LOL yet they still charge more than a competent consultant would for the reload.
"Technicians" like this really screw the industry over because the average moron considers them experts. And they directly hamper adoption of other OS's and hardware platforms with expert comments like "Mac sucks because it doesn't support level caches" and people eat that shit up like Bill Gates himself said it. And we all know that in the average minds of clueless users Bill Gates invented the personal computer.
XP out of the box with no 3rd party software to make it safe is most CERTAINLY not safe OR stable.
And as for using XP as a first OS to "learn computers" will really teach them nothing. A lot of what you learn as "standard practice" in Windows is considered suicidal in most OS's.
As far as an OS to teach a brand spanking new computer user, I tend to use DOS (or BSD w/o X11) then move to GUI's with many layers of abstraction from the computer like OS X or XP. I've found that my students tend to have a better grip on things later on this way because they really understand what's going on in the background. I don't go nuts until later courses, just get them comfortable moving around and using the machine from the CLI environment.
I think that's the issue. XP isn't safe or stable... it's also not fairly easy to use, however it's probably the same interface you've used since you were a kid. That makes it familiar, not easy.
You must be really young or deal with really young users. The Windows interface around when I was a kid was Windows 3.0 and it was even more awful. Hell, I'm only 27.
Even sicker, I grew up with Atari DOS (8bit) and DR GEM (Atari ST - 16bit box) when I was a kid. GEM was ugly but it was arguably better than Windows at the time.
Sadly, each of those machines were easier to use than a modern Windows XP machine and less of a support nightmare. Even if they didn't handle multitasking well and had visually UGLY interfaces. Fluorescent green desktop? Come on Atari, WTF were you thinking!
Modern PC's are less usable than many computers available in the mid 80's. You had to be a complete retard to have a hard time getting your Atari ST, Amiga 500 or Mac Plus to do something useful.
Citrix and Terminal Services with thin clients are great when the Citrix or RDP server is on the LAN. Back in 2001 I replaced 40 desktops with thin clients and had a dual 1Ghz P3 server w/ 1GB RAM and a SCSI RAID5 array running Win2K w/ TS. Worked out REALLY well and definitely lowered TCO. Even when all 40 people started Word or Access, it remained responsive.
Trying to replace 300 XP desktops at multiple locations w/ thin clients when the Citrix or RDP server is remote is pretty stupid. And you know most companies will try this and make employees miserable for quite a while. I've had to deal with that support nightmare. It's not pretty.
Our campus management system at the school is run in that fashion. I run the local network, can't do anything about the issues at corporate. That's the only remote resource we use from corporate, all of our other stuff is local. It just keeps track of student progress and text-only FinAid records.
When it takes 30 seconds to click an OK button (not exaggerating) corporate tells our Admissions reps to stop whining and suck it up or denies it's a problem and says it is "normal".
They lack the bandwidth, plain and simple. Either way, you shouldn't need an OC12 to provide 300 people a simple database front-end. Go web-based or a nice curses interface over SSH.
Their answer? Add another Quad-Xeon server to the server farm. They're still puzzled as to why that didn't fix the problem. If I felt like moving back to VA I could probably have that retard's job but I really hate VA. I mean REALLY REALLY hate VA.
If they were married to Citrix w/ that cheesy campus management app, why not drop a Citrix server at each location and just use the internet pipe for SQL queries to the DB server at corporate? Makes much more sense.
Citrix is cool but it isn't a magic bullet for all of your app deployment issues. It still takes proper planning and there's a lot of things it sucks for. Most MCSE admin kiddies don't get this.
At the school I work at, most of the campus management system is accessed via a Citrix server at a remote location.
Citrix is great over a local network but for the remote apps most people use it's a solution in search of a problem and also performs poorly.
For a database with no image or video data, I'd rather see a well-written intuitive menu-driven curses frontend used via SSH than a bloated GUI app delivered via Citrix. It's not as snazzy looking but much faster, consumes less resources and is ultimately just as easy to use. For some reason people see a character cell interface and think "antique" and "obsolete".
