D'oh, as some have pointed out, I posted an incorrect link. It was the Trieste, not the Challenger that dove that deep. Sometimes when I'm all excited about pointing something out, I google/wiki too quickly:) And yes, it's harder to dive deeper than the deepest point. But we could spend more time at these or similar depths, and learn a lot.
"A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service
The summary is too afraid to actually reference the actual province, for fear that no one would recognize it??? It is actually the biggest one, Ontario, with 12,000,000+ people. Surely *some* of you 'Murkins must have heard of it.
Sorry, but surely such condescending summaries aren't warranted here...
It always amazes me, that we (well, humankind that is, I can't take all the credit) managed to dive to almost 40,000 feet with the Challenger in *1951*, but haven't been back or deeper since! There is so much to explore on our own planet, and so much effort is being placed into going out into a vast, mostly empty vacuum, instead of looking under our own massive oceans, which are teeming with life (almost a new form, ever time we look at it).
The discoveries we are likely to make under our oceans, are undoubtedly going to be of far more relevance and benefit to our own lives on this little planet, that anything we find "out there." Yes, I think we should do both, but I think the depths of our oceans are severely and disproportionately neglected, except for the odd diving renegade.
In the past, said Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, customers paid a license fee when Windows was installed on a physical machine. But he said virtual-machine software breaks the tight link between the operating system and the hardware, raising the possibility that customers could be using Windows more but not paying for it. So now, he said, the license fee is based on when a copy of Windows is used, whether in a virtual or physical machine.
If that is their *official* stance, that the software can be used in various places, as long as it's only used once, that's great for VMWare. VMWare can advertise themselves as giving a consistent virtual environment for your VM. Take your VM between your home PC, your work Mac, your Linux cluster at work, no problem. It could *add* flexibility. And VMWare should have the ability to make the virtual machine that Windows sees be 100% consistent across time and machines, so silly activation hassles could be eliminated.
That being said, I doubt MS's official stance is that you can so easily move Windows between different physical machines, even if it's only being used once at a given time.
Someone needs to force these bastards to make an official stand, and stick by it, rather than just tolerating this patronizing marketing speak.
In Australia we have a law against advertising which involves displaying driving activity which is technically illegal.
The law was made because the major "australian" car manufacturer and their primary opposition (ford) were both glamourising speeding, burn outs, doughnuts etc. in car advertisements. I doubt the law was ever meant to cover situations which are technically difficult to reproduce.. afterall hyperbole is permitted in advertising (as long as it's evidently hyperbole and thus not misleading.)
Good point. And I can sort of agree with a law preventing car companies from advertising dumbass and dangerous driving. (In the US, they just throw up a "professional driver, closed course" disclaimer, which avoids showing law breaking behaviour.)
But can a toddler in diapers be charged with driving without having a license? So is that technically illegal? (Maybe it represents child neglect on the parent's part:) Also, can someone that young even perform a "copycat" act that significant? I think the whole "reaching the pedals" thing would make that argument moot.
Alcoholism is a disease, but it's like the only disease that you can get yelled at for having. "Dammit, Otto, you're an alcoholic." "Dammit, Otto, you have lupus." One of those two doesn't sound right.
And "Dammit, Otto, you're addicted to porn," is even weaker...
TFA didn't claim it was new. In fact, the first paragraph says the following.
The idea of the project was to build some devices that could do computation without eletrons. Water was a interesting choice, in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where eletronic control devices don't offer the reliability of cannot support the envoronment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when eletric devices cease to work.
So prior to the days of blackberries, they couldn't reach you by another on-demand interactive medium, say, ummmmm, I dunno, maybe, errr, the *telephone*??? There is nothing inherent in the technology that creates the social obligations. It's solely the discipline involved in using the technology.
