I can second the Namecheap recommendation. I moved my registration and hosting/email of my dozen domains from Godaddy to Namecheap last year and have been very satisfied.
The much-defamed App Store censors mostly just take a cursory glance at each submission to make sure the app is well-behaved (not malicious or destructively stupid) and socially acceptable to all audiences (how much FOSS pr*n are you planning to develop, eh?). Is it really too much to ask that someone double-check your work for brokenness before spreading it to the unwashed masses? Have you _seen_ what got through that process unabated?
I think you need to refresh your view of the App store approval process and stop simplifying the problem - look here for a better view
Respectfully , I think you're being too dismissive of the point being made. Like you I've been developing and like yourself - I've been around a while. (Full disclosure - been a Windows based coder snce the late 80's and 6 months ago went completely OS X)
Remember what made the Apple II sell like wild? It was the standardized and fairly open buss - the plug in cards and the extensibility. That was a a pretty new concept for the time. People loved it.
Remember what the "killer" development app was for the PC back in 92? It was Visual Basic. It opened up the world of Windows programming to people who didn't even know how to program (or so the joke went at Borland back then). But VB allowed pretty much ANYONE to code up gui based apps for the PC. And the crowds went wild and the PC eventually replaced mainframes and minis as teh platform of choice for business apps. And I would maintain that a LOT of why that happened was because of the easy to code platform that allowed so many people to create apps - VB.
These are just two examples off the top of my head but I would maintain that extensibility , creativity and opening the platform has always led to greater adoptation. Closing the platform to just the way of "Apple-think" could very likely lead to a kind of "inbredness" that opens the door to something else gaining the market share.
Know what I can do on my iPhone 2G that no one else (who just uses the app store) can't? I have a video camera on it courtesy of Cycorder and jailbreaking. Now this (for me ) is a killer feature and has primarily kep me from going to the 3G model - which I know is what Apple wanted me to do. Which is why they prohibited such apps in the forst place - so they could offer it in future "premium" models. Shortsighted Corporate thinking. What it did in the longer view is convert me completely to Apple products and back to a MacBook.
Now Apple is coming out with the Pad and I am going to buy it and I would LOVE to develop on it - it's a great idea who's time has come for SO many reasons. But look here. Maybe I;ll want to write a business app that Apple is going to prohibit because they want to do it themselves . And HP (or whomever) is going to come out with a Slate that does much of what the iPad will and...look here... I can ein Visual Studio on it and create whatever the hell I please. That's going to be a freaking difficult decision for me whan that time comes.
Apple needs to open the platform up somehow. Berhaps allow the App store AND cydia (or something like it) to run concurrently. Apple's brand name and reliability and trustworthiness and marketing ability will ALWAYS motivate the majority of people towards the app store. What little they will lose in sales I believe will be MORE than made up for by the number of developers who then flock to the platform in order to produce apps.
A closed platform is short sighted Corporate thinking and as it stands now is the biggest impediment to widespread adoptation of the iPad.
Everything works fine. I used a third party partition manager to set up/move the partitions around and then used the bootcamp drivers. Power savings could be better (2 hours under Win7 vs 6 hours in OS x) but aside from that nit it works just fine for me.
By the way, if you ever want to see some SERIOUS censorship - just get a BoingBoing account and mention something about the great work Violet Blue is doing for the sex positive community these days. Or mention anything at all negative about one of BB's sponsors. You'll be shut down faster than Sarah Conner at a Terminator class reunion.
Torrenting and downloading is by and large an expression of civil disobedience in reaction to the complete lockdown the entertainment mafia has on the industry. Fifteen bucks for a fracking CD ? Forty for a DVD? Right.
The corporate control of who gets to be distributed is nearly absolute - wonder why there's so little good music and new artists being put out by the major labels? Wonder why FM radio sucks?
There was a time when newspapers cost 25 cents a paper (OK I actually remember a time when they cost a dime but let's go with a quarter). And for your quarter you got incredible in depth columnists, actual coverage of real local events that happened that very same day and oh yeah - 2 or 3 pages of comics that you could actually read without a microscope. And there were two newspapers, a morning and an evening one run by two different companies who competed with each other for the best coverage. IN the evening one you could read about what happened or what changed that very morning. Politicians were afraid of newspapers and if one screwed up you can bet that you'd hear about it that same day. I read two papers a day for decades.
Now my local paper costs a dollar and it is less than half the size that it was 10 years ago. The type is much bigger now and there are five columns per page instead of six - 17% less print per page. And it's mostly ads. And most of the news comes from a news service. And the columnists are non-existent. And I'm lucky if I get coverage of something two days ago let alone today. There's ony one paper in town and it's run by the same guys that own pretty much all the newspapers for 50 miles in any direction. The comics have been micro-sized. I now read a newspaper maybe once or twice a month. Maybe.