I've actually seen X11 w/ the LBX extension outperform Citrix on several occasions and THAT is truly sad. LBX = Low Bandwidth X, it's been around forever, it has some rough edges and doesn't handle glitzy animations well but it isn't bad. Most people don't even know it exists much less use it. It's been around since the early XFree days, possibly even longer.
Citrix has its uses but most people try to use it in very silly ways.
I'm not saying Citrix sucks, it's just people try to shoehorn it into things it's really not good at. It'd be silly to deliver SaaS over Citrix for example. Not very cost effective at all.
Hell even my low-cost eMac handles YouTube just fine. BTW, a 1.42GHz eMac w/ DDR RAM makes a great low-cost multimedia box. You can get them for a song these days.
As in usable for daily computing tasks, not necessarily entertainment content from "leading providers".
Yeah, because the average Windows user will be able to get what they want to get done with FreeBSD. Give me a freaking break. People need more than just to browse the web, send email, and run notepad.
I used BSD to illustrate my point. And most people use a computer for just that. Simply replace notepad with Word.
That's not what I personally use a machine for but that's what the majority of computer illiterates purchasing machines use them for. Requiring this crowd to have a dual core machine with 2GB of RAM for reasonable performance is ludicrous.
They are going to want to do simple things like plug their iPhone or Blackberry in and sync. They are going to want to send photos from their digital camera. They want to play DVDs. Download music from iTunes. And video chat with their friends on MSN or Yahoo with their webcam. They want to push the scan-to-email button on their scanner and have it do just that.
And they couldn't do that with 1/2 the resources using XP? Why would they need Vista? They still need expensive AV software that hogs resources, they still need to live in fear of goofy bugs leaving gaping holes in their OS. In fact, they are less likely to have an out-of-the-box good experience when they realize half of the hardware they own is discontinued and no one is going to write Vista drivers. So they think they have "obsolete" hardware even though it's fairly current and media/toner is still easily purchased.
Most of the above ranges from possible but complicated to get working to outright not worth the effort even on something like Ubuntu. And even harder on FreeBSD.
I never claimed FreeBSD was easy for computer illiterate novices. It can be set up to be "user friendly" by someone who actually knows a thing or two about operating systems and computing. And when it IS set up to be easy, Grandma can certainly use it. And when it is set up in this fashion, it uses FAR less resources than any operating system MS has released since 2000.
And a 64MB machine? "Runs OK"? Sure whatever. If it chokes on youtube its not good enough.
I was perfectly able to stream MPEG video at youtube resolutions to a 200mhz FreeBSD-based Pentium box in 1997. Just because youtube uses a mutant embedded flash player doesn't make your complaint relevant. Maybe if more sites stuck to established standards instead of trying to push everything via HTTP in a bastardized fashion, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
Anyway, I said it ran fine. Just because the box would be too slow to stream a video of some kid bashing his balls in on a rail skateboarding which has been stuffed in a fucked up container being played in a video player written for a virtual machine does not mean the PC doesn't run fine.
I have those. A G4 Powerbook. Chokes on Youtube to the point its not usable. 'nuff said.
An obviously misconfigured or problematic powerbook. I've played Youtube videos on a first gen 450mhz TiBook at a "reasonable" framerate. I've played them at awesome framerates on a 700mhz G3 iBook (better GPU). I've even had Youtube play at acceptable framerates on a 500mhz Pismo w/ a G4 upgrade.
Really, what's your obsession with Youtube?
I have another 450MHz G4 Tower, and it runs "ok" after spending a few putting in a DVDRW, more RAM, and a new video card.
Yeah, a machine from the turn of the century. Show me a 500mhz Pentium III that can even boot Vista and have the UI even be usable much less play Youtube videos.
Seriously, WTF is up with you and Youtube?
Sucks less is exactly how I characterize successive versions of OSX from 10.0 onwards. And frankly I think performance-wise, it still sucks
Now think how much more useful that "suitable hardware" is with a real operating system that doesn't require 2GB of RAM to run Notepad without swapping.
