It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again, now down to.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to
reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to
increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed, it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on, South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy. America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again, now down to.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to
reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to
increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed, it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on, South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy. America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again, now down to.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed, it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on, South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy. America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP. Previously I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise to discover that PHP was vastly superior! I know this is a bold statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl. Here are a few of the things I've noticed about PHP. Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer out there. I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but can use Perl if I have to.
* Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
* The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
* Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
* Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
* Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
* Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
* Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data structures.
Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl coders because Perl was an excellent language. However, in certain cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl.
above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general
This is slashdot. I bet 90% of people here cana program.
Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.
No. Just like an other language, assebmler had libries/routines that people have given you. Check out The Piclist
And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.
Get a P16PRO40. Or Build Your Own
There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.
You know the electronic voting system that people have been going on about in Ireland for the past year? We were thinking... let's do the bleedin' obvious: instead of talking in the abstract, let's get a copy of its source code and give it a good gander.
So last month we put in a Freedom of Information request to the Department of the Environment and Local Government, which is responsible for the new system.
We requested "the source code of the electronic voting system first used in Ireland's May 2002 general election, plus any supporting technical documentation supplied to the Department of Environment and Local Government including the functional specifications".
We made the request in good faith, so that the 200,000 lines of code could undergo public scrutiny - particularly by experts such as programmers in business and academia. We need this access in order to examine the internal workings of the system properly, to see that (a) it is as secure as possible, (b) it produces fair and accurate election results, and (c) it does so in an efficient and cost-effective manner. We don't want to see just what's on the surface, at the interface: we want to see exactly what's happening under the bonnet as it were.
Now we expected one of two things: either they'd hand over the source code, or they'd come up with some incredibly lame excuse, along the lines that we weren't the Right Kind Of People to be looking at it.
But what we didn't expect was for the Department to admit that... it doesn't have the code!!!
It turned down our request for the source code, saying "the record does not exist in the Department". In a letter dated 13th January, 2003, Assistant Principal Michael Murphy of the Department's Franchise Section stated that: "The source code is held by the Nedap/Powervote [sic] and is not available in the Department of the Environment and Local Government."
Nedap/Powervote's voting machines have also been used in the Netherlands, and in Cologne and Dusseldorf in Germany. In an information paper the Department says that "Ireland's use of the software represents the first time the software has been adopted by a country for all election types (comprising local, general, Presidential and European elections and referenda)."
The Department commissioned PMI Software to evaluate the system's components and "the performance of the database in relation to election requirements". [An aside: PMI is a subsidiary of Project Management Group, "the largest Irish-owned engineering and technical services company". In July 2001, the Office of Public Works engaged PMG to assist in the implementation of the electrical engineering for the project of electronic voting in the Dail.]
Perhaps the PMI/PMG consultants saw the source code (OK, let's find out). But governments in other jurisdictions have gone much, much further, and made the source code for their voting systems open and readily accessible to all.
Take the Australian Capital Territory election commission in Canberra. It has put the full source code of its electronic voting system on a publicly accessible website, in a neatly zipped 127k file.
Some might argue that putting the source code into the public domain isn't in the public interest, that it might compromise the system's security. We don't think so: the general feeling within the software industry would probably be that public peer review, by a wide range of programmers, would do the very opposite, making the code far more robust, secure and efficient.
But above all it's about an issue of trust, and trust works both ways.
If the new electronic system is to be fully accepted by the electorate, the system's internal workings should be open and available to the electorate and civil society.
In particular it should earn the trust of our programming community - the very same sector earmarked by successi
So I came home from work the other day to discover my cat laying on the floor. His breathing was very shallow and his eyes were very glassy. When I approached him I noticed a belt tied around his arm and both a syringe and a bent spoon laying beside him. Despite all his promises to the contrary, my beloved Mittens has started shooting up smack again!
Fortunately the paramedics showed up quickly and gave him some naloxone which saved him. Unfortunately the problem of my cat being addicted to heroin still remains. Last week he sold my stereo and this weekend Mittens stole from my wallet to try for a hit.
I love my cat and want to see him off this horrible drug. Unfortunately he won't stop on his own! Mittens says he can quit anytime he wants to and becomes combative when I force the issue. I'm tired of seeing him throw his life away. He could've been a great mouser, one of the best before he got hooked.
