Reporters. I watched the local paper, the St. Louis Post Distpatch, go steadily down hill over the past few years. Every year it got thinner and thinner to the point where all it was good for was the local sports report. Last year, my father dropped his subscription. Especially when he finally got high speed internet and realized the articles he wanted was on their website STLToday.
All the paper consisted of was were wire reports. Usually the exact same content I had read via Yahoo or Cnn.com the day before. There was very little local investigative journalism. They did a 5-part expose on the local fire districts and some stuff that was going on there with the wives of firefighters being elected to boards/etc. Back in 2005. But not much since.
I forget the lady's name (The old woman in front row of the White House daily briefings (Helen something). She wrote a book about this topic a few years ago and she pointed out that it was this lack of in depth local news reporting was the major reason why newspapers were loosing so much readership. Her reason is that hiring investigative reports and having a real news room is expensive. So in order to boost short term profits....
This boils down to one thing: Content. You have good content, people will come. It doesn't matter if that is on the web or in print.
You know, I get sick of the complaining about lack of alternatives in power of generation. Then when "Alternatives get proposed, those "Alternatives" get attacked by someone as well. Is it expensive? Yeah, all new technology is expensive at first.
Wind Turbines: It's bad because they kill birds (Which is debatable, but so group ran around claiming so and got published in USA Today. Which is where most people got the news so therefore people rant, "Wind power: Think of the birds!)
Solar Power: Not so great if you live in Seattle or any other city/part of the world that sees a lot of cloudy days. Also, ever looked into the chemicals used in producing Solar cells? Not exactly the most environmentally friendly stuff on earth.
There's no magic pill, no perfect solution, but the more options that are on the table the better.
This was all a bad joke, but that was true about the Apple of old.
And I used to bitch a lot about Apple up until the deployment of OSX. Also, that was the time when I got out of college and into the real world and stopped playing with computers and using them to make a living. While I started on the hardware/IT side of things, I ended up on the editing and compositing end of video production. I don't have time to fiddle with things, I need it to work. Apple does that. A lot of that is on the software side of things. The work flow between FCP, Motion, and Shake is excellent. Xgrid, although lacking a decent GUI, has been painless to set up.
And when you start comparing powerhouse machines, the price isn't that much different.
On-site store managers would be subject to a fine of $1,000 or 100 hours of community service for the first offense and $5,000 or 500 hours of community service for each subsequent offense.
And when said retailer is in Canada, Mexico, or China?
The bill would also require an annual, independent analysis of game ratings and require the FTC to conduct an investigation to determine whether hidden sexual content like what was in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a pervasive problem and to take appropriate action
And when the design studio is in France, the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, or China? Especially if they offer their content online or allow to download via the internet with servers hosted out side of the Jurisdiction?
Finally, the bill would authorize the FTC to conduct an annual, random audit of retailers to monitor enforcement and report the findings to Congress.
See above remarks. And to this one, great, another "Random" government inspection. And are they going to go after the big box shops? No. It will be the smaller businesses. Not that there are a lot of them, but there are a few around, mainly in the form of franchises.
As far as their content and everything goes, maybe they should start with the Pentagon and make sure no one under 18 can access America's Army. Sorry, but I see parents taking their kids to R-rated movies, buy them M rated games, and not even blink twice.
We knew about the switch over back when the original date was 2006. So in 2000, when all the TV's in the house were 20 years old and in various stages of going on the fritz, he decided it was time to get one good TV. (My mother had passed away the year before and I was off to college most of the year.) So he bought a nice 65" HDTV. Also he made the switch to Dish network and got the HD reciever for the first couple years he got the HD package with HBO and Showtime HD. (Those were the only channels besides the demo channel).
Well then around 2002 I was home over spring break, watching HD and suddenly they just went blank. They were gone. We had no idea why, I went back to school, and he was busy on other things and had dropped his subscription down to the basics because there were only a few HD channels.
In 2004 I got a job that required a lot of travel. Instead of paying $800 a month for an apartment that I spent maybe 6 days a month in, I just put most of my crap in storage and left my electronics at my dad's house. If I had to be at the coporate office (in the same city as my dad lived in), I just stayed there. He decide that since there was more of an HD line up, and we had all the equipment, it was time to go back to an HD package. (Plus it was baseball time.)