Hell FreeBSD will run quite happily run on a 512MB machine with Compiz. W/o the snazzy OpenGL-accelerated wm (like using windowmaker instead), it'll run on an 64MB machine fairly well. It FLIES on a 2Ghz machine w/ 2GB of RAM and beats the disk much less than Vista will.
OS X Tiger ran great on a 450mhz G4 w/ 512MB RAM. It was even usable on a 500mhz G3 iBook w/ 384MB. OS X 10.4 has all the features Vista was touting and then some.
Just because Win7 "sucks less" doesn't mean MS deserves another chance.
And yes, I've used Vista. The 35 Vista machines we've been saddled with at work have been the biggest pains in our ass since they were purchased.
And anyone that willingly has DRM of that magnitude shoved down their throat on their own personal machine deserves what they get.
So the $25k/yr secretary doesn't deserve healthcare yet every organization needs one? What makes you so much "better" than him/her that you deserve to be healthy and he/she doesn't?
You shouldn't have to be a key employee to get adequate health care. That's wrong.
We still need secretaries. We still need gas station attendants. Those people deserve adequate health care as much as you do. Without these people you'd have a much harder time getting your job done. We still depend on them. They may not have the ABILITY to move up.
I grew up in Northern VA not too far from DC, moved to SC in 05. Cost of living is about double up there compared to here.
I was paying about $950/mo for an HMO plan through my employer up there for my family. No chronic diseases, they don't ask for much info anyway though, we're part of a Blue Cross group plan at work. I really have no idea why it's so expensive.
Well, my son's fine, he's a slightly hyper normal 6 year old at this point.
As for bankruptcy, I don't own much and they can't take your primary vehicle and I rent my house anyway. It just means a nasty credit black eye for 10 years.
What you don't realize is I'm already picking your pocket. When I can't pay that $6,000 ER bill, those costs get passed on to you.
In the end, nationalized health care would cost you less and supplemental insurance would be available to provide above and beyond what the basic system would provide. The insurance companies would also be forced to compete at that point which would drive YOUR overall costs down even though you are paying into the nationalized system and buying supplemental insurance. I'm also all for charging co-pays for the nationalized system to keep morons from bringing kids with the common cold to the hospital.
In the end, everyone wins. Right now, you are paying for the poor to drive their 10 kids to DSS in a cadillac escalade and get FREE health care. They are raising your costs because the lower middle class CAN'T pay and they are destroying our livelihood. My credit is so screwed at this point I have a hard time getting back into a decent paying IT job because of retarded background checks that include credit. Now THAT should be illegal.
By the way, I'd like to see you try to deny me my right to life. I've got 2,500 rounds of 7.62x39 that says you can't. The difference is at this point, I have the stomach for it. Do you?
LOL! No, I'm not a math teacher but I only rounded up by $600. I teach IT courses and occasionally some of the computing related business courses. Every once in a while I teach a desktop publishing course or two as well when that dept is short an instructor (dealing with Photoshop and Indesign mostly).
And yes, I get my students plenty of exposure to FOSS operating systems and desktop environments. I wouldn't have taken the job otherwise. They do get loads of MS exposure as well but in order to get their foot in the door in an entry level position, they need it. The disadvantage is that I have to spend a lot sleepless nights for doing class prep writing my own coursework because the books tend to focus on MS OS's exclusively.
Well, the kid in my case was just feeling like crap because of a nasty cold he got at school plus an ear infection. He had like a 103 degree fever. I actually talked to his mom for a while when I was sitting there unable to walk with a nicely burned hand and a towel on my face trying to get my nose to stop gushing blood.
Appendicitis is serious, I don't blame the ER for taking it pretty seriously.
I made sure I did my homework before I started throwing accusations at the triage staff. Even the kid's parents thought it was bullshit.
The CPU in the eMac is slightly beefier and the eMac (at least the 2005 model) has a much better video chipset (64MB Radeon 9600), more available ports for expansion and uses desktop components versus laptop components.