Can anyone recommend a way to get my cat off heroin? It would be much appreciated.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
If you just want a square wave oscillator, then I agree with you. I think the point of this story is making an *accurate* oscillator, that's controlalble via USB or serial.
If you want cool plans for how to build electronics stuff, google for 'DIY pic projects' for starters. Or you could just click here
There is a *huge* hobbiest crowd porgramming PICs to do all sorts of cool things. The chip takes maybe a day to learn the basics, and 2 or 3 weeks to master. The chip is around $4, and the programmer under 20. check out the Piclist for free tutorials, projects and code.
It'd be pretty flukey to have another dead mb with the exact same clock chip. He might - I don't know.
And as for the parts not working, the first thing he said was after cutting the chip out was powering it up to see if it works. Either it does or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you still haven't lost anything, as the board was dead anyway.
I just glossed over the article - I stand corrected.
Fair enough - I agree that this is an interesting project. But really - what did he do?
He took a chip off a motherboard, added a microcontroller and made a frequency generator. He made the chip do exactly was it was suppsoed to do (EG, be a variable clock chip). He didn't come up with a particulary novel use - the only hard part would be writing the PIC firmware. It's like me building an LCD controller (which I'm doing atm, btw) that connects to USB, and posting it to slashdot ('Look, ma! I can program a microcontroller!')
The 'cool hack value' is in re-using parts. But most EE's do this beofre the age of twelve, anyway (maybe no from motherboards, but from other devices).
well, not really. How do you plan to have a variable square wave output just by using flip-flops? You'd need a high speed master clock (TTL can style), flipflops, a divide-by-n chip, etc. You'd end up with a huge chip count. Using an SX style microcontrollers would be much easier.
Making a varible frew sine wave generator, now there's a worthy hack.
The price is something like $20, including transformer, PIC16F628 Microcontroller, FTDI serial to USB chip, etc. The problem is the clock chip. Places like radio shack etc aren't likely to have them.
The hardest part is learning PIC assembly. PIC's are weird devices, having an accumalator style, havard archecture. Take a look here for a good tutorial on PICs.
Besides the 'cheap hack' value, this is a total waste of time. Why?
1) You can't build more then one of them easily. Suppose he accisdently blows his prototye up. Where is he going to get another clock chip? Companies like realtek etc don't even want to know you, unless you which to order @ least a thousand parts.
2) The chip might be damaged. Never, NEVER work with parts that may or not work. It's simply not worth the frustration.
I've always used Windowz and I consider myself an exceptional Visual Basic programmer, so I know computers pretty good. In fact I got an A- in my programming class last term. But I'm a little wary of how much power Microsoft has in the computer field. Many of my friends use RedHat and I've recently installed it on my machine at home. Although I haven't had as much chance to play with it as I'd like, I've been greatly impressed.
This weekend I gave some thoughts to the things that are wrong with Linux. I hope no one minds having some flaws pointed out. I'd like to help make RedHat stronger so it can conquer MS. Hopefully RedHat will hear this (crossing fingers) and address these. I think with a little effort, RedHat's Linux can defeat Microsoft's Windows!:)
To begin with, there are too many different flavors of RedHat. Browsing a list on Amazon, I saw they made varients under the codenames of Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, just to name a few. I know that I'm very new to RedHat so maybe this is obvious but it seems like RedHat should just sell a few different flavors of its operating system. Perhaps one for the desktop and one for a server? Could someone explain why RedHat produces dozens of different versions of Linux?
Secondly did you know that anyone can view the source code to Linux! I think that RedHat shouldn't make its code available. After all, what keeps Microsoft from stealing RedHat's ideas and putting it into Windows? My friend says that FreeBSD stole the TCP/IP stack from DOS a long time ago and Microsoft is always looking for revenge for that. Plus it seems to me like RedHat is just giving away its ideas for free. And what keeps hackers or terrorists from tampering with the code and putting a virus in every computer?
On a related note, why doesn't RedHat write Linux in assembly? My friend says that's what Microsoft does for Windows, and that's why Windows is faster and more stable than Linux.
Next RedHat definitely should kill -9 (ha, ha!) the command line. Microsoft finally gave up DOS when Windows 2000 came out. I'm suprised that RedHat hasn't migrated away from...whatever its version of DOS is called (Bash, I think?) But maybe this is planned for a future release?