What happened? Big fracking corporate business happened.
The kind that cares only about making a shot term profit for the current investors before cutting and running. Comics? Too costly. Columnists? Too costly. News bureaus? Too costly? More ads? Yeah, that'll work!
The same kind of people with the same kind of mentality who crapped up our banking industry, our food industry , our I.T. industry, our auto industry... did it to newspapers as well. Big surprise there.
Here's your big headline "Corporate Fascism Kills America" News at 11
"The purpose of the name change is multi-faceted. It lets Microsoft distance itself from the stink of the Vista name "
Windows 7.... the KFC of the computer world.
Windows 7 Will beThe Death Knell For Microsoft
on
A Tale of Two Windows 7s
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A little background about me.... I've been using Windows since Windows 386 - I even played with Windows 286 for 10 minutes. I really started using Windows all the time with 3.0 . OK... so I've been using it since the mid to late 80's . I'm a microsoft developer by trade... started in Acess and VB and moved in to NET and SQL.
Vista , and now Windows 7, pushed me over to purchase a Macbok Pro. I've always admired the UI on those machines but Windows have been good enough and heaven knows it made me enough money.
So I try Vista 2 years ago. SLOW... excruciatingly bad user interface - Am I sure? Yes. Am I sure that I'm sure...? {sigh} I tried it 3 different times - couldn't take it more than a couple weeks. Transferring several gigs of info through the Explorer interface was a minimum of 5 times slower than in XP. Am I sure? Yes {sigh}
So I stick with XP and maintain Vista o a VM for when I have to test with it which is NEVER because NONE of my corporate clients are using it.
So I try Windows 7 about 2 months ago. Looks Pretty ! And it's not asking me if I'm sure it looks pretty every 2 minutes. It looks pretty right up till the time I go into Control Panel. Now it's not looking as nice. WTF? It's Control Panelzilla! Ahhhhh! And look how many new ways I have of sharing things. But you know what? I just want to share a fracking folder. I have a home group now too. I also have more things in my root drive than I ever wanted to see. Ever. Including lots of symbolic links. Which don't seem to be able to be handling correctly in Explorer. You haven't liven until you've seen a file path like "User Data/User/Data/User/ Data/ User data.... ad infinitum . Frack that. Oh... and it's still slow. And it crashed on mee 5 times the first week.
So I get a MAc book Pro. A little over 900 bucks. It's light... it's engineered well and the UI makes me wanna cry tears of joy. And it is faster on 2 gigs of memory and a 2.1 processor than my idiot HP 9700 was with Vista on 4 gigs and a 2.6 processor. MUCH faster. And I can run XP on it beautifully though I never do.
So I'm no longer a NET programmer. The same companies who NEVER adopted Vista (ummm... like all of them?) will NEVER adopt Win 7 - for the very same reasons. I think they will flock to something else. Linux? Maybe Macc? Maybe. Personally , I think they're screwed. Me? I'm learning Objective C and LAMP technologies and am going to reinvent myself programaticaly speaking. I'm through with MS. It's been a nice long ride bit it's over.
I've been around a while. I've seen IBM go from the major supplier of PCs and OS... to a non-player. Why? Because they thought they were gods and forgot they were just a corporation. They forgot they couldn't dictate what their clients wanted forever.
"As a legal immigrant in the States, I can state that (although I'm paying just as much tax as anyone else) : I have no vote, no free healthcare and no constitutional rights (let alone a TV show)."
Funny , as a legal citizen of the United States, I've felt much the same way the past 8 years.
Doesn't matter. Your opponents are still other players. Someone always wins every hand - the house never "wins". The house just takes a rake out of every pot.
I used to work as a programmer in a large Nevada casino.
The house regularly hires "shills" with good poker playing skills to sit at the table. The shills get a salary and the casino gets their winnings. That is how the house increases it's take
I see no reason why online casinos would not do the same thing.
Anyone who does not have the wherewithal and sense to not make public their extortion demand, very likely does not have the sense and wherewithal to actually harvest information. I see a text depiction of a list of alleged connections to T-Mo servers.
I do not see actual data - show me a 500 data item sample if you have anything at all.
My best guess: Some 15 year old in an Eastern European country will shortly have some 'splainin to do.
For many reasons, none of these solutions is ideal. So I'm asking you, insightful and funny Slashdotters, what would you do to keep your PC personal at school?
You're problem is that you feel uncomfortable saying "no" to a request to borrow a personal item? And you're looking for a technological solution for that?
Well I could talk about setting up a virtual machine sandbox for your your friends but the reality is that your question is not a technological one that belongs on Slashdot but rather something better served by Dear Abby because, T1000s excepted, there is no technology that can replace a lack of spine.