To me, it's worth the hackery to cram an LCD in there after the CRT finally gives up. It's also quite a bit more expandable and faster than the iMac G4's.
eMacs really aren't that bad. A better PPC machine would obviously be a big dual cpu G4 tower or a dual G5 but both are a LOT more expensive than an eMac. G4 eMacs are REALLY cheap these days as well. Usually half as expensive as an iMac G4 and are genuinely better machines even though the CRT will only do 1280x960.
Wouldn't it be easier just to find a surplus beat up LED sign with a serial port and write a script to handle the updates? A lot of them have serial ports and they can be found on the cheap.
This is an awesome homebrew DIY project though, I'm just kinda lazy.
Heh, thanks for not calling me a whiny bitch. I probably would have.
I never thought my livelihood would be destroyed because I want to live a normal healthy life. My credit is so screwed up at this point I have a hard time getting a better paying job as well.
Employers do credit checks pretty often for IT positions as part of their background check. IMHO, that should be illegal. I also shouldn't have to give up a profession that I genuinely enjoy that actually helps society.
I shouldn't contemplate shooting sprees just so my wife and kids can collect on the social security as well as qualify for Medicaid. That ain't healthy. Not that I'd do it but still..... not healthy.
My children recently qualified but there's a lot of back bills that are killing me that they handed over to the state department of revenue to collect on and my wife and I are still screwed.
We even thought about getting divorced and have her claim I left so she could [fraudulently] qualify for Medicaid. Our senses got the better of us.
Not trying to continue to whine and give personal details but this is the reality of how bad it is out there for a lot of us. And this is a severe button pushing issue for me and I think people really need to understand the reality of the situation.
Not all of us whiners wanting national healthcare are poor, commie pinko, handout-seeking, bottom-feeder, crack addicted losers.
I always thought NT on Alpha kinda sucked. It's too stale these days as well. Our AlphaServer 4000 runs FreeBSD 6.3 at the school.
We would love to keep it going but with everyone dropping Alpha support slowly, we are considering just dropping $1,000 to build a low-end socket AM2 quad-core opteron with a SATA RAID.
I'd take it home but I already have a VAX 4000-200 in my living room as an end table. I don't need any more massive power hungry antiques.
My son was born at 28 weeks and weighed 2lbs 8oz back in 2003. He spent 7 weeks in the NICU on several machines. His expenses were over a quarter million dollars. Fortunately my wife and I weren't married yet and Medicaid picked up the tab but otherwise we would have been HORRIBLY screwed.
I would have down to a bankruptcy lawyer's office quicker than I could blink. I've been able to put off bankruptcy until now but due to medical expenses and predatory companies, I'm going Chapter 7 next month.
I make $30,000/yr with a family of 4 and I don't qualify for Medicaid nor do I make enough for real insurance. My kids have recently qualified because I took a pay cut (from $32,000). My wife and I are truly screwed however.
This income bracket really sucks. The lower middle class (or upper lower class) are extremely abused these days and we make up a very large portion of the population.
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LOL yet they still charge more than a competent consultant would for the reload.
"Technicians" like this really screw the industry over because the average moron considers them experts. And they directly hamper adoption of other OS's and hardware platforms with expert comments like "Mac sucks because it doesn't support level caches" and people eat that shit up like Bill Gates himself said it. And we all know that in the average minds of clueless users Bill Gates invented the personal computer.
XP out of the box with no 3rd party software to make it safe is most CERTAINLY not safe OR stable.
And as for using XP as a first OS to "learn computers" will really teach them nothing. A lot of what you learn as "standard practice" in Windows is considered suicidal in most OS's.
As far as an OS to teach a brand spanking new computer user, I tend to use DOS (or BSD w/o X11) then move to GUI's with many layers of abstraction from the computer like OS X or XP. I've found that my students tend to have a better grip on things later on this way because they really understand what's going on in the background. I don't go nuts until later courses, just get them comfortable moving around and using the machine from the CLI environment.
I think that's the issue. XP isn't safe or stable... it's also not fairly easy to use, however it's probably the same interface you've used since you were a kid. That makes it familiar, not easy.
You must be really young or deal with really young users. The Windows interface around when I was a kid was Windows 3.0 and it was even more awful. Hell, I'm only 27.