Finally Linux needs games! RedHat will never be successful in the home without games. They should also tell M$ to release a version of Office for Linux too. And Internet Explorer!
Recently I had an experience to use OpenBSD. I had heard many great things about it, and was excited to replace a dead Linux firewall with this OS. Unfortunately as things turned out, OpenBSD proved to be more nightmare than solution.
When not attending classes at my community college to get my humanities degree, I work part-time at a printshop. Our Linux box there finally gave up the ghost. I'd heard that OpenBSD was incredibly secure so I talked my boss into putting that on as a replacement.
Part of the appeal of OpenBSD was its history. A fork of the Linux kernel, it was originally intended for Steve Job's failed NeXT cube. Recently, its found a home amongst the ignorant and easily-fooled as a firewall OS (later on, we'll see how Job's reached back to use OpenBSD in OSX. This will be important later!) BSD was also famous for an incident in the early 80s, where they were sued by Microsoft when the BSD developers stole the TCP/IP stack from Microsoft's PC-DOS.
Once my boss gave approval, I quickly headed over to openbsd.com and downloaded the ISOs from the web site. Our box was pretty state-of-the-art, a two-CPU'ed Pentium III. Installing it went pretty flawless and I had high hopes for our new firewall.
Almost immediately however I began to have concerns. I noticed no where did OpenBSD display the terms of the GPL. Since its based on Linux, this should be a requirement. Apparently the history of theft amongst the BSD developers still continues!
I was even more shocked to learn that the ipchains rules we'd carefully setup on our Linux box would not work on OpenBSD! Perhaps OpenBSD is still using a SHARE-based networking security from the DOS TCP/IP stack! Or more likely they just haven't caught up to Linux and are still using iptables.
Whatever the case, almost immediately our box was rooted. OpenBSD proved to be aptly named as the box was "open" to the entire world. Later on I would find out that despite its claims of being secure, OpenBSD's default configuration appears to start up every service known to man! I find it shocking that an OS commonly used for firewalls would have BIND running by default.
Then there was the OpenSSH holes. I would later learn that OpenBSD has a history of remote exploits. Perhaps they should work with the team at RedHat, as RH knows how to secure their distros.
After spending a week trying to patch a leaky firewall, I gave up. I found an Mac SE/30 and put OSX on it. I then installed Norton Personal Firewall. That became our firewall and I'm proud to say that its been happily running for two weeks without a single incident. I find it funny that despite OpenBSD users arrogant claims of superiority, a humble SE/30, running an OS that's loosely based on OpenBSD, performed much better. Perhaps its another failing of open source versus commercial software. Whatever the case, its clear that OpenBSD has a long ways to go before it can be taken seriously.
We have an immidiate requirement for Sr. Software Engineer for our MNC client from Banglore, INDIA. Exp: 5 - 8 Years Qual: B.E/B.Tech OR M.E/M.Tech The person must have a knowledge of the following key skills.
- C and RISC programming - Software Arch. and Design Experience - Chip Debugging - VxWorks - pSoS -Device Drivers -ATM -DSL -System Debugging
Please forword your Latest Resume as word document attachment.
I've heard many good things about the McIntosh recently, and my family and I decided we needed to buy a new computer to replace our old Windows machine. Having heard of its ease of use, we decided to go the McIntosh route. We recently purchased an 800 mHz G4, with OSX. We thought we were getting a good deal. But unfortunately things turned out quite different.
Upon putting together the system we discovered that our mouse appeared the be broken. Although it wasn't cracked or shattered, it only had one button. When I spoke with our McIntosh dealer, we were told that the upgrade to a real two-button mouse would require more money. Apparently the mice with one button were only a "trial version" of the hardware. I feel that this is a very deceptive practice on Apple's part, and have written a letter to the Better Business Bureau to protest this. I felt as though I'd bought a car but to make it go past 35mph we'd have to pay more money!
Rather than pay the exhorbitant sum of money for a real mouse, I went to CompUSA and bought one out of my own pocket.
Strike one for McIntosh!