Well come to find out, what caused the HD feed to go blank was all of a sudden Dish required a new module for their Model 6000 reciever. As far as we could tell, this wasn't something that was announced. It just happened. The module was $100. We were early adopters and paid about $600 for the damned box to start with. Since we had been a loyal customer for so many years, they sent out the module free after he complained. Plugged it in, and the first commercial we saw on the HD demo channels was, "If you own a model 6000 receiver you will need to call to get this module". Talk about f(*#ing irony.
The receiver finally died last year and they sent a free upgrade, yada, yada. However his big deal now is that he can't bundle services because he's an existing customer. So he's switching to cable at the end of the year, getting the $120 a month HD/HSI bundle and then next year will play the game again going back to a Dish/Phone/DSL combo.
Over the air isn't an option. The reason we first got cable back in the Early 1980's (I was the first kid in the class to have cable back when there was few if no commericals) was that the house is situated where we can't get jack. (Point the antenna in one direction, you get NBC clear, ABC's a little fuzzy, and PBS is there after dark. Point it 45 degrees to the south and you get WB & CBS with a lot of fuzz.
I just bought the $2500 15.4" MacBook Pro (The base model with the 256MB Video Card) and got the upgraded 250GB HDD and that was it. It came with 2GB standard and I purchased an additional 2GB for $90 from Crucial. (Because Apple wanted $700.)
I can run FCP and Motion and Shake at the same time with very little slow down. The only applications I have where I notice any difference between my MacBook Pro and my QuadCore PowerMac G5 with 8GB of RAM is Lightwave and Blender 3D. And that has to do with the amount of RAM in the video card versus the system.
I give XP Pro 1.5GB when I launch it via Paraellels and it plays any games I want to play without any slow down issues. (Which the only game I play is Falcon 4.0 Allied Force and do some work on the Homeworld 2 Battlestar Mod)
I've been working around 64-bit chips since DEC Alphas in the late 1990's. The old adage back then was double the ram on the 64-bit processors. (I remember that a 1-GB Ram module in those days cost almost as much as my Quadcore G5).
The thing is, I'm not an average user. I work in video production. Mostly it's editing for a couple videographers doing boring things like weddings. (Hey it pays the bills). But every couple months someone needs help with some 3D animation for a corporate project, or a law firm wants to model an accident for a court case, or an indy film with a small FX budget wants some work done, etc. But time is money. The faster I can render something, the sooner I can move to the next project.
And I'll admit that 4GB (Especially the 8GB on the Quadcore) is even overkill for me 95% of the time. I edited most videos on an old 1Ghz Titanium Powerbook with 1GB of Ram with FCP 4.5HD just fine. Sure it lacked real time rendering, but if my other machines were busy rendering a final product, I was still being productive.
Does it improve workflow being able to keep FCP, motion, and Shake open at the same time? A little. I can take a strip, sent it to shake, animation some effects in Motion, import into Shake, render the composite and send the final back to FCP with a few mouse clicks. Sure, it's nice, when I do it. But that's maybe once every couple weeks. On a day to day basis, I have FCP open or DVD Studio with iTunes playing in the background and that's about it.
Now I don't know, maybe with some of the games out on the market, they require the gobs of extra Ram.
A lot of the dials and cockpit settings for night flying were green. Especially in the days of monochrome screens. Blind a pilot to the color green at night, and suddenly he can't read the dials. Loosing those dials at night when it can be hard to tell which way is up is just enough that it could quickly lead to a crash.
And how long have you been using Apple products again? This isn't new. They did the same with Xgrid. The Technology Preview of Xgrid back on OS 10.3 had a couple slick GUI's that made it easy for joe user to create a render farm. (It was a better looking Qmaster interface but...). When OS 10.4 shipped, gone was the GUI and the controller features (needed OSX-server for that). [Caveat, the features were there, but turned off. If you knew the least bit of how to navigate and use Unix, you could enable the Controller feture. Or download Xgridlite to enable it. Couple it with the Xgrid control from the Xserver remote tools (free download) and you had all the functionality. I was working in Video production and we were all salavating over this. Finally an easy to use system for distributed rendering of video, animation, etc..