A computer is a personal item and the information on it valuable if destroyed. Do you let your friends have your car whenever they ask? Do you give them ten bucks whenever they ask? Can they use minutes on your cell phone at will?
Same thing.
Just smile and politely say "I'm sorry but I am not comfortable with anyone else using my personal machine" and that's really the end of it. If anyone thinks it "impolite" then it;s their issue and not yours.
You asked why I say it is all a sham. Here is my answer from what I have seen in California and Arizona:
1. There are extremely few (if any) programs that will actually help someone who wants to get back to work - get back to work.
2. Food and shelter take hours of yoru time to acquire. Typically, in California (SF and LA) there is a several hour wait in line to see if there will be room in a shelter. No room - come back and wait tomorrow. Food can take a trip across town to acquire - you need bus fare and and hour or two to get there. You will be spending 3-4 hours a day in lines waiting for food or a cot for the night . Try to get a job when 4 hours or more a day (job hours) are going to be spent in line.
3. If you have no money , a single person will receive about 45 bucks a week food stamps and about $110 a month cash for all other expenses. For the $110 a month you will have to spend about 5-10 hours a week working for the welfare dept. Not looking for a job $180 a month food stamps sound like a lot? You have no stove- no refrigerator. Everything you eat has to be prepackaged. You know what that costs? I do. It's a lot more then $180 a month
4. Just getting a shower took me a one hour wait in line.
5. Shelters are not safe. Women are regularly raped and beaten and robbed in them. They are understaffed bu the lowest quality of people imaginable. People who do not only care about you but will go out of their way to make fun of you.
6. Job and housing programs are basically a sham. When you go there you are told it will take 18 months to get housing and no job training money is currently available - come back next month. LOTS of staff there. No actual jobs or training being given out.
I could go on and on and on... so easy to criticize - so hard to empathize - unless you've been there.
With that said , there are programs out there that will feed and house you and help you get a job. They are FEW and FAR between. The only way that I found on was by the help of a nun in a woman's shelter I was staying at in Los Angeles. If you don't network or push your agenda - you get nothing.
Now , I've been in business and I know how to search for jobs, use the internet effectively and how to network (hence the Nun). But by far the vast VAST majority of people on the streets are not blessed as I am - so they are intentionally forgotten by understaffed and overworked govt workers of agencies who have their hands full filling out paperwork and documenting what they do so that they can justify next years budget.
It;s not about getting people off the streets nearly as much as it is about having everyone in the "assistance" agency keep their own jobs.
And that's the short version of what I mean by "it's a sham"
You are misinformed about the type of people who join the Army, Most of them are NOT gung-ho types who like guns and the idea of shooting up people.
Most of them just need a job. Most of them just want to go to college. Most of then are very poor and/or come from urban places that make the Army seem mild . Most of them saw the nifty multi-million dollar ad campaigns that tell them how they can be all that they can be or how in 6 weeks they can be a computer programmer too!
But the ads don't show war. They don't show you killing women and little children because you have been put into a place where you honestly have come to believe that you need to do that in order to stay alive - or to keep your buddies alive. The ads don't show you that.
Me, I was 2 years into an Ivy League education with a family that would make Dick Cheney's look warm and fuzzy by comparison. And I had enough and I left. And after my money ran out and I had no experience as a 19 year old in the world - I joined the military not because I liked guns but because I wanted to continue my college.
The Army does not take care of every aspect of your life as I've seen some people say here. You only think that if you haven't been in the military. Being in the military is a lot like being in any other job - you work 8 to 5 and you get weekends if you're not in combat. True, you don't have to worry about health care, or becoming homeless if you're laid off or even paying for food or housing (if you're single) but in most civilized Western countries (save the U.S.) . In many ways the peace-time Army is a lot like Sweden. But you still have to pay your bills, plan your financial future and buy your housewares just like everyone else.
Thank you . I hope that neither you nor your family ever come close to that again.
I suspect that over the next few years we will be seeing so very much more of this . Eight Years of ruining the economy will have consequences and a price - I fear we haven't even come close to paying that price as yet.
I need to answer your question in another way as well. You asked: What is it about the military that leads to homelessness and not having a normal life.
I'll tell you what that is and you will not like the answer.
Me, I worked in a combat medical field unit as an Operating Room Technician and a Field Medic. It was the only thing I was comfortable doing in the Army. Helping people - saving lives. I did a lot of both and although I am NOT a military supporter I am proud of what I did.
Most people in the military , especially men, go into jobs that involve killing people. Let me say that again - Killing people. Killing people is Job #1. Even in the Medical Corps we were told again and again "You are soldiers first and medics second" ( we gave the people telling us that the finger behind their backs of course)
We are all brought up to believe that killing people is wrong. Thou shall not murder.
