You haven't been outside much? Access is a part of Office 2003, a lot of people with just enough tech skills to be dangerous make their living off of writing Access dbs in critical situations.
Not to mention MS Access files being used by some electronic voting Cos.
I get a lot of perfectly good RAM chips laying around, they are removed from computers when upgrading but they are virtually useless afterwards as I usually buy the base RAM for a system so it's merely redundant if I have more of the same lower capacity.
Case in point; at Work I am upgrading some Mac Minis which have 2x256MB SO-DIMMS I would like to use them (512MB would be a great upgrade in other computers) but they only work in certain computers, and I don't know which or can't get adapter to utilize them in ones that could benefit the most.
I guess what I'm getting to is I wish RAMs were more interchangeable, most other computer components are, but most high capacity RAMS are limited by what they can be plugged into.
I hope these machines are good. I used to buy the $200 Fry's Great Quality machines, but Fry's is no longer selling those
Me too. Well the architecture is pretty similar (cyrix CPU) but it looks like the software is a factor better, many of those GQ machines didn't have adequate drivers to support the on-board video so you were stuck at 640x480 or whatever. Though installing Mandrake (back then) usually took care of that.
The thing that really burns me is all the "Good for Light Word Processing"crap these power-system zealots keep spewing - and I ma not discriminating here, all of the platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux are full of em. I can tell you that machine (512MB RAM/80GB HDD) is probably capable of some great DTP (Scribus) could be great for illustration (Inkscape) and really serious office work (OOo). It may not be fast at doing such things, but we should never say it is not capable.
As a Classic computerist I know of authors who write books and other published works still on Commodore 64s, (heck some have never left their typewriter behind). To them they get familiar with something and stick to it they don't upgrade because they are to busy being productive with what they have (the hard part is finding replacement parts for their daisy wheel printers). Same reason why the XO will be a hit with kids, they will not see those laptops as underpowered or slow, but the draw is they have access and the speed isn't really a factor when you are starting out (as they get better and outgrow it, then that's another matter; it took me years to outgrow the VIC-20).
Good luck on that mister, there's already 213,000 hits about you on Google!
http://www.google.com/search?q=Anonymous+Coward
The phrase many people have a issue with: government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information., presently it is not properly safeguarded, except for those guarding their data in order to maximize profits on it's resale.
I'll trust the government with my private data when I trust the administrators. Which usually means that they trust us also.
Quality Sound - One of the reason some of the crappy games get good scores is due to the judicious use of sounds, a crappy silent game just sucks, a crappy game with killer sound becomes much more enjoyable.
Theme music - As with sounds a good theme can make or break an otherwise average game.
Moving Character Animation - I recall reading in Donald Duck's Playground this was a big innovation.
Join at any time - I recall in Gauntlet players could join in at any time they didn't have to wait for the strongest player to die to rejoin the game, made it possible to get more quarters in a machine as well as allow weaker players to ride on the coattails of better ones (at least as long as they had quarters).
Wallpapers - I remember the controversy about Zaxxon "i's a mediocre game, it is just visual wallpaper", that visual wallpaper is just about mandatory on all games nowadays.
Save State - Before disk drives many games had no save character option.
Level Designer - A great feature that made game like Lode Runner runaway hits.
Copy Protection - May not be a matter of celebration for the user, but it was a game design innovation, and for some a new challenge of successfully copying the game besides shooting the bad guys. Also some of the things those crackers did to the games made some unplayable games playable (trained cracks).
I'm not much of a myspace person but I have an account (I'm 42), the reason was a friend of mine said to check out her myspace page and I had to sign up in order to do so. I am sure the same goes for many others.
I was waiting to hear about this, RIAA/MPAA and other have been doing a lot of finger pointing and taking advantage of the legal system to do a lot of their work and people are realizing that RIAA/MPAA is collecting the money bot not necessarily paying the bills for investigation and enforcement.
I have been expecting the pendulum to swing the other way to either strike down these things due to the financial burden on the enforcement/ judicial/ corrections or to start taxing (rightly so) all those poor artists of which they have been protecting their rights.
Is that rumblings that they plan from exiting the subscriber music business?
I have one friend who really enjoys Napster's subscription service probably have 1000 songs he listens to. If Napster were to shut down the service I think there would be a lot of very unhappy customers.