Secondly, one of the reasons that we went with McIntosh is because its new OS was based on the Linux kernel. Since my company uses Linux heavily (and its an OS I'm highly familiar with) I thought it would be nice to be able to run my work applications at home. Imagine my shock upon hearing that McIntosh was actually based on an incompatible fork of Linux - a fork known as BSD. Since our computers at work ran Linux - and not BSD - it was clear that I'd be unable to compile them on my Apple! Strike two for McIntosh.
The final straw came last night. I received an email from a friend alerting me to numerous holes in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When I went to MS' home page to download a patch (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downlo ads/cri tical/q321232/default.asp), I was stunned to see this patch only applies to Windows machines! Given the tiny user base of McIntosh, apparently software patches aren't made frequently - if at all - for McIntosh. I refuse to use an OS that is as ridden with holes as swiss cheese. Thus I'm going to be returning my McIntosh and purchasing a Windows XP box.
I hope this message reaches someone at McIntosh headquarters. Maybe their CEO, Steve Ballmer(?) will get this and fix their business practices. Until such changes are made, however, I fear that McIntosh will continue to be a bit player in the computer world.
Slashdot Mirror
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy
when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again,
now down to
reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American
is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to
increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed,
it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on,
South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another
a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over
to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy.
America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring
factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
Fact: The USA is dying
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy
when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again,
now down to
reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American
is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to
increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed,
it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on,
South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another
a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over
to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy.
America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring
factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
Fact: The USA is dying
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy
when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again, now down to
last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to increase an average of
$992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed, it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on, South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another a more compassionate government. Now
Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy. America
is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the USA is
to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring factions. America continues to
decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For
all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
Fact: The USA is dying
It's great the worlds only sat navigation system is no longer in the hands of the US Army I guess...
A good read is here
Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP. Previously
I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end
all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise
to discover that PHP was vastly superior! I know this is a bold
statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that
PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use
for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of
the shortcomings I've had with Perl. Here are a few of the things I've
noticed about PHP. Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer
out there. I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but
can use Perl if I have to.
* Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of
both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable
website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl
took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP.
I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with
Perl.
* The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all
that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up
so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection,
reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
* Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under
the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems
limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the
later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl
though.
* Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it
won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in
almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's
strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP,
but I can't think of any at the moment.
* Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto
an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it
run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this
with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires
that much rewriting.
* Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I
wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice)
its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a
substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library
of any kind.
* Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure
you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse
Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely
limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you
can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and
because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks
pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user
pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data
structures.
Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl
coders because Perl was an excellent language. However, in certain
cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl.
Merry Kwanza!
I try not to, but I can't resist this time.
It seems that out dollar has been gaining value for quite some time, while the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did.
OK, where to begin?
above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general
This is slashdot. I bet 90% of people here cana program.
Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.
No. Just like an other language, assebmler had libries/routines that people have given you. Check out The Piclist
And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.
Get a P16PRO40. Or Build Your Own
There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.
The piclist has all of this.
Short version: They don't have the source code.
Long Version (The Site is shakey already):
You know the electronic voting system that people have been going on about in Ireland for the past year? We were thinking... let's do the bleedin' obvious: instead of talking in the abstract, let's get a copy of its source code and give it a good gander.
So last month we put in a Freedom of Information request to the Department of the Environment and Local Government, which is responsible for the new system.
We requested "the source code of the electronic voting system first used in Ireland's May 2002 general election, plus any supporting technical documentation supplied to the Department of Environment and Local Government including the functional specifications".
We made the request in good faith, so that the 200,000 lines of code could undergo public scrutiny - particularly by experts such as programmers in business and academia. We need this access in order to examine the internal workings of the system properly, to see that (a) it is as secure as possible, (b) it produces fair and accurate election results, and (c) it does so in an efficient and cost-effective manner. We don't want to see just what's on the surface, at the interface: we want to see exactly what's happening under the bonnet as it were.
Now we expected one of two things: either they'd hand over the source code, or they'd come up with some incredibly lame excuse, along the lines that we weren't the Right Kind Of People to be looking at it.
But what we didn't expect was for the Department to admit that... it doesn't have the code!!!
It turned down our request for the source code, saying "the record does not exist in the Department". In a letter dated 13th January, 2003, Assistant Principal Michael Murphy of the Department's Franchise Section stated that: "The source code is held by the Nedap/Powervote [sic] and is not available in the Department of the Environment and Local Government."