The military has a way around this by creating a culture of dehumanizing the enemy du jour - and other ways. Killing is a part and parcel of Army culture. You ever see the shirts that say "Join the Army , Travel to interesting places meet interesting people and Kill them"
You might think that's an interesting snarky comment on military culture. It is not. The infantry people I saw who wore those shirts were 100% percent serious about the message. Not Snark. A way of life
That's what it's like being in the Army.
And God forbid you actually end up in a war and have to go meet interesting men women and children and kill them - you are in a culture that tells you that you did nothing wrong. In fact it rewards you - Hooo Aaa!
And all that is well and good until you return to civilian life, laws and the Ten Commandments again and it hits you: "My God, what have I done!"
And you can tell no one because no one outside of the military could possibly understand. And you can't wear your T-shirt anymore either.
So you turn to alcohol or drugs and you can't sleep at night and you go slowly crazy. And you can't hold your job and you realize that you were not the person that you used to think you were. And you never will be again.
That didn't happen to me. But I saw it happen over and over again to people that I knew. People who shot other people. Who killed interesting people. How can you go into Church ever again you wonder?
Oh and by the way - That war. It was all about the oil anyway.
So that's the problem - that's why so many American military people end up the way that they do.
I spent the following 17 years after leaving the military living a very normal life. I increased my career from working at Radio Shack, shortly after I got out - to being a contract software developer and making 6 figures for a while.
The military was great to me and gave me the interpersonal and management skills to really suceed afterwords.
In 2001 I found myself jobless shortly before 911. After 911 I was over 40 and there were NO jobs available. Over 40, female, Bubble Burst, nobody hiring - George Bush economy - things were not well on 01.
My other friends who had been doing very well were now jobless as well. My story was not unique in Silicon Valley. I survived it - not everyone did.
And I was still a lot better off then the mentally ill or addicted or other homeless people I saw in shelters who had just given up.
It's a transformative experience - but not one you would like to have had.
Having 6 months living expenses at the time was about 12K saved (at the time my 1 bdrm apt was $1200 a month) That an 6 mos unemployment kept me off the street for almost a year.
Until You've been homeless. I know. I've been there. With all my progressive thinking, I knew nothing about it.
In 2000-01 I was making 6 figures working as a Senior Developer in Los Angeles. I lost my job after Bush and 911. I sent out over 300 resumes in a 3 month period - not one single response. I had 6 months income saved . By month 7 I was sleeping on friends couches. Previously I had been able to get a new contract within 2 weeks tops. I borrowed several thousand from friends to keep me in monthly hotels - I was good for it. I always had been working right?
By month 12 I was sleeping in my car. I took temp jobs driving buses and I took temp IT jobs doing data entry at 10 bucks an hour. You know how well you can live on 10 bucks an hour in CA when you have no more money? Not very well. Get an apartment ? With what? 10 bucks an hour?
By month 22 I was starting to live in shelters. And I saw things. Things I would rather not ever have seen. I saw people in bloody bandages, terrible dirty and out of their mind being laughed at and made fun of by city shelter workers. I saw it took over an hour to get in line to take a shower. I drug addiction, mental illness and hopelessness standing right next to me every single day. I saw my self confidence die along with my job prospects. Most importantly I saw that nobody really cared.
You think there are State run programs to help people out there. I am here to tell you you are so so wrong. It;s all a sham. There are a very few. Very few. Most are fronts just to make it seem like something is being done. Nothing is. I've seen it. I've been there.
You haven't seen it. You don't know.
There are very few programs out there and by using the library internet I found one for Women Vets. I got small IT jobs and was able to keep them now that I had food shelter and safety. I worked my way back up the ladder again. Now I make about half of whay I used to - but we all are now - unless you're a banker.
Friends, Family?? I left home at 19 and an Ivy League University - joined the military to continue college. My family were bad people. Rich, but very bad. How Bad? I begged to sleep on a couch with one of them. I told them I slept behind a church last night - in the open. My family refused. Good luck. Don't assume all families are like yours. I assure you they are not.
There's a lot more I could say. More that needs to be said. But I've said enough. It's the rich greedy sons and daughters of bitches who think nothing of others and thing only how to get more to themselves that post about how homeless people bring it all on themselves. Well some do. And some are just broken down by the process. Those people need help. Where is their help?
Slashdot Mirror
and highly toxic chemicals!
And they're going to set it on fire.
What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4651126
I can second the Namecheap recommendation. I moved my registration and hosting/email of my dozen domains from Godaddy to Namecheap last year and have been very satisfied.