However, for the slick, easy to use GUI to Xgrid....gone. While it wasn't too bad for people like me who was a *iux systems admin before hopping over to the Animation side of things, it was no big deal. But to the true artists who worked in Maya or Lightwave all day and used to using a GUI interface to Screamernet or other renderfarm engine, Xgrid in it's final form wasn't that impressive. Hell, even the guys over in editing continued to use Qmaster. The only application I've really used on Xgrid has been Terragen. And that's mainly because it's not a multi-threaded application. So in order to use all 4 processors on my quadcore to render Terragen output, it has to be run through Xgrid.
Apple has defended their trade secrets for years. And vigerously. So much so that the Microsoft Mac Business Unit across the street didn't have an inkling to the switch from PPC to Intel until it was announced. Company I worked for had some in house graphics apps (Ported from IRIX to OSX) and we had to sign a huge number of NDA's for some of the developer documentation.
Anyone who's worked around Apple for any length of time should know two things by now: Never by a 1st Gen product and don't get overly impressed with any previews.
So long as I remain in video & post at some level, I'll continue to run Mac. For the money, Final Cut Pro and Shake are slick apps.
They offered XP again after MS allowed OEM's to go back and install XP Pro. But at the time back in Feb/March it was Vista or nothing. That's due to their arrangements with Microsoft for volume licensing. And we were working from their Small/Medium business store, not the SOHO. But Dell did the same thing when XP was released over 2K Pro.
I have a similar model Samsung (B&W only) that I've had for 5 years now. I buy a new toner/drum cartige once a year (I did have one that would never work on a refill...but) and just refill. Works great for printing out invoices and most of the weekly business grind. And I believe I only paid $99 the printer (although the cartiages are about $80. So it's still giving the printer away...
Hell, the printer even came with Linux drivers...(But I use OSX so...)
Ironically, they are the same issues that drove me from recommending Gateway and go with Dell about a decade ago. Really this hit one of my clients about this time last year. (For the record I mostly do my Consulting business in video production arena, which is mostly dominated by Apple at the small/medium level and BOXX for those deploying none-custom Linux boxen) I was doing some work at a small medical supply company who were still running their inventory and billing software on 15 year old DOS based systems.
However, over the past few years I've been seeing an increase in the number of quality control issues on their PC boxes. Probably from cutting corners in the cost. Something similar happened to Gateway and Packard Bell back in the day. Also, the fact when people called tech support they got someone who barely spoke english and answered questions from a script further served to alienate users.
This time last year I was working on a project for a small mom & pop medical supply company.
It was coming time for a new round of Medicare and state certifications, plus the owners were getting ready to sell the company and retire after running it for 25 years and their 15 year old computers running DOS wasn't going to make the cut. Especially when trying to sell the company. (Hey if you buy it, the first thing you have to do is buy $25k in hardware and software (mostly software).
Their software vendor was still in business. They recommended going with Dell (They had some sort of deal with them plus had stated they were able to get support from Dell as opposed to HP or other vendors with their product lines). However, the company was also very upfront with the fact that their software WOULD NOT work on Vista.
I kept telling the business owners they needed to purchase their workstations last January before the switchover to Vista happened. I kept telling them that as soon as Vista was released, they would not be able to get a Dell PC shipped with XP Pro. And I kept getting the: "We have 30k of public aid money coming. We'll buy them when it comes in." Now this was more of a small business owner problem than a Dell problem, but nothing happened for a couple months and I got a phone call at the end of Feb (may have been early March). "We called Dell, and they said they can't(won't) ship a PC workstation with XP pro on it. It's all vista and the software won't work on Vista and probably won't for another year or more!". I was originally hired to back up their data from the DOS box and for my advise on what to do next. (Going to a hosted solution, vs. storing the data locally, which basically meant listen to the sales folks, and then tell the owners of the business my opinion.)
I was nice and checked around and Gateway was the only somewhat major vendor, ironically, that still offered machines you could order with XP pro installed. Well, they ended up buying Dell's with Vista. and eventually spending another $500 downgrading to XP Pro. And that was after 3 months of being the software vendors Vista beta test bitch (And the software vendor still charged the medical supply company $15k with no discount for the honor)
And this wasn't the first time. I also remember this happening in the transition from Windows 2k pro to XP. A lot of my clients at the time liked Windows 2K Pro and saw no major need to upgrade right away. (And I still don't blame them.)