Nedap/Powervote's voting machines have also been used in the Netherlands, and in Cologne and Dusseldorf in Germany. In an information paper the Department says that "Ireland's use of the software represents the first time the software has been adopted by a country for all election types (comprising local, general, Presidential and European elections and referenda)."
The Department commissioned PMI Software to evaluate the system's components and "the performance of the database in relation to election requirements". [An aside: PMI is a subsidiary of Project Management Group, "the largest Irish-owned engineering and technical services company". In July 2001, the Office of Public Works engaged PMG to assist in the implementation of the electrical engineering for the project of electronic voting in the Dail.]
Perhaps the PMI/PMG consultants saw the source code (OK, let's find out). But governments in other jurisdictions have gone much, much further, and made the source code for their voting systems open and readily accessible to all.
Take the Australian Capital Territory election commission in Canberra. It has put the full source code of its electronic voting system on a publicly accessible website, in a neatly zipped 127k file.
Some might argue that putting the source code into the public domain isn't in the public interest, that it might compromise the system's security. We don't think so: the general feeling within the software industry would probably be that public peer review, by a wide range of programmers, would do the very opposite, making the code far more robust, secure and efficient.
But above all it's about an issue of trust, and trust works both ways.
If the new electronic system is to be fully accepted by the electorate, the system's internal workings should be open and available to the electorate and civil society.
In particular it should earn the trust of our programming community - the very same sector earmarked by successi
So I came home from work the other day to discover my cat laying on
the floor. His breathing was very shallow and his eyes were very
glassy. When I approached him I noticed a belt tied around his arm and
both a syringe and a bent spoon laying beside him. Despite all his
promises to the contrary, my beloved Mittens has started shooting up
smack again!
Fortunately the paramedics showed up quickly and gave him some
naloxone which saved him. Unfortunately the problem of my cat being
addicted to heroin still remains. Last week he sold my stereo and this
weekend Mittens stole from my wallet to try for a
hit.
I love my cat and want to see him off this horrible drug.
Unfortunately he won't stop on his own! Mittens says he can quit
anytime he wants to and becomes combative when I force the issue. I'm
tired of seeing him throw his life away. He could've been a great
mouser, one of the best before he got hooked.
Can anyone recommend a way to get my cat off heroin? It would be much
appreciated.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.
If you just want a square wave oscillator, then I agree with you. I think the point of this story is making an *accurate* oscillator, that's controlalble via USB or serial.
:-)
That's a little tricky with a '555
Are you 100% sure?
I just checked - My last motherboard ( an abit) had a RTM520-39 clock chip. My current board (bought 2 months ago) has an RTM-580.
You may be thinking of the Super I/O chip.
OK, I give up! You win!
OK, OK. I'll let you in on a little secret.
If you want cool plans for how to build electronics stuff, google for 'DIY pic projects' for starters. Or you could just click here
There is a *huge* hobbiest crowd porgramming PICs to do all sorts of cool things. The chip takes maybe a day to learn the basics, and 2 or 3 weeks to master. The chip is around $4, and the programmer under 20. check out the Piclist for free tutorials, projects and code.
If you think it's cool, then go for it.
Um... from another dead motherboard?
It'd be pretty flukey to have another dead mb with the exact same clock chip. He might - I don't know.
And as for the parts not working, the first thing he said was after cutting the chip out was powering it up to see if it works. Either it does or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you still haven't lost anything, as the board was dead anyway.
I just glossed over the article - I stand corrected.
Sure - if you don't mid a little drift. Don't forget the money for the transformer, regulator, case, pot, know, etc ;-)
Fair enough - I agree that this is an interesting project. But really - what did he do?
He took a chip off a motherboard, added a microcontroller and made a frequency generator. He made the chip do exactly was it was suppsoed to do (EG, be a variable clock chip). He didn't come up with a particulary novel use - the only hard part would be writing the PIC firmware. It's like me building an LCD controller (which I'm doing atm, btw) that connects to USB, and posting it to slashdot ('Look, ma! I can program a microcontroller!')
The 'cool hack value' is in re-using parts. But most EE's do this beofre the age of twelve, anyway (maybe no from motherboards, but from other devices).
well, not really. How do you plan to have a variable square wave output just by using flip-flops? You'd need a high speed master clock (TTL can style), flipflops, a divide-by-n chip, etc. You'd end up with a huge chip count. Using an SX style microcontrollers would be much easier.