With closed source you really don't know whats going on changes can be done and you have no clue.
On an open source system, technical professionals, besides average joes, will be able to examine and validate the integrity of the code. To verify it has not been tampered with authorities would compile the public source, get a checksum on the binaries, then compare that to what is installed on the machines, if there is a difference they replace the invalid binaries with the verified.
If there are bugs it can be a mess but it's better then having a bug in closed source and having a last minute patch that included a little bit more than just the bug patch.
In general voting system should not change much at all. They should accurately display/provide choices, record vote properly, produce verifiable paper trail and consistently transmit data with safeguards to ensure it's accuracy upon receipt. It's not really a system that should need constant major updates or radical changes in the base OS.
As with all the hype since the 64s of computers as appliances, just plug it in and you don't need to mess with it, it just works, thats what the voting machines should be like, not be a major money maker for any private institution.
If say Software Co wants to make an syncing interface for Blackberry, Palm or other popular but non-competing device that would potentially increase Apple's market share they probably would support the developers.
If Free Software group adds support for some old printer (which does not necessarily equate to more sales, but makes customers happy) they probably are pretty indifferent about it.
If Company makes something that reduces Apples sales of one of their products they probably won't be to happy. (I remmeber Apple wasn't happy with people hacking in support for 3rd party DVD Burners instead of buying Superdrives)
If someone makes something that Apple created and markets (OS X is responsible for a high percentage of Apple hardware/software sales.) and copies or sells it without Apples various compensations (hardware, software profits) I am sure lawyers will be involved.
Last videogames magazine subscription I had was to Electronic Games back in the 80s. I buy a newsstand VG mag once in a while but they just never match up to the granddaddy.
What Apple will do I release Java 6 as an update for Leopard only and as people release Java 6 only apps you will be forced into running Leopard.
I figure it will be like they did with Java 5 released only for Tiger, no Panther Support - if you go to the Java site and they say go to the Apple site.
It sure slows down the Macs here at work here, granted they are G3s and G4s, but to state they don't slow down because yours doesn't is being narrow. The point about not finding OS9 related files still stands - I had to install a third party app, EasyFind, just to have accurate simple filename searches. (yeah there is Find in the Finder menus,but it doesn't seem to find them either.
Heh, reminds me of Spotlight. It indexes everything you connect to (well almost everything, OS9 files seem to be invisible to it) and slows the computer especially if you connect to a foriegn network or disc, which initiates it to index that too.
When you have 20+ systems to backup it gets to be a big problem. Like I said, if there was some way for iPhoto to clean up the photo cache when you don't want all those revisions it would be a welcome improvement, but iPhoto does not seem to have such capability.
iPhoto may look and act real spiffy but it is a hog on hard disk resources and file management (just like the new Mail App). If you just look at a photo in iPhoto it makes a duplicate and stores the previous version (well ok a little bit more than look, but with 10 mpix digital cameras we are taking an extra 3mb taken up for a simple brightness adjustment) While it is easy to make these revisions it's darned near impossible to get iPhoto to clean up it's mess. It's one of those things on our work computers I prefer not to back up (if I can avoid it).
Fortunately most popular FOSS projects are on top of such behavior and strive to keep their programs under better control.
If they terminate a connection from happening they are blocking it. It may be OK to them to call it 'delaying' but technically the connection is blocked initially.
2. Slap the Microsoft name on the whiz-bang technology they just bought, claim it as their product of "innovation".
3. Publish a press release that the the software company will be offering better "Windows compatibility" on all platforms to "build a better community".
4. Once the added Windows APIs have been debugged, (after a few months) start dropping all other non-windows OS support due to "customer demand"
There is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market.
Nope. Shoddy companies like that are also not below lying in their ads (or press statements for that matter), spreading FUD about their competition, and lobbying to reduce all those 'regulations' keeping them from doing worse things to citizens, etc. If they can't beat the competition, then make anything else just seem worse.
I am too far into reading but, Answer 2 is a very insightful answer, it sums up a lot of the problems with corporations now. And should be in a FAQ about what's wrong with many publicly traded companies.
Though I think his response to the 10 year question is premature, Apple may be hot, but it's still a closed system and as a long time Mac person and a newer Linux person am finding more frustrations with OSX buggyness (on a technical level) than with Linux. I think in the long term,if not addressed, their limited cross-platform compatibility will kill Apple.