Remember a handy thing called Wikiscanner? It caught all these folks (According to the article) editing their own entries. If nothing else I've found my research topic for next semester for a class dubbed Politics in the New Media. (Yeah, if it that isn't full of buzzwords). (If you haven't heard of wikiscanner, google it yourself and try and learn something)
The list of companies and organizations caught by Wikiscanner also includes, Walmart, Boeing, Nestle, Dell, My Space, Amnesty International, National Rifle Association, the Israeli government, Labour Party, Anheuser-Busch, and others.
If I had any point to make it is that this stuff goes on at all levels all the time. From kids/friends spreading gossip over a phone call on up. This is all just part of human nature. You can either piss and moan about it or realize it happens, shrug, and try and deal with it. Getting ally pissy about it ain't going to change that either. If it's right, guess what it's going to happen. If you think it's wrong, guess what: it's still going to happen. Control of information is power and people like power.
It happened before the internet age with programs such as Radio Free Europe, clandestine support of printing and distributing materials, paying people to print articles, etc. etc.. I never said this was right/wrong/indifferent. Just merely that it has happened, does happen, and will happen until humanity dies off. As far as I can tell, it's just part of human nature.
You can't sit here and tell me that New Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Iran, Brazil, Christmas Island, don't do the same thing. Or that Adobe, Microsoft, militant Linux users (also known as half of slashdot), Apple, militant Apple users (15% of Slashdot), Greenpeace, PETA, the NRA, Moveon.org, Swift Boat Vets for Truth, the Minutemen and so on and so forth don't do the same thing?
The only difference between Propaganda, PR, and Marketing is just the spelling.
I got an old Inspiron 1000 collecting dust in the corner. 256MB of ram with 32 shared with the SIS graphics card...so we can fire it up and see.
Currently it happily runs FreeBSD 6.2 with XFCE without too many issues or I boot puppy with a flashdrive save. Both are pretty snappy, even in the case of Puppy being a live distro.
WTF is this stuff doing on laptops in the first place?
It seems logical to me that this kind of information should be on a centralized servers at a state office with managed firewalls and all the rest with only hardwired terminals allowed access with maybe a VPN set up for remote access if absolutely needed out in the field. I know wireless isn't 100% secure and no system is but that just makes logical sense to me.
There is an old quote in the PERL world: there is more than one right way to do it.
The only formal programming course I ever had was a VB class in college (needed a "computer credit and I didn't know VB). Everything else I've learned from looking, reading, and writing/rewriting code till it worked.
It is? Maybe around slashdot, but go around ask 90% of iPod owners what format their Ipod's play and they'll say, "MP3." It kind of reminds of a line from Redvsblue: "And you can play them on your MP3 player. Only we don't call 'em MP3's anymore, they're MP48's..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvNeHthx3Ng
I don't have kids yet, but as the poster mentioned, this is a vaccine for an STD and one that is simply to new to really know what the long term effect are when introduced to the larger population.
In 10 - 15 years when we do know more about any long term effects, (Does it wear off in or 30 years? Perhaps has some other unknown side-effects we don't yet know about?), then it's a different story. But if I had a child in this situation, it would be hard call. I spent my last two years of high school watching my mother suffer through and die of ovarian/cervical cancer (they were never really sure where the origin was) and believe me, that has a lasting impact. If in 10 - 15 years it's proven that it's safe and effective (and if I have any daughters), I'll have no problem getting them vaccinated.
It's having the government mandate it so soon after getting FDA approval that I have concerns about. Because there could be side effects that we won't know about until 10 - 15 years down the line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
Yeah, my British friends lament about having to order a "litre" instead of a Pint at the pub. At least we can still order a pint, but it's smaller over here...
Slashdot Mirror
All the paper consisted of was were wire reports. Usually the exact same content I had read via Yahoo or Cnn.com the day before. There was very little local investigative journalism. They did a 5-part expose on the local fire districts and some stuff that was going on there with the wives of firefighters being elected to boards/etc. Back in 2005. But not much since.
I forget the lady's name (The old woman in front row of the White House daily briefings (Helen something). She wrote a book about this topic a few years ago and she pointed out that it was this lack of in depth local news reporting was the major reason why newspapers were loosing so much readership. Her reason is that hiring investigative reports and having a real news room is expensive. So in order to boost short term profits....
This boils down to one thing: Content. You have good content, people will come. It doesn't matter if that is on the web or in print.