Even sicker, I grew up with Atari DOS (8bit) and DR GEM (Atari ST - 16bit box) when I was a kid. GEM was ugly but it was arguably better than Windows at the time.
Sadly, each of those machines were easier to use than a modern Windows XP machine and less of a support nightmare. Even if they didn't handle multitasking well and had visually UGLY interfaces. Fluorescent green desktop? Come on Atari, WTF were you thinking!
Modern PC's are less usable than many computers available in the mid 80's. You had to be a complete retard to have a hard time getting your Atari ST, Amiga 500 or Mac Plus to do something useful.
Citrix and Terminal Services with thin clients are great when the Citrix or RDP server is on the LAN. Back in 2001 I replaced 40 desktops with thin clients and had a dual 1Ghz P3 server w/ 1GB RAM and a SCSI RAID5 array running Win2K w/ TS. Worked out REALLY well and definitely lowered TCO. Even when all 40 people started Word or Access, it remained responsive.
Trying to replace 300 XP desktops at multiple locations w/ thin clients when the Citrix or RDP server is remote is pretty stupid. And you know most companies will try this and make employees miserable for quite a while. I've had to deal with that support nightmare. It's not pretty.
Our campus management system at the school is run in that fashion. I run the local network, can't do anything about the issues at corporate. That's the only remote resource we use from corporate, all of our other stuff is local. It just keeps track of student progress and text-only FinAid records.
When it takes 30 seconds to click an OK button (not exaggerating) corporate tells our Admissions reps to stop whining and suck it up or denies it's a problem and says it is "normal".
They lack the bandwidth, plain and simple. Either way, you shouldn't need an OC12 to provide 300 people a simple database front-end. Go web-based or a nice curses interface over SSH.
Their answer? Add another Quad-Xeon server to the server farm. They're still puzzled as to why that didn't fix the problem. If I felt like moving back to VA I could probably have that retard's job but I really hate VA. I mean REALLY REALLY hate VA.
If they were married to Citrix w/ that cheesy campus management app, why not drop a Citrix server at each location and just use the internet pipe for SQL queries to the DB server at corporate? Makes much more sense.
Citrix is cool but it isn't a magic bullet for all of your app deployment issues. It still takes proper planning and there's a lot of things it sucks for. Most MCSE admin kiddies don't get this.
At the school I work at, most of the campus management system is accessed via a Citrix server at a remote location.
Citrix is great over a local network but for the remote apps most people use it's a solution in search of a problem and also performs poorly.
For a database with no image or video data, I'd rather see a well-written intuitive menu-driven curses frontend used via SSH than a bloated GUI app delivered via Citrix. It's not as snazzy looking but much faster, consumes less resources and is ultimately just as easy to use. For some reason people see a character cell interface and think "antique" and "obsolete".
I've actually seen X11 w/ the LBX extension outperform Citrix on several occasions and THAT is truly sad. LBX = Low Bandwidth X, it's been around forever, it has some rough edges and doesn't handle glitzy animations well but it isn't bad. Most people don't even know it exists much less use it. It's been around since the early XFree days, possibly even longer.
Citrix has its uses but most people try to use it in very silly ways.
I'm not saying Citrix sucks, it's just people try to shoehorn it into things it's really not good at. It'd be silly to deliver SaaS over Citrix for example. Not very cost effective at all.
European swallow? Like an old ME-262 from the 40's?
Hell even my low-cost eMac handles YouTube just fine. BTW, a 1.42GHz eMac w/ DDR RAM makes a great low-cost multimedia box. You can get them for a song these days.
Define useful?
As in usable for daily computing tasks, not necessarily entertainment content from "leading providers".
Yeah, because the average Windows user will be able to get what they want to get done with FreeBSD. Give me a freaking break. People need more than just to browse the web, send email, and run notepad.
I used BSD to illustrate my point. And most people use a computer for just that. Simply replace notepad with Word.
That's not what I personally use a machine for but that's what the majority of computer illiterates purchasing machines use them for. Requiring this crowd to have a dual core machine with 2GB of RAM for reasonable performance is ludicrous.
