anyone who saw the feeding frenzy of this past year's elections knows how the "game" is played. personally, it makes me want to wretch.
how did jeb bush win a handy re-election, when any civilized floridian (there are a handful of us in miami here, none in government) wanted him out like a leper in a hemophiliac ward????? He gave the best 37 Million reasons why, as opposed to McBride's 15 Million reasons.
in fact, the worst part of that fiasco, was that the Dem high muckety mucks (i used to not even know they existed) chose him, cuz they felt he'd be a more Big Money attractive canditate. Reno wouldn't take anything over 500 bucks from anyone, didn't do a lick of expensive advertising and lost. Hell, Bush's team attacked McBride (read = gave him free advertising) and made him the candidate to whup on later.
bottom line, the money makes the monkey dance, and advertising sadly sells these crooked canditates to the masses and all of us up the river.
actually, a few grown adults do use photoslop for real stuff. however, i think that the fourteen year olds simply get a thrill out of downloading 600 dollar programs.
bottom line, adobe is more interested in getting design houses to fork over the cash, than prosecuting people with pimples.
this WiFi announcement makes as much sense as the personal injury suits won by crooks years back (i'm certain overturned on appeal), who sued homeowners when they hurt themselves in attempted breakins.
yes, people today in the US fell less secure in some ways, say, when traveling on airlines. this is understandable due to the trauma of 9-11 and the threat of worse, such as the SAM attack in Kenya last week. bad things do happen in the world, they are unavoidable, and my mother would agree, better paranoid than alive.
however, it is this/.er's opinion that the right wing extremists of our beloved (not) presidential administration is overly eager to use the situation to extend the police powers of the state.
every little chink in personal liberty, every new crime invented, every new link to terrorism where it does not exist, ALL of THEM, are affronts to not only the liberty of the land of the free, but to the free world at large.
take Jose Padilla. an enemy combatant now, why? last time i looked (i took a history degree in a prior life) a Citizen of the United States had certain rights, even if he used them in a way detrimental to society. this is a "free" country, treason is an option, still punishable by death, none the less an option. that isn't to say it's my choice, but he made his willingly. why is he all of the sudden, this native born son (or bastard, don't know yet really, do we?) having something taken by Ashcroft (remember, he did lose an election to a corpse before his elevation to Grand Inquisitor), that a proper court of Law would only strip of him (this is being decided now) in the most dire of circumstances.
wi-fi security is just another nick in the neck of lady liberty. unfortunately, if you add the nicks up, there's a gaping hole at the moment, and not enough people to stand up to GOP sticks and stones making these nicks. may the god i don't believe exists help us all, without faith based government initiatives.
seriously, mozilla's bloat is reaching critical mass. if aol took a linux distro, threw mozilla onto it as the sole tool and gui. wrote a quick mozilla wrapper to openoffice and swallowed that package, put it onto cds and shipped it out. m$ might fall off the desktop in a jiffy.
in fact. who wants to help me with my new distro? AOHeLinux
actually, apple has de-coupled the big announcments from macworld over the last year. remember the xserve announcement. it was just, whenever. the benefit of apple's secrecy about future development is that there is interest in all of their product launches these days.
maybe mac has decided that more switchers ads and less macworlds is the right path for the times.
anyway, now IDG can get onto planning WinWorld, if only they could figure a way to make the escalators crash and the elevators freeze . . . ... .
i agree with you, apple has truly started to raise the bar in terms of expectations and performance. keep in mind that for every iTunes, there could be a cube lurking behind it. and yes, we would all like bigger better badder gizmos out of apple. why? cuz what's out there is oustanding.
my comment about hammer is not a joke. yes the rumor has been discredited, blah blah blah. However, i would love to see apple make versions for both, and do something intelligent like selling a chipset, motherboard, OS X disk combo.
it would blow m$ out of the water! i have seen Win die hard sysadmins go nutz over OS X. seriously, i'm helping one right now with his new mac, die hard!