Wind Turbines: It's bad because they kill birds (Which is debatable, but so group ran around claiming so and got published in USA Today. Which is where most people got the news so therefore people rant, "Wind power: Think of the birds!)
Solar Power: Not so great if you live in Seattle or any other city/part of the world that sees a lot of cloudy days. Also, ever looked into the chemicals used in producing Solar cells? Not exactly the most environmentally friendly stuff on earth.
There's no magic pill, no perfect solution, but the more options that are on the table the better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZqWv7kDRy8
And I used to bitch a lot about Apple up until the deployment of OSX. Also, that was the time when I got out of college and into the real world and stopped playing with computers and using them to make a living. While I started on the hardware/IT side of things, I ended up on the editing and compositing end of video production. I don't have time to fiddle with things, I need it to work. Apple does that. A lot of that is on the software side of things. The work flow between FCP, Motion, and Shake is excellent. Xgrid, although lacking a decent GUI, has been painless to set up.
And when you start comparing powerhouse machines, the price isn't that much different.
And when said retailer is in Canada, Mexico, or China?
The bill would also require an annual, independent analysis of game ratings and require the FTC to conduct an investigation to determine whether hidden sexual content like what was in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a pervasive problem and to take appropriate actionAnd when the design studio is in France, the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, or China? Especially if they offer their content online or allow to download via the internet with servers hosted out side of the Jurisdiction?
Finally, the bill would authorize the FTC to conduct an annual, random audit of retailers to monitor enforcement and report the findings to Congress.See above remarks. And to this one, great, another "Random" government inspection. And are they going to go after the big box shops? No. It will be the smaller businesses. Not that there are a lot of them, but there are a few around, mainly in the form of franchises.
As far as their content and everything goes, maybe they should start with the Pentagon and make sure no one under 18 can access America's Army. Sorry, but I see parents taking their kids to R-rated movies, buy them M rated games, and not even blink twice.
1-18-08
So could it be some type of nerdy viral campaign like Ilovebees?
Well then around 2002 I was home over spring break, watching HD and suddenly they just went blank. They were gone. We had no idea why, I went back to school, and he was busy on other things and had dropped his subscription down to the basics because there were only a few HD channels.
In 2004 I got a job that required a lot of travel. Instead of paying $800 a month for an apartment that I spent maybe 6 days a month in, I just put most of my crap in storage and left my electronics at my dad's house. If I had to be at the coporate office (in the same city as my dad lived in), I just stayed there. He decide that since there was more of an HD line up, and we had all the equipment, it was time to go back to an HD package. (Plus it was baseball time.)
Well come to find out, what caused the HD feed to go blank was all of a sudden Dish required a new module for their Model 6000 reciever. As far as we could tell, this wasn't something that was announced. It just happened. The module was $100. We were early adopters and paid about $600 for the damned box to start with. Since we had been a loyal customer for so many years, they sent out the module free after he complained. Plugged it in, and the first commercial we saw on the HD demo channels was, "If you own a model 6000 receiver you will need to call to get this module". Talk about f(*#ing irony.
The receiver finally died last year and they sent a free upgrade, yada, yada. However his big deal now is that he can't bundle services because he's an existing customer. So he's switching to cable at the end of the year, getting the $120 a month HD/HSI bundle and then next year will play the game again going back to a Dish/Phone/DSL combo.
Over the air isn't an option. The reason we first got cable back in the Early 1980's (I was the first kid in the class to have cable back when there was few if no commericals) was that the house is situated where we can't get jack. (Point the antenna in one direction, you get NBC clear, ABC's a little fuzzy, and PBS is there after dark. Point it 45 degrees to the south and you get WB & CBS with a lot of fuzz.
Anyway, our little HD story.
I can run FCP and Motion and Shake at the same time with very little slow down. The only applications I have where I notice any difference between my MacBook Pro and my QuadCore PowerMac G5 with 8GB of RAM is Lightwave and Blender 3D. And that has to do with the amount of RAM in the video card versus the system.
I give XP Pro 1.5GB when I launch it via Paraellels and it plays any games I want to play without any slow down issues. (Which the only game I play is Falcon 4.0 Allied Force and do some work on the Homeworld 2 Battlestar Mod)
I've been working around 64-bit chips since DEC Alphas in the late 1990's. The old adage back then was double the ram on the 64-bit processors. (I remember that a 1-GB Ram module in those days cost almost as much as my Quadcore G5).