Having greater enabling technologies for when you need responsiveness isn't a bad thing. Not realizing that there are limits, and applying them appropriately, *can* be a bad thing. (It's similar to the whole wonderful Unix flexiblity thing; it gives you the mechanism, *not* the policy. Yes, you can hang yourself with C pointers, Perl syntax, Unix cryptiveness; but policy and discipline can prevent all of that)
Due to some unfortunate divorce circumstances and wacky judge's decisions and the associated financial repercussions, I was forced to live a little bit "off the grid" in a cottage for awhile; a challenge indeed, with four children. I had no running water (I carried in every ounce I used, and heated it with a coleman propane heater), composting toilet, and the only high speed available was via satellite. (I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Direcway.) Anyhow, when Hurricane Juan hit the Maritimes, power was out, phone lines and internet was down, roads were blocked.
My "off the grid" living was barely impacted:) Due to flakey power at the cottage, I had a generator, so I had power, lights, etc. when Juan hit. Fireplace and propane for heat, no problem. I had a water supply carted in, heated by propane, so I was the only one getting hot showers. And with the satellite internet (linked to middle america), I had no interruptions in my internet service, while everyone else was down for a week or two. I kept working without a hiccup. It was a bit ironic, that this down-to-earth living was impacted so little by a disaster like this, even in high tech ways.
But in the end, such living had more benefits in a spiritual and gratitude terms. I'll never flush a toilet or take a long hot shower again, without being very thankful.:)
The same reason that Future Shop will sell you a $50 printer, then try to sell you a $30 USB cable to go with it. (Dollar stores are a great place for dirt cheap, high quality cables for non-bleeding edge cables. You won't find HD cables there, but for gold plated brand name [GE] USB and others, you can't beat the price.)
Microsoft embarasses me as a computer professional
Wow, I had never heard anyone said it so succinctly, but that's it, baby. I always felt an unrecognized sense of shame for the state of computers today, and I never quite realized why. This is it. Things should be *soooo* much further along today, if it weren't for the predatory monopolistic effects of MS. Throughout so much of the short PC history, there were rays of sunshine (Quarterdeck's multitasking DOS thing, many IP stacks, etc., etc), that were quashed by their monopoly. To see this happen, and realize their mediocracy, and not have done anything about it, definitely brings a sense of shame.
Almost every action in Vista is actually compose of two separate actions: the one you want to do, and the confirmation to do it.
As usual, Apple's ad compaigns nailed this one well, with their "Security" ad, here. Quicktime required, I supposed, for some reason.:) As a switcher, it's just another smile on my face instead of a constant daily annoyance from microsoft.
Why is it that I can get wireless 50mbps streams over wireless (well, when things are working), in a generic, 802-wireless way, over a hundred yards or so, but I can't get video from my computer to my monitor, over one foot, a fraction of the bandwidth, to a wireless monitor. The time is way overdue for a ubiquitous wireless monitor spec... I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't innovated on this front (although their iMac's are an elegant alternative).
I have a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, wireless headset for my laptop. I can understand the delay on killing the wires on power (although induction is a solution there), but where's the freakin' wireless monitors?!?!?
I've always wondered about using the potential energy of water (that is, raising it to a higher height), to store that energy to smooth out production versus demand issues for electricity.
It would likely be expensive to set up, and dependant upon the geography of an area, but the basic idea would be this: use windmills to pump water up to a basin on higher ground. Then, generate hydroelectric power at the rate desired (at night, during windless times, etc.), by letting the water fall back down to lower ground through turbines. The man-made (or even natural) lake, acts as a "battery" with the difference in height of the water that it was pumped to, being the potential energy that is stored.
Does anyone know if this is being done? It seems like it would be more straight forward than the refrigeration method mentioend in the article.
(If it's not being done, then patent-pending, patent-pending, patent-pending!)
It's not just a human thing. "Pretending" is critical for many (most?) animals in learning life skills. Small animals play to develop motor and hunting skills, and a safe pretend world. Toys for humans are the same; they inspire us to play and imagine, and prepare us for real world things. Enjoying play, and gaining the skills developed from it, has been a distinct evolutionary advantage.