hammer/mac systems oem would be great too. finally some choices for the finest os around. please apple please.
oh, almost forgot to mention. os x = darwin = bsd = portable. yes, developers would have to recompile for different architecture, but nothing as difficult as old school porting excercises.
every mac user knows that a macworld means new hardware. each macworld makes it more difficult for Apple to sell existing supply of their machines. add that to the convention company woes, and it makes sense.
we'll miss em if they go. maybe now they can finish that port of OS X for the Hammer
So it doesn't answer really why mainframes are still around.
ummm. i don't have a z900 to play with, just my nifty little web server doing it's thing, but i can answer this one. cuz something as large and crusty as a mainframe will:
a) get the job done consistently as hell
b) if u look up conservative, you will find a mainframe admin's picture in the dictionary
c) mainframe admins are scared to turn the damn things off, u can imagine the stark terror this translates into for Luddite management who think that shutting it down might kill the hampster powering the thing by running on it's wheel.
d) they just work.
btw. i had a chance to talk with an old mainframe guy (friend of mine's dad) who works for Alltel. he was a VP of a company they bought in the early 90s (jurassic era).
if you're wondering why these things still live, i'll give u the nutshell version (fossilized of course) of why they are still alive, taken from the mouth of someone who truly KNOWS the story, and the deal
50% of the mortgages in the world are calculated by Alltel. they run on those old monsters, and the programs they use are ancient and reliable. How ancient? they use disk images of punch cards to do the heavy lifting!!!!! this is not a joke, it is straight from the top. they began a re-write of the system a few years back, into something web-able and real time, but preferred to kill it in favor of using the old stuff, cuz it was there and it works.
how important is this? his words were: i used to not really worry too much about making a simple error, because i thought "its not a matter of life or death, just computer shit", "then i woke up one day and realized, it IS a matter of life or death!, what if one of my programs makes a mistake on some poor joe's mortgage, and he kills himself?? and now, 50% of the world's joes use my stuff!"
conclusion. just because its fossilized, don't mean its broke.
i thought all of the city transport was above ground, big trolleys with bus drivers that weren't picky if u reused your ticket. heck, even most of the trains were above ground there.
it really adds all of the charm to almost being run over by something every second on the street:) ring ring! ring ring!
but seriously folks. that city is old, circular and downright confusing to find your way around. and that's when you're sober, after a couple of good coffee shop visits, forget it. everything looks the same (the locals should attest to this), and the city is a big horse shoe. so if you take one wrong turn you wind up who knows where!
hell. one night i spent 2 hours freezin my butt off, during the summer, at 3 am until i could find a decent sign.
i had my.mac account for two years and i was very upset at the prospect of paying for it . . . .
if you are a first timer, or had a free account before they switched to a pay format, they offered it for 50 bucks.
then at the end they sweetened the deal by offering 100 4x6 prints from kodak for Free! those cost 50 bucks anyway.
in fact, they did that for all.mac users. they also give u alot of software for joining, Virex (well that's useless, we don't really have those, but. ..), the great Backup util that saved my bookmarks and some other stuff.
don't forget, u can make all the functionality of.mac on your own server if you want. its all open source.
all in all, it looked bad at the start, but they really did a good thing with it, worth it for the few bucks extra.
In what people will call true Microsoft style, I've had the phone crash on me twice to the point where even holding the power button down will not allow it to turn off.
i have been harping on this point in my recent posts on this topic, but was really just making fun of windoze on the principle.
to hear that m$ found a way to make a cellphone crash is just absurd. almost reminds me of those stupid five year old windoze humor mails that my family sends me once a month about what if m$ made a car, every time someone re-painted the lines on the road your car would crash!
i'm sure m$ finds the situation less humorous than i do.
seriously, how do you crash a cellphone? i've been using them for years, and even with java, and browsers, and GPS and everything Motorola can throw into a phone, its never stopped responding, frozen, crashed or even hesitated to do what i asked. even the nextel i1000 by Moto didn't like to keep calls going too long, but it never crashed on me.
hey, i didn't notice if he said the reception was any good. first time i didn't see that in a phone review, guess he couldn't make phone calls. but those VGA pics sure looked almost in focus.