The thing is, I'm not an average user. I work in video production. Mostly it's editing for a couple videographers doing boring things like weddings. (Hey it pays the bills). But every couple months someone needs help with some 3D animation for a corporate project, or a law firm wants to model an accident for a court case, or an indy film with a small FX budget wants some work done, etc. But time is money. The faster I can render something, the sooner I can move to the next project.
And I'll admit that 4GB (Especially the 8GB on the Quadcore) is even overkill for me 95% of the time. I edited most videos on an old 1Ghz Titanium Powerbook with 1GB of Ram with FCP 4.5HD just fine. Sure it lacked real time rendering, but if my other machines were busy rendering a final product, I was still being productive.
Does it improve workflow being able to keep FCP, motion, and Shake open at the same time? A little. I can take a strip, sent it to shake, animation some effects in Motion, import into Shake, render the composite and send the final back to FCP with a few mouse clicks. Sure, it's nice, when I do it. But that's maybe once every couple weeks. On a day to day basis, I have FCP open or DVD Studio with iTunes playing in the background and that's about it.
Now I don't know, maybe with some of the games out on the market, they require the gobs of extra Ram.
But on the more serious note:
Why not Linux?
A: http://www.openbsd.org/
Which at one time was a DARPA funded project.
A lot of the dials and cockpit settings for night flying were green. Especially in the days of monochrome screens. Blind a pilot to the color green at night, and suddenly he can't read the dials. Loosing those dials at night when it can be hard to tell which way is up is just enough that it could quickly lead to a crash.
However, for the slick, easy to use GUI to Xgrid....gone. While it wasn't too bad for people like me who was a *iux systems admin before hopping over to the Animation side of things, it was no big deal. But to the true artists who worked in Maya or Lightwave all day and used to using a GUI interface to Screamernet or other renderfarm engine, Xgrid in it's final form wasn't that impressive. Hell, even the guys over in editing continued to use Qmaster. The only application I've really used on Xgrid has been Terragen. And that's mainly because it's not a multi-threaded application. So in order to use all 4 processors on my quadcore to render Terragen output, it has to be run through Xgrid.
Apple has defended their trade secrets for years. And vigerously. So much so that the Microsoft Mac Business Unit across the street didn't have an inkling to the switch from PPC to Intel until it was announced. Company I worked for had some in house graphics apps (Ported from IRIX to OSX) and we had to sign a huge number of NDA's for some of the developer documentation.
Anyone who's worked around Apple for any length of time should know two things by now: Never by a 1st Gen product and don't get overly impressed with any previews.
So long as I remain in video & post at some level, I'll continue to run Mac. For the money, Final Cut Pro and Shake are slick apps.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/1912247
They offered XP again after MS allowed OEM's to go back and install XP Pro. But at the time back in Feb/March it was Vista or nothing. That's due to their arrangements with Microsoft for volume licensing. And we were working from their Small/Medium business store, not the SOHO. But Dell did the same thing when XP was released over 2K Pro.
I have a similar model Samsung (B&W only) that I've had for 5 years now. I buy a new toner/drum cartige once a year (I did have one that would never work on a refill...but) and just refill. Works great for printing out invoices and most of the weekly business grind. And I believe I only paid $99 the printer (although the cartiages are about $80. So it's still giving the printer away... Hell, the printer even came with Linux drivers...(But I use OSX so...)
However, over the past few years I've been seeing an increase in the number of quality control issues on their PC boxes. Probably from cutting corners in the cost. Something similar happened to Gateway and Packard Bell back in the day. Also, the fact when people called tech support they got someone who barely spoke english and answered questions from a script further served to alienate users.
This time last year I was working on a project for a small mom & pop medical supply company. It was coming time for a new round of Medicare and state certifications, plus the owners were getting ready to sell the company and retire after running it for 25 years and their 15 year old computers running DOS wasn't going to make the cut. Especially when trying to sell the company. (Hey if you buy it, the first thing you have to do is buy $25k in hardware and software (mostly software).
Their software vendor was still in business. They recommended going with Dell (They had some sort of deal with them plus had stated they were able to get support from Dell as opposed to HP or other vendors with their product lines). However, the company was also very upfront with the fact that their software WOULD NOT work on Vista.