In my experience, Flip4Mac didn't play any of the media files I had kicking around, and VLC played them all (with a nicer interface, and didn't require a paid upgrade to simply play full screen, a la Quicktime). Flip4Mac sounds interesting, but it didn't play many files for me.
I've been using Windows from day 1, and seen the Mac as a curiosity. Being a hard core Unix junkie and developer, with the switch to OS X, my ears perked up for sure. The switch the Intel, even more so, so I picked up a Macbook. Well, baby, there's no looking back.
I only got the Macbook because it was a fast x86 machine that could run Windows (faster than most laptops, it turns out), and I had Parallels to run a virtualized Windows (Crossover and VMWare still suck on OS X, but won't before long I'm sure). But guess what? I haven't booted Parallels in a week, and probably won't for another month. Almost *everything* works under OS X. VLC Player filled in the "play windows media files" hole, which really was one of the last reasons to boot Windows. Good bye windows, and Sayonara indeed!
Yes, Jobs might be slightly evil ("Evil light, just one Calorie!" as Dr. Evil might say), but as compared to MS, he's freakin' Mother Theresa. (Oh wait, she was a little evil, too. But you know what I mean.) Even though Jobs obviously has Apple's shareholders' bottom line in mind, and embraces DRM, etc., etc., at least Apple shows a slight bit of respect for the consumer, while taking their money. MS is just stabbing in the dark, and nothing short of offensive in their business practices.
In short, I love my Mac. I'll develop on it, likely deploy on Linux (LAMP is LAMP, on OS X or Linux), while having a wonderful desktop to use in the meantime.
I created a site which became a top 100 site during the.COM boom. We started out on Linux. Due to some investor pressure and visibility aspects, we moved to sun hardware. (Being a portable Java app, it wasn't a big port.) The hardware was nice; overpriced, but pretty nice. We paid the big bucks for it, and the support. We had several memory leak and crash issues that Sun attempted to fix, and escalated quite nicely and got us some personal attention. But when you're paying a million bucks for a fancy server, even having to help hunt down such bugs is unacceptable. After the.COM crash, we reverted to Linux/x86 machines, and were just as happy and reliable as ever. (Sept 11th finally took us out for good.)
Sun hardware is good, the company and its products are nice. But personally, with a properly designed application that doesn't depend upon certain hardware, it really is unnecessary in this day and age.
Aside from the ethical, legal aspects, the technology of GPS loggers is actually quite interesting these days. I recently purchased a USB-memory-key sized device that is a GPS->Bluetooth receiver. Gets the fixes, and sends them wirelessly to the laptop (or Treo, or whatever). The quality of these units is truly amazing these days; the modern chipsets (StarSirf, I think it is?) will even work inside the glove compartment (and obviously indoors is no problem either). The prices are great, too; I got mine for $100. Combined with Streets N' Trips, it makes my subnotebook into a great little GPS mapping device.
While I was shopping around, I came across a couple of different units that would log away to their internal RAM, when not connected via Bluetooth. So you could stick one in your cheatin' wife's car quite easily, and see where she went with a simple Bluetooth/USB download later. It certainly is bringing GPS tracking into the hands of everyone who wants it. (This feature wasn't particularly important to me, and the devices that had it didn't *quite* have as good reviews for the reception ability, so I went with my Holux GPSlim unit instead.)
I'm Canadian, and will sign the petition, but I have already found a better solution. I just bought a Mac. Vote with your wallets people.
I thought the transition would be difficult, and thought I'd rely heavily on Parallels to run Windows apps; I haven't had to fire it up in over a week (and even then, it wasn't because I really needed to). Have my hard-core Unix development at my fingertips under the hood, with the best commercially available GUI (in my opinion), is almost a dream come true. I think the switch Intel was brilliant, in that it allayed one potential fear (if MacOS doesn't do it for me, I can just put Windows on the unit; something I won't even bother to try now.)