I'm running Ubuntu on a couple servers, from my observations it was a step up and down from the CentOS 4 Servers I was running before (Red Hat EL 3 before that)
The good:
Lots of more packages available than RH and more support than CentOS.
The installation was great had LAMP on the CD - PHP5, MySQL5, Apache 2.
Adding packages is a breeze much better the the RPM tool of CentOS.
PhpMyadmin from the installer was a nice thing as that was missing from CentOS.
Updates are pretty painless too.
The not as good:
I miss the nice 'just works' system-config-users, samba, etc. tools of RH/CentOS, I installed gsambad but it is still lacking and munges the config file comments.
There are bugs, like the DAV lock permission problem, may be an apache issue but it hasn't been patched in Ubuntu officially AFAIK.
Part of the installer puts in a MySQL account to provide automatic MySQL updates, restoring my MySQL data from the backup tar from CentOS, I overwrote the account, took a little research to get it back. Both those solutions were easily Googleable BTW.
Nothing too bad though.
Otherwise seems to work fine and am pretty happy to be away from the RH shadow and the lack of CentOS RPM support.
This has been the MOU for Microsoft for years buy a company, speak the 'we support our users' talk, take the staff and code, drop the non-MS users and then tout how they are innovating and are the best thing there is.
Any of these ring a bell: - Fox Software - Bungie - SubLogic
All of which made great programs that supported users of multiple platforms, MS bought them, said they were dedicated to enhacing the product across all platforms, made a half assed release or two and then dropped all other platforms due to 'lack of interest' (they claim it was customer lack of interest when it was more like Microsoft's). It's amazing MS Office for Mac has lasted as long as it has...
I am curious on what similarity, does Google limit the user by switching to Analytics- or what is missed by Analytics that isn't by Urchin?
The term One Cent has been used in common english for over a hundred years, as America uses the term on their one cent pieces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Eagle_cent the image of the Canadian cent design is probably enforceable, but the name 'one cent' is going to far.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't been outside much? Access is a part of Office 2003, a lot of people with just enough tech skills to be dangerous make their living off of writing Access dbs in critical situations.
Not to mention MS Access files being used by some electronic voting Cos.
I get a lot of perfectly good RAM chips laying around, they are removed from computers when upgrading but they are virtually useless afterwards as I usually buy the base RAM for a system so it's merely redundant if I have more of the same lower capacity.
Case in point; at Work I am upgrading some Mac Minis which have 2x256MB SO-DIMMS I would like to use them (512MB would be a great upgrade in other computers) but they only work in certain computers, and I don't know which or can't get adapter to utilize them in ones that could benefit the most.
I guess what I'm getting to is I wish RAMs were more interchangeable, most other computer components are, but most high capacity RAMS are limited by what they can be plugged into.
I hope these machines are good. I used to buy the $200 Fry's Great Quality machines, but Fry's is no longer selling those
Me too. Well the architecture is pretty similar (cyrix CPU) but it looks like the software is a factor better, many of those GQ machines didn't have adequate drivers to support the on-board video so you were stuck at 640x480 or whatever. Though installing Mandrake (back then) usually took care of that.
The thing that really burns me is all the "Good for Light Word Processing"crap these power-system zealots keep spewing - and I ma not discriminating here, all of the platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux are full of em. I can tell you that machine (512MB RAM/80GB HDD) is probably capable of some great DTP (Scribus) could be great for illustration (Inkscape) and really serious office work (OOo). It may not be fast at doing such things, but we should never say it is not capable.
As a Classic computerist I know of authors who write books and other published works still on Commodore 64s, (heck some have never left their typewriter behind). To them they get familiar with something and stick to it they don't upgrade because they are to busy being productive with what they have (the hard part is finding replacement parts for their daisy wheel printers). Same reason why the XO will be a hit with kids, they will not see those laptops as underpowered or slow, but the draw is they have access and the speed isn't really a factor when you are starting out (as they get better and outgrow it, then that's another matter; it took me years to outgrow the VIC-20).
Good luck on that mister, there's already 213,000 hits about you on Google!
http://www.google.com/search?q=Anonymous+Coward
The phrase many people have a issue with: government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information., presently it is not properly safeguarded, except for those guarding their data in order to maximize profits on it's resale.