I kept telling the business owners they needed to purchase their workstations last January before the switchover to Vista happened. I kept telling them that as soon as Vista was released, they would not be able to get a Dell PC shipped with XP Pro. And I kept getting the: "We have 30k of public aid money coming. We'll buy them when it comes in." Now this was more of a small business owner problem than a Dell problem, but nothing happened for a couple months and I got a phone call at the end of Feb (may have been early March). "We called Dell, and they said they can't(won't) ship a PC workstation with XP pro on it. It's all vista and the software won't work on Vista and probably won't for another year or more!". I was originally hired to back up their data from the DOS box and for my advise on what to do next. (Going to a hosted solution, vs. storing the data locally, which basically meant listen to the sales folks, and then tell the owners of the business my opinion.)
I was nice and checked around and Gateway was the only somewhat major vendor, ironically, that still offered machines you could order with XP pro installed. Well, they ended up buying Dell's with Vista. and eventually spending another $500 downgrading to XP Pro. And that was after 3 months of being the software vendors Vista beta test bitch (And the software vendor still charged the medical supply company $15k with no discount for the honor)
And this wasn't the first time. I also remember this happening in the transition from Windows 2k pro to XP. A lot of my clients at the time liked Windows 2K Pro and saw no major need to upgrade right away. (And I still don't blame them.)
Remember a handy thing called Wikiscanner? It caught all these folks (According to the article) editing their own entries. If nothing else I've found my research topic for next semester for a class dubbed Politics in the New Media. (Yeah, if it that isn't full of buzzwords). (If you haven't heard of wikiscanner, google it yourself and try and learn something)
If I had any point to make it is that this stuff goes on at all levels all the time. From kids/friends spreading gossip over a phone call on up. This is all just part of human nature. You can either piss and moan about it or realize it happens, shrug, and try and deal with it. Getting ally pissy about it ain't going to change that either. If it's right, guess what it's going to happen. If you think it's wrong, guess what: it's still going to happen. Control of information is power and people like power.
It happened before the internet age with programs such as Radio Free Europe, clandestine support of printing and distributing materials, paying people to print articles, etc. etc.. I never said this was right/wrong/indifferent. Just merely that it has happened, does happen, and will happen until humanity dies off. As far as I can tell, it's just part of human nature.
The only difference between Propaganda, PR, and Marketing is just the spelling.
Currently it happily runs FreeBSD 6.2 with XFCE without too many issues or I boot puppy with a flashdrive save. Both are pretty snappy, even in the case of Puppy being a live distro.
It seems logical to me that this kind of information should be on a centralized servers at a state office with managed firewalls and all the rest with only hardwired terminals allowed access with maybe a VPN set up for remote access if absolutely needed out in the field. I know wireless isn't 100% secure and no system is but that just makes logical sense to me.
The only formal programming course I ever had was a VB class in college (needed a "computer credit and I didn't know VB). Everything else I've learned from looking, reading, and writing/rewriting code till it worked.
It is? Maybe around slashdot, but go around ask 90% of iPod owners what format their Ipod's play and they'll say, "MP3." It kind of reminds of a line from Redvsblue: "And you can play them on your MP3 player. Only we don't call 'em MP3's anymore, they're MP48's..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvNeHthx3Ng
15 years later and I can still humm the launch/flying in space theme to Privateer.
In 10 - 15 years when we do know more about any long term effects, (Does it wear off in or 30 years? Perhaps has some other unknown side-effects we don't yet know about?), then it's a different story. But if I had a child in this situation, it would be hard call. I spent my last two years of high school watching my mother suffer through and die of ovarian/cervical cancer (they were never really sure where the origin was) and believe me, that has a lasting impact. If in 10 - 15 years it's proven that it's safe and effective (and if I have any daughters), I'll have no problem getting them vaccinated.
It's having the government mandate it so soon after getting FDA approval that I have concerns about. Because there could be side effects that we won't know about until 10 - 15 years down the line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
Yeah, my British friends lament about having to order a "litre" instead of a Pint at the pub. At least we can still order a pint, but it's smaller over here...
$14.4M is nothing for this kind of thing. I wonder what it would have cost if it was given to GD or Locheed, or some other defense contractor.