Making a varible frew sine wave generator, now there's a worthy hack.
What frequency range?
The price is something like $20, including transformer, PIC16F628 Microcontroller, FTDI serial to USB chip, etc. The problem is the clock chip. Places like radio shack etc aren't likely to have them.
The hardest part is learning PIC assembly. PIC's are weird devices, having an accumalator style, havard archecture. Take a look here for a good tutorial on PICs.
Besides the 'cheap hack' value, this is a total waste of time. Why?
1) You can't build more then one of them easily. Suppose he accisdently blows his prototye up. Where is he going to get another clock chip? Companies like realtek etc don't even want to know you, unless you which to order @ least a thousand parts.
2) The chip might be damaged. Never, NEVER work with parts that may or not work. It's simply not worth the frustration.
That aside, it's a pretty cool hack.
Hi,
:)
I've always used Windowz and I consider myself an exceptional Visual
Basic programmer, so I know computers pretty good. In fact I got an A-
in my programming class last term. But I'm a little wary of how much
power Microsoft has in the computer field. Many of my friends use
RedHat and I've recently installed it on my machine at home. Although
I haven't had as much chance to play with it as I'd like, I've been
greatly impressed.
This weekend I gave some thoughts to the things that are wrong with
Linux. I hope no one minds having some flaws pointed out. I'd like to
help make RedHat stronger so it can conquer MS. Hopefully RedHat will
hear this (crossing fingers) and address these. I think with a little
effort, RedHat's Linux can defeat Microsoft's Windows!
To begin with, there are too many different flavors of RedHat.
Browsing a list on Amazon, I saw they made varients under the
codenames of Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, just to name a few. I
know that I'm very new to RedHat so maybe this is obvious but it seems
like RedHat should just sell a few different flavors of its operating
system. Perhaps one for the desktop and one for a server? Could
someone explain why RedHat produces dozens of different versions of
Linux?
Secondly did you know that anyone can view the source code to Linux! I
think that RedHat shouldn't make its code available. After all, what
keeps Microsoft from stealing RedHat's ideas and putting it into
Windows? My friend says that FreeBSD stole the TCP/IP stack from DOS a
long time ago and Microsoft is always looking for revenge for that.
Plus it seems to me like RedHat is just giving away its ideas for
free. And what keeps hackers or terrorists from tampering with the
code and putting a virus in every computer?
On a related note, why doesn't RedHat write Linux in assembly? My
friend says that's what Microsoft does for Windows, and that's why
Windows is faster and more stable than Linux.
Next RedHat definitely should kill -9 (ha, ha!) the command line.
Microsoft finally gave up DOS when Windows 2000 came out. I'm suprised
that RedHat hasn't migrated away from...whatever its version of DOS is
called (Bash, I think?) But maybe this is planned for a future
release?
Finally Linux needs games! RedHat will never be successful in the home
without games. They should also tell M$ to release a version of Office
for Linux too. And Internet Explorer!
Have a nice day! Go Linux!!
Hello,
Recently I had an experience to use OpenBSD. I had heard many great
things about it, and was excited to replace a dead Linux firewall with
this OS. Unfortunately as things turned out, OpenBSD proved to be more
nightmare than solution.
When not attending classes at my community college to get my
humanities degree, I work part-time at a printshop. Our Linux box
there finally gave up the ghost. I'd heard that OpenBSD was incredibly
secure so I talked my boss into putting that on as a replacement.
Part of the appeal of OpenBSD was its history. A fork of the Linux
kernel, it was originally intended for Steve Job's failed NeXT cube.
Recently, its found a home amongst the ignorant and easily-fooled as a
firewall OS (later on, we'll see how Job's reached back to use OpenBSD
in OSX. This will be important later!) BSD was also famous for an
incident in the early 80s, where they were sued by Microsoft when the
BSD developers stole the TCP/IP stack from Microsoft's PC-DOS.
Once my boss gave approval, I quickly headed over to openbsd.com and
downloaded the ISOs from the web site. Our box was pretty
state-of-the-art, a two-CPU'ed Pentium III. Installing it went pretty
flawless and I had high hopes for our new firewall.