People who like the SPV like the implementation of the PocketPC functionality and the added gizmos, but frequently accept that the basic phone functionality lets it down. Which does kind of sound like a classic Microsoft product.
this is actually quite sad. a once decent company has sunk to making devices that behave poorly. how much cash do you think they sunk into this? i'm sure it was a bundle. it really is a loss to the world, of course, today, m$ views that as a gain. oh well.
think i'll find a miamiLuG and get a party together. . . . .
it is ironic that m$ is really trying to make their own BeOS out of windoze, with a bunch of consumer penalties and taxes added.
fact is, with all the reimplementations of BeOS they have lost something crucial to long term adoption (not like they really had it anyway), some measure of consistency.
actually, reminds me of the crumbling of Hotline and it's formerly high level of consistency. Now there are a whole mess of BeOSs out there. If they were any good, don't u think someone would use them???
i hope m$ wastes a fuckin lot of time on all this technology that nobody's askin for, to run on hardware nobody wants to buy.
well, u know how most regular folks are with machines. i have literally taught more than a few people in the last year how to click a mouse and why that would be useful. any surprise that broadband users are still afraid of their windows machines? at least they have managed to get all that whiteout off the screen. sheesh
I would be GLAD to give several hundred dollars to any company that can make a consistent, user-friendly, non-MS OS for my x86 hardware (all of it, not just some). Is this possible? Apple - where are you?
as you well know, the apple community has been speculating lately, as to when AMD processor support will be introduced. with any luck, it will be sometime in the end of next year, once the Hammer line of 64 bit chips arrives.
i can tell you from what i am seeing right now, there is a TON of everyday JOE interest in OS X and apple. just in the last month, i have had four offers to buy my iMac for about 500 bucks.
in truth, apple's offerings may not be cutting edge from a hardware point of view. from a usability and stability pov they are the Real Deal. all the complaints about the "high cost" of entry should keep in mind that the apple hardware also retains a much higher value after purchase.
case in point, my iMac is just about to turn 3 years old now! i paid 1500 for it. u can buy a complete and new pc with monitor for 300 bucks from walmart. its not nearly as snazzy as my old imac and has a smaller hard drive. so what's so expensive? most mac users i know have a death grip on their hardware, no matter how old it is.
why???? the reason is the same response i get from previously m$ stalwart sysadmins who use it for the first time and fall in love.
Slashdot Mirror
now if we could just get the elections straight.
how did jeb bush win a handy re-election, when any civilized floridian (there are a handful of us in miami here, none in government) wanted him out like a leper in a hemophiliac ward????? He gave the best 37 Million reasons why, as opposed to McBride's 15 Million reasons.
in fact, the worst part of that fiasco, was that the Dem high muckety mucks (i used to not even know they existed) chose him, cuz they felt he'd be a more Big Money attractive canditate. Reno wouldn't take anything over 500 bucks from anyone, didn't do a lick of expensive advertising and lost. Hell, Bush's team attacked McBride (read = gave him free advertising) and made him the candidate to whup on later.
bottom line, the money makes the monkey dance, and advertising sadly sells these crooked canditates to the masses and all of us up the river.