I did try out a vista prevue/beta under Parallels to see what it looked like. It ran well, but looked a bit different and unfamiliar, and I couldn't really see anything compelling to it. So I deleted it.
It all made sense, and they had me right up until they said "print out..." Come on,/.'ers, fess up, there's gotta be a pretty good percentage of you laptop owners that do computer-related activites on the can, *without* printing out anything, if you know what I mean.
I expected the story to involve tablets or kiosk-like computers in the stalls. I was half thinking of inventing a little discrete flip-up table/shelf for laptops for use by nerds in the loo. ThinkGeek, drop me a line, and we'll market this puppy.
While I haven't read the article (or thus I wouldn't belong on/. at all), it's hard to see that this is such a major leap beyond what an "Alt-Tab, Windows-Run" or "Start-blah", or even "^C" (cut), "Alt-Tab" (switch to Opera), "^Lg^" (open link, google and paste), would achieve. Yes, the way I do things is a few more keystrokes, but not *that* many more.
On the other hand, I'm a big fan of being able to do everything from the keyboard (hence my vi-ness), and maybe this does make it even easier; I might just check it out (if I hadn't just switched to a Mac).
Refuse the offer. Or at least pretend to. If they really wanted to hire you, they will, and will give you what they promised. If they won't, then they're a very misleading and deceitful company, and you don't want to be there anyway.
Not being without a job sucks, yes, which could be a constraint in your go forward; but I would say that you're probably in a stronger position than you imagine, if they hired you and were willing to relocate you at all. Call their bluff. The "our policy overrides any agreement" is total BS; talk to the person who made you the offer. In the worst case, and they don't follow through on their promise, then you're likely fairly marketable, if someone was willing to relocate you in the first place (and you had an existing job). You'll find something, don't get too worked up, but don't take their shit.
This strikes me as the ultimate in temporary solutions. If spam senders *tend* to use only the primary MX record, and people start fighting spam by listing bad primaries, won't the spam senders simply start using secondaries? It almost seems the only way that this approach might be valuable, is if it weren't publicized and posted on/., and one kept it to oneself:)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to ramble on too much, replying to my own posts, but for those interested... It really is quite amazing...
"The dive has never been repeated, and presently no manned or unmanned craft exists capable of reaching such depth."
Not even *unmanned* crafts today can reach those depths, and in 1951, they sent people down there.
D'oh, as some have pointed out, I posted an incorrect link. It was the Trieste, not the Challenger that dove that deep. Sometimes when I'm all excited about pointing something out, I google/wiki too quickly :) And yes, it's harder to dive deeper than the deepest point. But we could spend more time at these or similar depths, and learn a lot.
"A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service
The summary is too afraid to actually reference the actual province, for fear that no one would recognize it??? It is actually the biggest one, Ontario, with 12,000,000+ people. Surely *some* of you 'Murkins must have heard of it.
Sorry, but surely such condescending summaries aren't warranted here...
It always amazes me, that we (well, humankind that is, I can't take all the credit) managed to dive to almost 40,000 feet with the Challenger in *1951*, but haven't been back or deeper since! There is so much to explore on our own planet, and so much effort is being placed into going out into a vast, mostly empty vacuum, instead of looking under our own massive oceans, which are teeming with life (almost a new form, ever time we look at it).
The discoveries we are likely to make under our oceans, are undoubtedly going to be of far more relevance and benefit to our own lives on this little planet, that anything we find "out there." Yes, I think we should do both, but I think the depths of our oceans are severely and disproportionately neglected, except for the odd diving renegade.
If that is their *official* stance, that the software can be used in various places, as long as it's only used once, that's great for VMWare. VMWare can advertise themselves as giving a consistent virtual environment for your VM. Take your VM between your home PC, your work Mac, your Linux cluster at work, no problem. It could *add* flexibility. And VMWare should have the ability to make the virtual machine that Windows sees be 100% consistent across time and machines, so silly activation hassles could be eliminated.
That being said, I doubt MS's official stance is that you can so easily move Windows between different physical machines, even if it's only being used once at a given time.