Almost immediately however I began to have concerns. I noticed no
where did OpenBSD display the terms of the GPL. Since its based on
Linux, this should be a requirement. Apparently the history of theft
amongst the BSD developers still continues!
I was even more shocked to learn that the ipchains rules we'd
carefully setup on our Linux box would not work on OpenBSD! Perhaps
OpenBSD is still using a SHARE-based networking security from the DOS
TCP/IP stack! Or more likely they just haven't caught up to Linux and
are still using iptables.
Whatever the case, almost immediately our box was rooted. OpenBSD
proved to be aptly named as the box was "open" to the entire world.
Later on I would find out that despite its claims of being secure,
OpenBSD's default configuration appears to start up every service
known to man! I find it shocking that an OS commonly used for
firewalls would have BIND running by default.
Then there was the OpenSSH holes. I would later learn that OpenBSD has
a history of remote exploits. Perhaps they should work with the team
at RedHat, as RH knows how to secure their distros.
After spending a week trying to patch a leaky firewall, I gave up. I
found an Mac SE/30 and put OSX on it. I then installed Norton Personal
Firewall. That became our firewall and I'm proud to say that its been
happily running for two weeks without a single incident. I find it
funny that despite OpenBSD users arrogant claims of superiority, a
humble SE/30, running an OS that's loosely based on OpenBSD, performed
much better. Perhaps its another failing of open source versus
commercial software. Whatever the case, its clear that OpenBSD has a
long ways to go before it can be taken seriously.
Dear Friends,
We have an immidiate requirement for Sr. Software Engineer for our MNC
client from Banglore, INDIA.
Exp: 5 - 8 Years
Qual: B.E/B.Tech OR M.E/M.Tech
The person must have a knowledge of the following key skills.
- C and RISC programming
- Software Arch. and Design Experience
- Chip Debugging
- VxWorks
- pSoS
-Device Drivers
-ATM
-DSL
-System Debugging
Please forword your Latest Resume as word document attachment.
Thanks
Uday.
uday@eexcelsolutions.com
visit: www.eexcelsolutions.com
Please do convey your friends and pals who are looking for a better
opportunity in in INDIA.
I've heard many good things about the McIntosh recently, and my family
o ads/cri tical/q321232/default.asp),
and I decided we needed to buy a new computer to replace our old
Windows machine. Having heard of its ease of use, we decided to go the
McIntosh route. We recently purchased an 800 mHz G4, with OSX. We
thought we were getting a good deal. But unfortunately things turned
out quite different.
Upon putting together the system we discovered that our mouse appeared
the be broken. Although it wasn't cracked or shattered, it only had
one button. When I spoke with our McIntosh dealer, we were told that
the upgrade to a real two-button mouse would require more money.
Apparently the mice with one button were only a "trial version" of the
hardware. I feel that this is a very deceptive practice on Apple's
part, and have written a letter to the Better Business Bureau to
protest this. I felt as though I'd bought a car but to make it go past
35mph we'd have to pay more money!
Rather than pay the exhorbitant sum of money for a real mouse, I went
to CompUSA and bought one out of my own pocket.
Strike one for McIntosh!
Secondly, one of the reasons that we went with McIntosh is because its
new OS was based on the Linux kernel. Since my company uses Linux
heavily (and its an OS I'm highly familiar with) I thought it would be
nice to be able to run my work applications at home. Imagine my shock
upon hearing that McIntosh was actually based on an incompatible fork
of Linux - a fork known as BSD. Since our computers at work ran Linux
- and not BSD - it was clear that I'd be unable to compile them on my
Apple! Strike two for McIntosh.
The final straw came last night. I received an email from a friend
alerting me to numerous holes in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When I
went to MS' home page to download a patch
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downl
I was stunned to see this patch only applies to Windows machines!
Given the tiny user base of McIntosh, apparently software patches
aren't made frequently - if at all - for McIntosh. I refuse to use an
OS that is as ridden with holes as swiss cheese. Thus I'm going to be
returning my McIntosh and purchasing a Windows XP box.
I hope this message reaches someone at McIntosh headquarters. Maybe
their CEO, Steve Ballmer(?) will get this and fix their business
practices. Until such changes are made, however, I fear that McIntosh
will continue to be a bit player in the computer world.