/. is my favorite video game addiction.
bottom line, adobe is more interested in getting design houses to fork over the cash, than prosecuting people with pimples.
yes, people today in the US fell less secure in some ways, say, when traveling on airlines. this is understandable due to the trauma of 9-11 and the threat of worse, such as the SAM attack in Kenya last week. bad things do happen in the world, they are unavoidable, and my mother would agree, better paranoid than alive.
however, it is this /.er's opinion that the right wing extremists of our beloved (not) presidential administration is overly eager to use the situation to extend the police powers of the state.
every little chink in personal liberty, every new crime invented, every new link to terrorism where it does not exist, ALL of THEM, are affronts to not only the liberty of the land of the free, but to the free world at large.
take Jose Padilla. an enemy combatant now, why? last time i looked (i took a history degree in a prior life) a Citizen of the United States had certain rights, even if he used them in a way detrimental to society. this is a "free" country, treason is an option, still punishable by death, none the less an option. that isn't to say it's my choice, but he made his willingly. why is he all of the sudden, this native born son (or bastard, don't know yet really, do we?) having something taken by Ashcroft (remember, he did lose an election to a corpse before his elevation to Grand Inquisitor), that a proper court of Law would only strip of him (this is being decided now) in the most dire of circumstances.
wi-fi security is just another nick in the neck of lady liberty. unfortunately, if you add the nicks up, there's a gaping hole at the moment, and not enough people to stand up to GOP sticks and stones making these nicks. may the god i don't believe exists help us all, without faith based government initiatives.
your car would be so busy reporting to big brother it ignores the throttle and the steering wheel, but the radio works just fine.
yes, the m$ car would crash before you made it
in fact. who wants to help me with my new distro? AOHeLinux
maybe mac has decided that more switchers ads and less macworlds is the right path for the times.
anyway, now IDG can get onto planning WinWorld, if only they could figure a way to make the escalators crash and the elevators freeze . . . . .. .
however, the company that does the shows IDG is having problems right now, there could be more to this than simply not wanting to spend the money.
my comment about hammer is not a joke. yes the rumor has been discredited, blah blah blah. However, i would love to see apple make versions for both, and do something intelligent like selling a chipset, motherboard, OS X disk combo.
it would blow m$ out of the water! i have seen Win die hard sysadmins go nutz over OS X. seriously, i'm helping one right now with his new mac, die hard!
hammer/mac systems oem would be great too. finally some choices for the finest os around. please apple please.
oh, almost forgot to mention. os x = darwin = bsd = portable. yes, developers would have to recompile for different architecture, but nothing as difficult as old school porting excercises.
we'll miss em if they go. maybe now they can finish that port of OS X for the Hammer
i musta been modded down by some really angry big iron people over that post :( . . . . . . .. .
ummm. i don't have a z900 to play with, just my nifty little web server doing it's thing, but i can answer this one. cuz something as large and crusty as a mainframe will:
a) get the job done consistently as hell
b) if u look up conservative, you will find a mainframe admin's picture in the dictionary
c) mainframe admins are scared to turn the damn things off, u can imagine the stark terror this translates into for Luddite management who think that shutting it down might kill the hampster powering the thing by running on it's wheel.
d) they just work.
btw. i had a chance to talk with an old mainframe guy (friend of mine's dad) who works for Alltel. he was a VP of a company they bought in the early 90s (jurassic era).
if you're wondering why these things still live, i'll give u the nutshell version (fossilized of course) of why they are still alive, taken from the mouth of someone who truly KNOWS the story, and the deal
50% of the mortgages in the world are calculated by Alltel. they run on those old monsters, and the programs they use are ancient and reliable. How ancient? they use disk images of punch cards to do the heavy lifting!!!!! this is not a joke, it is straight from the top. they began a re-write of the system a few years back, into something web-able and real time, but preferred to kill it in favor of using the old stuff, cuz it was there and it works.
how important is this? his words were: i used to not really worry too much about making a simple error, because i thought "its not a matter of life or death, just computer shit", "then i woke up one day and realized, it IS a matter of life or death!, what if one of my programs makes a mistake on some poor joe's mortgage, and he kills himself?? and now, 50% of the world's joes use my stuff!"
conclusion. just because its fossilized, don't mean its broke.
the worst part was getting directions from someone.
it really adds all of the charm to almost being run over by something every second on the street :) ring ring! ring ring!