Someone needs to force these bastards to make an official stand, and stick by it, rather than just tolerating this patronizing marketing speak.
The law was made because the major "australian" car manufacturer and their primary opposition (ford) were both glamourising speeding, burn outs, doughnuts etc. in car advertisements. I doubt the law was ever meant to cover situations which are technically difficult to reproduce.. afterall hyperbole is permitted in advertising (as long as it's evidently hyperbole and thus not misleading.)
Good point. And I can sort of agree with a law preventing car companies from advertising dumbass and dangerous driving. (In the US, they just throw up a "professional driver, closed course" disclaimer, which avoids showing law breaking behaviour.)
But can a toddler in diapers be charged with driving without having a license? So is that technically illegal? (Maybe it represents child neglect on the parent's part :) Also, can someone that young even perform a "copycat" act that significant? I think the whole "reaching the pedals" thing would make that argument moot.
As Mitch Hedberg would say (may he rest in peace):
Alcoholism is a disease, but it's like the only disease that you can get yelled at for having. "Dammit, Otto, you're an alcoholic." "Dammit, Otto, you have lupus." One of those two doesn't sound right.
And "Dammit, Otto, you're addicted to porn," is even weaker...
TFA didn't claim it was new. In fact, the first paragraph says the following.
The idea of the project was to build some devices that could do computation without eletrons. Water was a interesting choice, in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where eletronic control devices don't offer the reliability of cannot support the envoronment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when eletric devices cease to work.
So prior to the days of blackberries, they couldn't reach you by another on-demand interactive medium, say, ummmmm, I dunno, maybe, errr, the *telephone*??? There is nothing inherent in the technology that creates the social obligations. It's solely the discipline involved in using the technology.
Having greater enabling technologies for when you need responsiveness isn't a bad thing. Not realizing that there are limits, and applying them appropriately, *can* be a bad thing. (It's similar to the whole wonderful Unix flexiblity thing; it gives you the mechanism, *not* the policy. Yes, you can hang yourself with C pointers, Perl syntax, Unix cryptiveness; but policy and discipline can prevent all of that)
Due to some unfortunate divorce circumstances and wacky judge's decisions and the associated financial repercussions, I was forced to live a little bit "off the grid" in a cottage for awhile; a challenge indeed, with four children. I had no running water (I carried in every ounce I used, and heated it with a coleman propane heater), composting toilet, and the only high speed available was via satellite. (I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Direcway.) Anyhow, when Hurricane Juan hit the Maritimes, power was out, phone lines and internet was down, roads were blocked.
:) Due to flakey power at the cottage, I had a generator, so I had power, lights, etc. when Juan hit. Fireplace and propane for heat, no problem. I had a water supply carted in, heated by propane, so I was the only one getting hot showers. And with the satellite internet (linked to middle america), I had no interruptions in my internet service, while everyone else was down for a week or two. I kept working without a hiccup. It was a bit ironic, that this down-to-earth living was impacted so little by a disaster like this, even in high tech ways.
:)
My "off the grid" living was barely impacted
But in the end, such living had more benefits in a spiritual and gratitude terms. I'll never flush a toilet or take a long hot shower again, without being very thankful.
The same reason that Future Shop will sell you a $50 printer, then try to sell you a $30 USB cable to go with it. (Dollar stores are a great place for dirt cheap, high quality cables for non-bleeding edge cables. You won't find HD cables there, but for gold plated brand name [GE] USB and others, you can't beat the price.)
Microsoft embarasses me as a computer professional
Wow, I had never heard anyone said it so succinctly, but that's it, baby. I always felt an unrecognized sense of shame for the state of computers today, and I never quite realized why. This is it. Things should be *soooo* much further along today, if it weren't for the predatory monopolistic effects of MS. Throughout so much of the short PC history, there were rays of sunshine (Quarterdeck's multitasking DOS thing, many IP stacks, etc., etc), that were quashed by their monopoly. To see this happen, and realize their mediocracy, and not have done anything about it, definitely brings a sense of shame.