I'll trust the government with my private data when I trust the administrators. Which usually means that they trust us also.
Quality Sound - One of the reason some of the crappy games get good scores is due to the judicious use of sounds, a crappy silent game just sucks, a crappy game with killer sound becomes much more enjoyable.
Theme music - As with sounds a good theme can make or break an otherwise average game.
Moving Character Animation - I recall reading in Donald Duck's Playground this was a big innovation.
Join at any time - I recall in Gauntlet players could join in at any time they didn't have to wait for the strongest player to die to rejoin the game, made it possible to get more quarters in a machine as well as allow weaker players to ride on the coattails of better ones (at least as long as they had quarters).
Wallpapers - I remember the controversy about Zaxxon "i's a mediocre game, it is just visual wallpaper", that visual wallpaper is just about mandatory on all games nowadays.
Save State - Before disk drives many games had no save character option.
Level Designer - A great feature that made game like Lode Runner runaway hits.
Copy Protection - May not be a matter of celebration for the user, but it was a game design innovation, and for some a new challenge of successfully copying the game besides shooting the bad guys. Also some of the things those crackers did to the games made some unplayable games playable (trained cracks).
I'm not much of a myspace person but I have an account (I'm 42), the reason was a friend of mine said to check out her myspace page and I had to sign up in order to do so. I am sure the same goes for many others.
I was waiting to hear about this, RIAA/MPAA and other have been doing a lot of finger pointing and taking advantage of the legal system to do a lot of their work and people are realizing that RIAA/MPAA is collecting the money bot not necessarily paying the bills for investigation and enforcement.
I have been expecting the pendulum to swing the other way to either strike down these things due to the financial burden on the enforcement/ judicial/ corrections or to start taxing (rightly so) all those poor artists of which they have been protecting their rights.
Is that rumblings that they plan from exiting the subscriber music business?
I have one friend who really enjoys Napster's subscription service probably have 1000 songs he listens to. If Napster were to shut down the service I think there would be a lot of very unhappy customers.
With closed source you really don't know whats going on changes can be done and you have no clue.
On an open source system, technical professionals, besides average joes, will be able to examine and validate the integrity of the code. To verify it has not been tampered with authorities would compile the public source, get a checksum on the binaries, then compare that to what is installed on the machines, if there is a difference they replace the invalid binaries with the verified.
If there are bugs it can be a mess but it's better then having a bug in closed source and having a last minute patch that included a little bit more than just the bug patch.
In general voting system should not change much at all. They should accurately display/provide choices, record vote properly, produce verifiable paper trail and consistently transmit data with safeguards to ensure it's accuracy upon receipt. It's not really a system that should need constant major updates or radical changes in the base OS.
As with all the hype since the 64s of computers as appliances, just plug it in and you don't need to mess with it, it just works, thats what the voting machines should be like, not be a major money maker for any private institution.
Depends on the situation:
If say Software Co wants to make an syncing interface for Blackberry, Palm or other popular but non-competing device that would potentially increase Apple's market share they probably would support the developers.
If Free Software group adds support for some old printer (which does not necessarily equate to more sales, but makes customers happy) they probably are pretty indifferent about it.
If Company makes something that reduces Apples sales of one of their products they probably won't be to happy. (I remmeber Apple wasn't happy with people hacking in support for 3rd party DVD Burners instead of buying Superdrives)
If someone makes something that Apple created and markets (OS X is responsible for a high percentage of Apple hardware/software sales.) and copies or sells it without Apples various compensations (hardware, software profits) I am sure lawyers will be involved.
Last videogames magazine subscription I had was to Electronic Games back in the 80s. I buy a newsstand VG mag once in a while but they just never match up to the granddaddy.
What Apple will do I release Java 6 as an update for Leopard only and as people release Java 6 only apps you will be forced into running Leopard.
I figure it will be like they did with Java 5 released only for Tiger, no Panther Support - if you go to the Java site and they say go to the Apple site.
A significant vote at stockholder meetings?
To me 1.6% does not signify any 'controlling' percentage, maybe gadfly status...
It sure slows down the Macs here at work here, granted they are G3s and G4s, but to state they don't slow down because yours doesn't is being narrow. The point about not finding OS9 related files still stands - I had to install a third party app, EasyFind, just to have accurate simple filename searches. (yeah there is Find in the Finder menus,but it doesn't seem to find them either.