They are going to want to do simple things like plug their iPhone or Blackberry in and sync. They are going to want to send photos from their digital camera. They want to play DVDs. Download music from iTunes. And video chat with their friends on MSN or Yahoo with their webcam. They want to push the scan-to-email button on their scanner and have it do just that.
And they couldn't do that with 1/2 the resources using XP? Why would they need Vista? They still need expensive AV software that hogs resources, they still need to live in fear of goofy bugs leaving gaping holes in their OS. In fact, they are less likely to have an out-of-the-box good experience when they realize half of the hardware they own is discontinued and no one is going to write Vista drivers. So they think they have "obsolete" hardware even though it's fairly current and media/toner is still easily purchased.
Most of the above ranges from possible but complicated to get working to outright not worth the effort even on something like Ubuntu. And even harder on FreeBSD.
I never claimed FreeBSD was easy for computer illiterate novices. It can be set up to be "user friendly" by someone who actually knows a thing or two about operating systems and computing. And when it IS set up to be easy, Grandma can certainly use it. And when it is set up in this fashion, it uses FAR less resources than any operating system MS has released since 2000.
And a 64MB machine? "Runs OK"? Sure whatever. If it chokes on youtube its not good enough.
I was perfectly able to stream MPEG video at youtube resolutions to a 200mhz FreeBSD-based Pentium box in 1997. Just because youtube uses a mutant embedded flash player doesn't make your complaint relevant. Maybe if more sites stuck to established standards instead of trying to push everything via HTTP in a bastardized fashion, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
Anyway, I said it ran fine. Just because the box would be too slow to stream a video of some kid bashing his balls in on a rail skateboarding which has been stuffed in a fucked up container being played in a video player written for a virtual machine does not mean the PC doesn't run fine.
I have those. A G4 Powerbook. Chokes on Youtube to the point its not usable. 'nuff said.
An obviously misconfigured or problematic powerbook. I've played Youtube videos on a first gen 450mhz TiBook at a "reasonable" framerate. I've played them at awesome framerates on a 700mhz G3 iBook (better GPU). I've even had Youtube play at acceptable framerates on a 500mhz Pismo w/ a G4 upgrade.
Really, what's your obsession with Youtube?
I have another 450MHz G4 Tower, and it runs "ok" after spending a few putting in a DVDRW, more RAM, and a new video card.
Yeah, a machine from the turn of the century. Show me a 500mhz Pentium III that can even boot Vista and have the UI even be usable much less play Youtube videos.
Seriously, WTF is up with you and Youtube?
Sucks less is exactly how I characterize successive versions of OSX from 10.0 onwards. And frankly I think performance-wise, it still sucks
Now think how much more useful that "suitable hardware" is with a real operating system that doesn't require 2GB of RAM to run Notepad without swapping.
Hell FreeBSD will run quite happily run on a 512MB machine with Compiz. W/o the snazzy OpenGL-accelerated wm (like using windowmaker instead), it'll run on an 64MB machine fairly well. It FLIES on a 2Ghz machine w/ 2GB of RAM and beats the disk much less than Vista will.
OS X Tiger ran great on a 450mhz G4 w/ 512MB RAM. It was even usable on a 500mhz G3 iBook w/ 384MB. OS X 10.4 has all the features Vista was touting and then some.
Just because Win7 "sucks less" doesn't mean MS deserves another chance.
And yes, I've used Vista. The 35 Vista machines we've been saddled with at work have been the biggest pains in our ass since they were purchased.
And anyone that willingly has DRM of that magnitude shoved down their throat on their own personal machine deserves what they get.
So the $25k/yr secretary doesn't deserve healthcare yet every organization needs one? What makes you so much "better" than him/her that you deserve to be healthy and he/she doesn't?
You shouldn't have to be a key employee to get adequate health care. That's wrong.
We still need secretaries. We still need gas station attendants. Those people deserve adequate health care as much as you do. Without these people you'd have a much harder time getting your job done. We still depend on them. They may not have the ABILITY to move up.