but seriously folks. that city is old, circular and downright confusing to find your way around. and that's when you're sober, after a couple of good coffee shop visits, forget it. everything looks the same (the locals should attest to this), and the city is a big horse shoe. so if you take one wrong turn you wind up who knows where!
hell. one night i spent 2 hours freezin my butt off, during the summer, at 3 am until i could find a decent sign.
i for one am glad to see gps put to a fun use.
i'm not one to grumble bout moderation, but . . . . they did mention .mac in the wired article, i hardly find it offtopic.
poor coward, good call. gs
if you are a first timer, or had a free account before they switched to a pay format, they offered it for 50 bucks.
then at the end they sweetened the deal by offering 100 4x6 prints from kodak for Free! those cost 50 bucks anyway.
in fact, they did that for all .mac users. they also give u alot of software for joining, Virex (well that's useless, we don't really have those, but. . .), the great Backup util that saved my bookmarks and some other stuff.
don't forget, u can make all the functionality of .mac on your own server if you want. its all open source.
all in all, it looked bad at the start, but they really did a good thing with it, worth it for the few bucks extra.
mind u, i was vehemently opposed at the beginning
In what people will call true Microsoft style, I've had the phone crash on me twice to the point where even holding the power button down will not allow it to turn off.
i have been harping on this point in my recent posts on this topic, but was really just making fun of windoze on the principle.
to hear that m$ found a way to make a cellphone crash is just absurd. almost reminds me of those stupid five year old windoze humor mails that my family sends me once a month about what if m$ made a car, every time someone re-painted the lines on the road your car would crash!
i'm sure m$ finds the situation less humorous than i do.
seriously, how do you crash a cellphone? i've been using them for years, and even with java, and browsers, and GPS and everything Motorola can throw into a phone, its never stopped responding, frozen, crashed or even hesitated to do what i asked. even the nextel i1000 by Moto didn't like to keep calls going too long, but it never crashed on me.
hey, i didn't notice if he said the reception was any good. first time i didn't see that in a phone review, guess he couldn't make phone calls. but those VGA pics sure looked almost in focus.
this is actually quite sad. a once decent company has sunk to making devices that behave poorly. how much cash do you think they sunk into this? i'm sure it was a bundle. it really is a loss to the world, of course, today, m$ views that as a gain. oh well.
think i'll find a miamiLuG and get a party together. . . . .
c'mon, m$ shit always needs a fan, right?
fact is, with all the reimplementations of BeOS they have lost something crucial to long term adoption (not like they really had it anyway), some measure of consistency.
actually, reminds me of the crumbling of Hotline and it's formerly high level of consistency. Now there are a whole mess of BeOSs out there. If they were any good, don't u think someone would use them???
i hope m$ wastes a fuckin lot of time on all this technology that nobody's askin for, to run on hardware nobody wants to buy.
if we're lucky this is the new OS/2 Warp.
well, u know how most regular folks are with machines. i have literally taught more than a few people in the last year how to click a mouse and why that would be useful. any surprise that broadband users are still afraid of their windows machines? at least they have managed to get all that whiteout off the screen. sheesh
as you well know, the apple community has been speculating lately, as to when AMD processor support will be introduced. with any luck, it will be sometime in the end of next year, once the Hammer line of 64 bit chips arrives.
i can tell you from what i am seeing right now, there is a TON of everyday JOE interest in OS X and apple. just in the last month, i have had four offers to buy my iMac for about 500 bucks.
in truth, apple's offerings may not be cutting edge from a hardware point of view. from a usability and stability pov they are the Real Deal. all the complaints about the "high cost" of entry should keep in mind that the apple hardware also retains a much higher value after purchase.
case in point, my iMac is just about to turn 3 years old now! i paid 1500 for it. u can buy a complete and new pc with monitor for 300 bucks from walmart. its not nearly as snazzy as my old imac and has a smaller hard drive. so what's so expensive? most mac users i know have a death grip on their hardware, no matter how old it is.
why???? the reason is the same response i get from previously m$ stalwart sysadmins who use it for the first time and fall in love.