Almost every action in Vista is actually compose of two separate actions: the one you want to do, and the confirmation to do it.
:) As a switcher, it's just another smile on my face instead of a constant daily annoyance from microsoft.
As usual, Apple's ad compaigns nailed this one well, with their "Security" ad, here. Quicktime required, I supposed, for some reason.
Why is it that I can get wireless 50mbps streams over wireless (well, when things are working), in a generic, 802-wireless way, over a hundred yards or so, but I can't get video from my computer to my monitor, over one foot, a fraction of the bandwidth, to a wireless monitor. The time is way overdue for a ubiquitous wireless monitor spec... I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't innovated on this front (although their iMac's are an elegant alternative).
I have a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, wireless headset for my laptop. I can understand the delay on killing the wires on power (although induction is a solution there), but where's the freakin' wireless monitors?!?!?
I've always wondered about using the potential energy of water (that is, raising it to a higher height), to store that energy to smooth out production versus demand issues for electricity.
It would likely be expensive to set up, and dependant upon the geography of an area, but the basic idea would be this: use windmills to pump water up to a basin on higher ground. Then, generate hydroelectric power at the rate desired (at night, during windless times, etc.), by letting the water fall back down to lower ground through turbines. The man-made (or even natural) lake, acts as a "battery" with the difference in height of the water that it was pumped to, being the potential energy that is stored.
Does anyone know if this is being done? It seems like it would be more straight forward than the refrigeration method mentioend in the article.
(If it's not being done, then patent-pending, patent-pending, patent-pending!)
It's not just a human thing. "Pretending" is critical for many (most?) animals in learning life skills. Small animals play to develop motor and hunting skills, and a safe pretend world. Toys for humans are the same; they inspire us to play and imagine, and prepare us for real world things. Enjoying play, and gaining the skills developed from it, has been a distinct evolutionary advantage.
In my experience, Flip4Mac didn't play any of the media files I had kicking around, and VLC played them all (with a nicer interface, and didn't require a paid upgrade to simply play full screen, a la Quicktime). Flip4Mac sounds interesting, but it didn't play many files for me.
I've been using Windows from day 1, and seen the Mac as a curiosity. Being a hard core Unix junkie and developer, with the switch to OS X, my ears perked up for sure. The switch the Intel, even more so, so I picked up a Macbook. Well, baby, there's no looking back.
I only got the Macbook because it was a fast x86 machine that could run Windows (faster than most laptops, it turns out), and I had Parallels to run a virtualized Windows (Crossover and VMWare still suck on OS X, but won't before long I'm sure). But guess what? I haven't booted Parallels in a week, and probably won't for another month. Almost *everything* works under OS X. VLC Player filled in the "play windows media files" hole, which really was one of the last reasons to boot Windows. Good bye windows, and Sayonara indeed!
Yes, Jobs might be slightly evil ("Evil light, just one Calorie!" as Dr. Evil might say), but as compared to MS, he's freakin' Mother Theresa. (Oh wait, she was a little evil, too. But you know what I mean.) Even though Jobs obviously has Apple's shareholders' bottom line in mind, and embraces DRM, etc., etc., at least Apple shows a slight bit of respect for the consumer, while taking their money. MS is just stabbing in the dark, and nothing short of offensive in their business practices.
In short, I love my Mac. I'll develop on it, likely deploy on Linux (LAMP is LAMP, on OS X or Linux), while having a wonderful desktop to use in the meantime.
I created a site which became a top 100 site during the .COM boom. We started out on Linux. Due to some investor pressure and visibility aspects, we moved to sun hardware. (Being a portable Java app, it wasn't a big port.) The hardware was nice; overpriced, but pretty nice. We paid the big bucks for it, and the support. We had several memory leak and crash issues that Sun attempted to fix, and escalated quite nicely and got us some personal attention. But when you're paying a million bucks for a fancy server, even having to help hunt down such bugs is unacceptable. After the .COM crash, we reverted to Linux/x86 machines, and were just as happy and reliable as ever. (Sept 11th finally took us out for good.)