Heh, reminds me of Spotlight. It indexes everything you connect to (well almost everything, OS9 files seem to be invisible to it) and slows the computer especially if you connect to a foriegn network or disc, which initiates it to index that too.
When you have 20+ systems to backup it gets to be a big problem. Like I said, if there was some way for iPhoto to clean up the photo cache when you don't want all those revisions it would be a welcome improvement, but iPhoto does not seem to have such capability.
iPhoto may look and act real spiffy but it is a hog on hard disk resources and file management (just like the new Mail App). If you just look at a photo in iPhoto it makes a duplicate and stores the previous version (well ok a little bit more than look, but with 10 mpix digital cameras we are taking an extra 3mb taken up for a simple brightness adjustment) While it is easy to make these revisions it's darned near impossible to get iPhoto to clean up it's mess. It's one of those things on our work computers I prefer not to back up (if I can avoid it).
Fortunately most popular FOSS projects are on top of such behavior and strive to keep their programs under better control.
If they terminate a connection from happening they are blocking it. It may be OK to them to call it 'delaying' but technically the connection is blocked initially.
1. Buy (Open Source) Company.
2. Slap the Microsoft name on the whiz-bang technology they just bought, claim it as their product of "innovation".
3. Publish a press release that the the software company will be offering better "Windows compatibility" on all platforms to "build a better community".
4. Once the added Windows APIs have been debugged, (after a few months) start dropping all other non-windows OS support due to "customer demand"
5. Profit
There is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market.
Nope. Shoddy companies like that are also not below lying in their ads (or press statements for that matter), spreading FUD about their competition, and lobbying to reduce all those 'regulations' keeping them from doing worse things to citizens, etc. If they can't beat the competition, then make anything else just seem worse.
How dare you, my eyes are now burning!!!
I am too far into reading but, Answer 2 is a very insightful answer, it sums up a lot of the problems with corporations now. And should be in a FAQ about what's wrong with many publicly traded companies.
,if not addressed, their limited cross-platform compatibility will kill Apple.
Though I think his response to the 10 year question is premature, Apple may be hot, but it's still a closed system and as a long time Mac person and a newer Linux person am finding more frustrations with OSX buggyness (on a technical level) than with Linux. I think in the long term
Back to reading...
I'm running Ubuntu on a couple servers, from my observations it was a step up and down from the CentOS 4 Servers I was running before (Red Hat EL 3 before that)
The good:
Lots of more packages available than RH and more support than CentOS.
The installation was great had LAMP on the CD - PHP5, MySQL5, Apache 2.
Adding packages is a breeze much better the the RPM tool of CentOS.
PhpMyadmin from the installer was a nice thing as that was missing from CentOS.
Updates are pretty painless too.
The not as good:
I miss the nice 'just works' system-config-users, samba, etc. tools of RH/CentOS, I installed gsambad but it is still lacking and munges the config file comments.
There are bugs, like the DAV lock permission problem, may be an apache issue but it hasn't been patched in Ubuntu officially AFAIK.
Part of the installer puts in a MySQL account to provide automatic MySQL updates, restoring my MySQL data from the backup tar from CentOS, I overwrote the account, took a little research to get it back. Both those solutions were easily Googleable BTW.
Nothing too bad though.
Otherwise seems to work fine and am pretty happy to be away from the RH shadow and the lack of CentOS RPM support.
This has been the MOU for Microsoft for years buy a company, speak the 'we support our users' talk, take the staff and code, drop the non-MS users and then tout how they are innovating and are the best thing there is.
Any of these ring a bell:
- Fox Software
- Bungie
- SubLogic
All of which made great programs that supported users of multiple platforms, MS bought them, said they were dedicated to enhacing the product across all platforms, made a half assed release or two and then dropped all other platforms due to 'lack of interest' (they claim it was customer lack of interest when it was more like Microsoft's). It's amazing MS Office for Mac has lasted as long as it has...
I am curious on what similarity, does Google limit the user by switching to Analytics- or what is missed by Analytics that isn't by Urchin?
The term One Cent has been used in common english for over a hundred years, as America uses the term on their one cent pieces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Eagle_cent the image of the Canadian cent design is probably enforceable, but the name 'one cent' is going to far.