The much-defamed App Store censors mostly just take a cursory glance at each submission to make sure the app is well-behaved (not malicious or destructively stupid) and socially acceptable to all audiences (how much FOSS pr*n are you planning to develop, eh?). Is it really too much to ask that someone double-check your work for brokenness before spreading it to the unwashed masses? Have you _seen_ what got through that process unabated?
I think you need to refresh your view of the App store approval process and stop simplifying the problem - look here for a better view
http://apprejections.com/
and remember that Google is your friend ("app store rejections")
Respectfully , I think you're being too dismissive of the point being made. Like you I've been developing and like yourself - I've been around a while. (Full disclosure - been a Windows based coder snce the late 80's and 6 months ago went completely OS X)
Remember what made the Apple II sell like wild? It was the standardized and fairly open buss - the plug in cards and the extensibility. That was a a pretty new concept for the time. People loved it.
Remember what the "killer" development app was for the PC back in 92? It was Visual Basic. It opened up the world of Windows programming to people who didn't even know how to program (or so the joke went at Borland back then). But VB allowed pretty much ANYONE to code up gui based apps for the PC. And the crowds went wild and the PC eventually replaced mainframes and minis as teh platform of choice for business apps. And I would maintain that a LOT of why that happened was because of the easy to code platform that allowed so many people to create apps - VB.
These are just two examples off the top of my head but I would maintain that extensibility , creativity and opening the platform has always led to greater adoptation. Closing the platform to just the way of "Apple-think" could very likely lead to a kind of "inbredness" that opens the door to something else gaining the market share.
Know what I can do on my iPhone 2G that no one else (who just uses the app store) can't? I have a video camera on it courtesy of Cycorder and jailbreaking. Now this (for me ) is a killer feature and has primarily kep me from going to the 3G model - which I know is what Apple wanted me to do. Which is why they prohibited such apps in the forst place - so they could offer it in future "premium" models. Shortsighted Corporate thinking. What it did in the longer view is convert me completely to Apple products and back to a MacBook.
Now Apple is coming out with the Pad and I am going to buy it and I would LOVE to develop on it - it's a great idea who's time has come for SO many reasons. But look here. Maybe I;ll want to write a business app that Apple is going to prohibit because they want to do it themselves . And HP (or whomever) is going to come out with a Slate that does much of what the iPad will and ...look here... I can ein Visual Studio on it and create whatever the hell I please. That's going to be a freaking difficult decision for me whan that time comes.
Apple needs to open the platform up somehow. Berhaps allow the App store AND cydia (or something like it) to run concurrently. Apple's brand name and reliability and trustworthiness and marketing ability will ALWAYS motivate the majority of people towards the app store. What little they will lose in sales I believe will be MORE than made up for by the number of developers who then flock to the platform in order to produce apps.
A closed platform is short sighted Corporate thinking and as it stands now is the biggest impediment to widespread adoptation of the iPad.
Everything works fine. I used a third party partition manager to set up/move the partitions around and then used the bootcamp drivers. Power savings could be better (2 hours under Win7 vs 6 hours in OS x) but aside from that nit it works just fine for me.
I'm not entirely sure what the issue is.
Cory Doctroll strikes again.
By the way, if you ever want to see some SERIOUS censorship - just get a BoingBoing account and mention something about the great work Violet Blue is doing for the sex positive community these days. Or mention anything at all negative about one of BB's sponsors. You'll be shut down faster than Sarah Conner at a Terminator class reunion.
George Orwell wept - Jesus just laughed.
That has kept me completely virus free for about 3 months now.
I think they call it ... OS X
Torrenting and downloading is by and large an expression of civil disobedience in reaction to the complete lockdown the entertainment mafia has on the industry. Fifteen bucks for a fracking CD ? Forty for a DVD? Right.
The corporate control of who gets to be distributed is nearly absolute - wonder why there's so little good music and new artists being put out by the major labels? Wonder why FM radio sucks?
We all know it.
I'm just saying it.
There was a time when newspapers cost 25 cents a paper (OK I actually remember a time when they cost a dime but let's go with a quarter). And for your quarter you got incredible in depth columnists, actual coverage of real local events that happened that very same day and oh yeah - 2 or 3 pages of comics that you could actually read without a microscope. And there were two newspapers, a morning and an evening one run by two different companies who competed with each other for the best coverage. IN the evening one you could read about what happened or what changed that very morning. Politicians were afraid of newspapers and if one screwed up you can bet that you'd hear about it that same day. I read two papers a day for decades.
Now my local paper costs a dollar and it is less than half the size that it was 10 years ago. The type is much bigger now and there are five columns per page instead of six - 17% less print per page. And it's mostly ads. And most of the news comes from a news service. And the columnists are non-existent. And I'm lucky if I get coverage of something two days ago let alone today. There's ony one paper in town and it's run by the same guys that own pretty much all the newspapers for 50 miles in any direction. The comics have been micro-sized. I now read a newspaper maybe once or twice a month. Maybe.