Sun hardware is good, the company and its products are nice. But personally, with a properly designed application that doesn't depend upon certain hardware, it really is unnecessary in this day and age.
Aside from the ethical, legal aspects, the technology of GPS loggers is actually quite interesting these days. I recently purchased a USB-memory-key sized device that is a GPS->Bluetooth receiver. Gets the fixes, and sends them wirelessly to the laptop (or Treo, or whatever). The quality of these units is truly amazing these days; the modern chipsets (StarSirf, I think it is?) will even work inside the glove compartment (and obviously indoors is no problem either). The prices are great, too; I got mine for $100. Combined with Streets N' Trips, it makes my subnotebook into a great little GPS mapping device.
While I was shopping around, I came across a couple of different units that would log away to their internal RAM, when not connected via Bluetooth. So you could stick one in your cheatin' wife's car quite easily, and see where she went with a simple Bluetooth/USB download later. It certainly is bringing GPS tracking into the hands of everyone who wants it. (This feature wasn't particularly important to me, and the devices that had it didn't *quite* have as good reviews for the reception ability, so I went with my Holux GPSlim unit instead.)
I'm Canadian, and will sign the petition, but I have already found a better solution. I just bought a Mac. Vote with your wallets people.
I thought the transition would be difficult, and thought I'd rely heavily on Parallels to run Windows apps; I haven't had to fire it up in over a week (and even then, it wasn't because I really needed to). Have my hard-core Unix development at my fingertips under the hood, with the best commercially available GUI (in my opinion), is almost a dream come true. I think the switch Intel was brilliant, in that it allayed one potential fear (if MacOS doesn't do it for me, I can just put Windows on the unit; something I won't even bother to try now.)
I did try out a vista prevue/beta under Parallels to see what it looked like. It ran well, but looked a bit different and unfamiliar, and I couldn't really see anything compelling to it. So I deleted it.
It all made sense, and they had me right up until they said "print out..." Come on, /.'ers, fess up, there's gotta be a pretty good percentage of you laptop owners that do computer-related activites on the can, *without* printing out anything, if you know what I mean.
I expected the story to involve tablets or kiosk-like computers in the stalls. I was half thinking of inventing a little discrete flip-up table/shelf for laptops for use by nerds in the loo. ThinkGeek, drop me a line, and we'll market this puppy.
While I haven't read the article (or thus I wouldn't belong on /. at all), it's hard to see that this is such a major leap beyond what an "Alt-Tab, Windows-Run" or "Start-blah", or even "^C" (cut), "Alt-Tab" (switch to Opera), "^Lg^" (open link, google and paste), would achieve. Yes, the way I do things is a few more keystrokes, but not *that* many more.
On the other hand, I'm a big fan of being able to do everything from the keyboard (hence my vi-ness), and maybe this does make it even easier; I might just check it out (if I hadn't just switched to a Mac).
Refuse the offer. Or at least pretend to. If they really wanted to hire you, they will, and will give you what they promised. If they won't, then they're a very misleading and deceitful company, and you don't want to be there anyway.
Not being without a job sucks, yes, which could be a constraint in your go forward; but I would say that you're probably in a stronger position than you imagine, if they hired you and were willing to relocate you at all. Call their bluff. The "our policy overrides any agreement" is total BS; talk to the person who made you the offer. In the worst case, and they don't follow through on their promise, then you're likely fairly marketable, if someone was willing to relocate you in the first place (and you had an existing job). You'll find something, don't get too worked up, but don't take their shit.
This strikes me as the ultimate in temporary solutions. If spam senders *tend* to use only the primary MX record, and people start fighting spam by listing bad primaries, won't the spam senders simply start using secondaries? It almost seems the only way that this approach might be valuable, is if it weren't publicized and posted on /., and one kept it to oneself :)