What happened?
Big fracking corporate business happened.
The kind that cares only about making a shot term profit for the current investors before cutting and running. Comics? Too costly. Columnists? Too costly. News bureaus? Too costly? More ads? Yeah, that'll work!
The same kind of people with the same kind of mentality who crapped up our banking industry, our food industry , our I.T. industry, our auto industry ... did it to newspapers as well. Big surprise there.
Here's your big headline "Corporate Fascism Kills America"
News at 11
Windows 7 .... the KFC of the computer world.
A little background about me.... ... started in Acess and VB and moved in to NET and SQL.
I've been using Windows since Windows 386 - I even played with Windows 286 for 10 minutes. I really started using Windows all the time with 3.0 . OK... so I've been using it since the mid to late 80's . I'm a microsoft developer by trade
Vista , and now Windows 7, pushed me over to purchase a Macbok Pro. I've always admired the UI on those machines but Windows have been good enough and heaven knows it made me enough money.
So I try Vista 2 years ago. SLOW... excruciatingly bad user interface - Am I sure? Yes. Am I sure that I'm sure...? {sigh} I tried it 3 different times - couldn't take it more than a couple weeks. Transferring several gigs of info through the Explorer interface was a minimum of 5 times slower than in XP. Am I sure? Yes {sigh}
So I stick with XP and maintain Vista o a VM for when I have to test with it which is NEVER because NONE of my corporate clients are using it.
So I try Windows 7 about 2 months ago. Looks Pretty ! And it's not asking me if I'm sure it looks pretty every 2 minutes. It looks pretty right up till the time I go into Control Panel. Now it's not looking as nice. WTF? It's Control Panelzilla! Ahhhhh! And look how many new ways I have of sharing things. But you know what? I just want to share a fracking folder. I have a home group now too. I also have more things in my root drive than I ever wanted to see. Ever. Including lots of symbolic links. Which don't seem to be able to be handling correctly in Explorer. You haven't liven until you've seen a file path like "User Data/User/Data/User/ Data/ User data.... ad infinitum . Frack that. Oh ... and it's still slow. And it crashed on mee 5 times the first week.
So I get a MAc book Pro. A little over 900 bucks. It's light ... it's engineered well and the UI makes me wanna cry tears of joy. And it is faster on 2 gigs of memory and a 2.1 processor than my idiot HP 9700 was with Vista on 4 gigs and a 2.6 processor. MUCH faster. And I can run XP on it beautifully though I never do.
So I'm no longer a NET programmer. The same companies who NEVER adopted Vista (ummm... like all of them?) will NEVER adopt Win 7 - for the very same reasons. I think they will flock to something else. Linux? Maybe Macc? Maybe. Personally , I think they're screwed. Me? I'm learning Objective C and LAMP technologies and am going to reinvent myself programaticaly speaking. I'm through with MS. It's been a nice long ride bit it's over.
I've been around a while. I've seen IBM go from the major supplier of PCs and OS... to a non-player. Why? Because they thought they were gods and forgot they were just a corporation. They forgot they couldn't dictate what their clients wanted forever.
Think the paradigm can't shift?
Think again.
And doing it professionally since I was 29. I'm 50 something now.
When I work I code between 6 to 12 - maybe more - hours a day.
On my own time I like to read, go skiing, fly airplanes, hang out with friends, go dancing, take a trip somewhere.
It's called Life.
I am not my job.
"As a legal immigrant in the States, I can state that (although I'm paying just as much tax as anyone else) : I have no vote, no free healthcare and no constitutional rights (let alone a TV show)."
Funny , as a legal citizen of the United States, I've felt much the same way the past 8 years.
"women who would rather play social games with each other"
This is a wild and crazy guess but you're single, right?
Doesn't matter. Your opponents are still other players. Someone always wins every hand - the house never "wins". The house just takes a rake out of every pot.
I used to work as a programmer in a large Nevada casino.
The house regularly hires "shills" with good poker playing skills to sit at the table. The shills get a salary and the casino gets their winnings. That is how the house increases it's take
I see no reason why online casinos would not do the same thing.
Anyone who does not have the wherewithal and sense to not make public their extortion demand, very likely does not have the sense and wherewithal to actually harvest information. I see a text depiction of a list of alleged connections to T-Mo servers.
I do not see actual data - show me a 500 data item sample if you have anything at all.
My best guess: Some 15 year old in an Eastern European country will shortly have some 'splainin to do.
You're problem is that you feel uncomfortable saying "no" to a request to borrow a personal item? And you're looking for a technological solution for that?
Well I could talk about setting up a virtual machine sandbox for your your friends but the reality is that your question is not a technological one that belongs on Slashdot but rather something better served by Dear Abby because, T1000s excepted, there is no technology that can replace a lack of spine.
A computer is a personal item and the information on it valuable if destroyed. Do you let your friends have your car whenever they ask? Do you give them ten bucks whenever they ask? Can they use minutes on your cell phone at will?
Same thing.
Just smile and politely say "I'm sorry but I am not comfortable with anyone else using my personal machine" and that's really the end of it. If anyone thinks it "impolite" then it;s their issue and not yours.
You asked why I say it is all a sham. Here is my answer from what I have seen in California and Arizona:
1. There are extremely few (if any) programs that will actually help someone who wants to get back to work - get back to work.
2. Food and shelter take hours of yoru time to acquire. Typically, in California (SF and LA) there is a several hour wait in line to see if there will be room in a shelter. No room - come back and wait tomorrow. Food can take a trip across town to acquire - you need bus fare and and hour or two to get there. You will be spending 3-4 hours a day in lines waiting for food or a cot for the night . Try to get a job when 4 hours or more a day (job hours) are going to be spent in line.
3. If you have no money , a single person will receive about 45 bucks a week food stamps and about $110 a month cash for all other expenses. For the $110 a month you will have to spend about 5-10 hours a week working for the welfare dept. Not looking for a job $180 a month food stamps sound like a lot? You have no stove- no refrigerator. Everything you eat has to be prepackaged. You know what that costs? I do. It's a lot more then $180 a month
4. Just getting a shower took me a one hour wait in line.
5. Shelters are not safe. Women are regularly raped and beaten and robbed in them. They are understaffed bu the lowest quality of people imaginable. People who do not only care about you but will go out of their way to make fun of you.
6. Job and housing programs are basically a sham. When you go there you are told it will take 18 months to get housing and no job training money is currently available - come back next month. LOTS of staff there. No actual jobs or training being given out.
I could go on and on and on... so easy to criticize - so hard to empathize - unless you've been there.
With that said , there are programs out there that will feed and house you and help you get a job. They are FEW and FAR between. The only way that I found on was by the help of a nun in a woman's shelter I was staying at in Los Angeles. If you don't network or push your agenda - you get nothing.
Now , I've been in business and I know how to search for jobs, use the internet effectively and how to network (hence the Nun). But by far the vast VAST majority of people on the streets are not blessed as I am - so they are intentionally forgotten by understaffed and overworked govt workers of agencies who have their hands full filling out paperwork and documenting what they do so that they can justify next years budget.
It;s not about getting people off the streets nearly as much as it is about having everyone in the "assistance" agency keep their own jobs.
And that's the short version of what I mean by "it's a sham"
You are misinformed about the type of people who join the Army, Most of them are NOT gung-ho types who like guns and the idea of shooting up people.
Most of them just need a job. Most of them just want to go to college. Most of then are very poor and/or come from urban places that make the Army seem mild . Most of them saw the nifty multi-million dollar ad campaigns that tell them how they can be all that they can be or how in 6 weeks they can be a computer programmer too!
But the ads don't show war. They don't show you killing women and little children because you have been put into a place where you honestly have come to believe that you need to do that in order to stay alive - or to keep your buddies alive. The ads don't show you that.
Me, I was 2 years into an Ivy League education with a family that would make Dick Cheney's look warm and fuzzy by comparison. And I had enough and I left. And after my money ran out and I had no experience as a 19 year old in the world - I joined the military not because I liked guns but because I wanted to continue my college.
The Army does not take care of every aspect of your life as I've seen some people say here. You only think that if you haven't been in the military. Being in the military is a lot like being in any other job - you work 8 to 5 and you get weekends if you're not in combat. True, you don't have to worry about health care, or becoming homeless if you're laid off or even paying for food or housing (if you're single) but in most civilized Western countries (save the U.S.) . In many ways the peace-time Army is a lot like Sweden. But you still have to pay your bills, plan your financial future and buy your housewares just like everyone else.
Thank you .
I hope that neither you nor your family ever come close to that again.
I suspect that over the next few years we will be seeing so very much more of this .
Eight Years of ruining the economy will have consequences and a price - I fear we haven't even come close to paying that price as yet.
I need to answer your question in another way as well.
You asked: What is it about the military that leads to homelessness and not having a normal life.
I'll tell you what that is and you will not like the answer.
Me, I worked in a combat medical field unit as an Operating Room Technician and a Field Medic. It was the only thing I was comfortable doing in the Army. Helping people - saving lives. I did a lot of both and although I am NOT a military supporter I am proud of what I did.
Most people in the military , especially men, go into jobs that involve killing people.
Let me say that again - Killing people. Killing people is Job #1. Even in the Medical Corps we were told again and again "You are soldiers first and medics second" ( we gave the people telling us that the finger behind their backs of course)
We are all brought up to believe that killing people is wrong. Thou shall not murder.
The military has a way around this by creating a culture of dehumanizing the enemy du jour - and other ways.
Killing is a part and parcel of Army culture.
You ever see the shirts that say "Join the Army , Travel to interesting places meet interesting people and Kill them"
You might think that's an interesting snarky comment on military culture.
It is not. The infantry people I saw who wore those shirts were 100% percent serious about the message.
Not Snark. A way of life
That's what it's like being in the Army.
And God forbid you actually end up in a war and have to go meet interesting men women and children and kill them - you are in a culture that tells you that you did nothing wrong. In fact it rewards you - Hooo Aaa!
And all that is well and good until you return to civilian life, laws and the Ten Commandments again and it hits you:
"My God, what have I done!"
And you can tell no one because no one outside of the military could possibly understand. And you can't wear your T-shirt anymore either.
So you turn to alcohol or drugs and you can't sleep at night and you go slowly crazy. And you can't hold your job and you realize that you were not the person that you used to think you were. And you never will be again.
That didn't happen to me.
But I saw it happen over and over again to people that I knew. People who shot other people. Who killed interesting people. How can you go into Church ever again you wonder?
Oh and by the way - That war. It was all about the oil anyway.
So that's the problem - that's why so many American military people end up the way that they do.
I spent the following 17 years after leaving the military living a very normal life. I increased my career from working at Radio Shack, shortly after I got out - to being a contract software developer and making 6 figures for a while.
The military was great to me and gave me the interpersonal and management skills to really suceed afterwords.
In 2001 I found myself jobless shortly before 911. After 911 I was over 40 and there were NO jobs available.
Over 40, female, Bubble Burst, nobody hiring - George Bush economy - things were not well on 01.
My other friends who had been doing very well were now jobless as well.
My story was not unique in Silicon Valley.
I survived it - not everyone did.
And I was still a lot better off then the mentally ill or addicted or other homeless people I saw in shelters who had just given up.
It's a transformative experience - but not one you would like to have had.
I actually moved out of CA and went to NV and AZ for a while.
I drove buses in Reno and in AZ.
When apartments cost 1200 or more to get into (yes even with a roommate) and you are making ten dollars an hour gross - well the math is obvious.
There are no simple reasons why this happens.
Having 6 months living expenses at the time was about 12K saved (at the time my 1 bdrm apt was $1200 a month) That an 6 mos unemployment kept me off the street for almost a year.
Until You've been homeless. I know. I've been there. With all my progressive thinking, I knew nothing about it.
In 2000-01 I was making 6 figures working as a Senior Developer in Los Angeles. I lost my job after Bush and 911. I sent out over 300 resumes in a 3 month period - not one single response. I had 6 months income saved . By month 7 I was sleeping on friends couches. Previously I had been able to get a new contract within 2 weeks tops. I borrowed several thousand from friends to keep me in monthly hotels - I was good for it. I always had been working right?
By month 12 I was sleeping in my car. I took temp jobs driving buses and I took temp IT jobs doing data entry at 10 bucks an hour. You know how well you can live on 10 bucks an hour in CA when you have no more money? Not very well. Get an apartment ? With what? 10 bucks an hour?
By month 22 I was starting to live in shelters. And I saw things. Things I would rather not ever have seen. I saw people in bloody bandages, terrible dirty and out of their mind being laughed at and made fun of by city shelter workers. I saw it took over an hour to get in line to take a shower. I drug addiction, mental illness and hopelessness standing right next to me every single day. I saw my self confidence die along with my job prospects. Most importantly I saw that nobody really cared.
You think there are State run programs to help people out there. I am here to tell you you are so so wrong. It;s all a sham. There are a very few. Very few. Most are fronts just to make it seem like something is being done. Nothing is. I've seen it. I've been there.
You haven't seen it. You don't know.
There are very few programs out there and by using the library internet I found one for Women Vets. I got small IT jobs and was able to keep them now that I had food shelter and safety. I worked my way back up the ladder again. Now I make about half of whay I used to - but we all are now - unless you're a banker.
Friends, Family?? I left home at 19 and an Ivy League University - joined the military to continue college. My family were bad people. Rich, but very bad. How Bad? I begged to sleep on a couch with one of them. I told them I slept behind a church last night - in the open. My family refused. Good luck. Don't assume all families are like yours. I assure you they are not.
There's a lot more I could say. More that needs to be said. But I've said enough. It's the rich greedy sons and daughters of bitches who think nothing of others and thing only how to get more to themselves that post about how homeless people bring it all on themselves. Well some do. And some are just broken down by the process. Those people need help. Where is their help?