You aren't "better" than anyone else.
I grew up in Northern VA not too far from DC, moved to SC in 05. Cost of living is about double up there compared to here.
I was paying about $950/mo for an HMO plan through my employer up there for my family. No chronic diseases, they don't ask for much info anyway though, we're part of a Blue Cross group plan at work. I really have no idea why it's so expensive.
Well, my son's fine, he's a slightly hyper normal 6 year old at this point.
As for bankruptcy, I don't own much and they can't take your primary vehicle and I rent my house anyway. It just means a nasty credit black eye for 10 years.
What you don't realize is I'm already picking your pocket. When I can't pay that $6,000 ER bill, those costs get passed on to you.
In the end, nationalized health care would cost you less and supplemental insurance would be available to provide above and beyond what the basic system would provide. The insurance companies would also be forced to compete at that point which would drive YOUR overall costs down even though you are paying into the nationalized system and buying supplemental insurance. I'm also all for charging co-pays for the nationalized system to keep morons from bringing kids with the common cold to the hospital.
In the end, everyone wins. Right now, you are paying for the poor to drive their 10 kids to DSS in a cadillac escalade and get FREE health care. They are raising your costs because the lower middle class CAN'T pay and they are destroying our livelihood. My credit is so screwed at this point I have a hard time getting back into a decent paying IT job because of retarded background checks that include credit. Now THAT should be illegal.
By the way, I'd like to see you try to deny me my right to life. I've got 2,500 rounds of 7.62x39 that says you can't. The difference is at this point, I have the stomach for it. Do you?
LOL! No, I'm not a math teacher but I only rounded up by $600. I teach IT courses and occasionally some of the computing related business courses. Every once in a while I teach a desktop publishing course or two as well when that dept is short an instructor (dealing with Photoshop and Indesign mostly).
And yes, I get my students plenty of exposure to FOSS operating systems and desktop environments. I wouldn't have taken the job otherwise. They do get loads of MS exposure as well but in order to get their foot in the door in an entry level position, they need it. The disadvantage is that I have to spend a lot sleepless nights for doing class prep writing my own coursework because the books tend to focus on MS OS's exclusively.
Well, the kid in my case was just feeling like crap because of a nasty cold he got at school plus an ear infection. He had like a 103 degree fever. I actually talked to his mom for a while when I was sitting there unable to walk with a nicely burned hand and a towel on my face trying to get my nose to stop gushing blood.
Appendicitis is serious, I don't blame the ER for taking it pretty seriously.
I made sure I did my homework before I started throwing accusations at the triage staff. Even the kid's parents thought it was bullshit.
The CPU in the eMac is slightly beefier and the eMac (at least the 2005 model) has a much better video chipset (64MB Radeon 9600), more available ports for expansion and uses desktop components versus laptop components.
To me, it's worth the hackery to cram an LCD in there after the CRT finally gives up. It's also quite a bit more expandable and faster than the iMac G4's.
eMacs really aren't that bad. A better PPC machine would obviously be a big dual cpu G4 tower or a dual G5 but both are a LOT more expensive than an eMac. G4 eMacs are REALLY cheap these days as well. Usually half as expensive as an iMac G4 and are genuinely better machines even though the CRT will only do 1280x960.
Wouldn't it be easier just to find a surplus beat up LED sign with a serial port and write a script to handle the updates? A lot of them have serial ports and they can be found on the cheap.
This is an awesome homebrew DIY project though, I'm just kinda lazy.
Heh, thanks for not calling me a whiny bitch. I probably would have.
I never thought my livelihood would be destroyed because I want to live a normal healthy life. My credit is so screwed up at this point I have a hard time getting a better paying job as well.
Employers do credit checks pretty often for IT positions as part of their background check. IMHO, that should be illegal. I also shouldn't have to give up a profession that I genuinely enjoy that actually helps society.
I shouldn't contemplate shooting sprees just so my wife and kids can collect on the social security as well as qualify for Medicaid. That ain't healthy. Not that I'd do it but still..... not healthy.
My children recently qualified but there's a lot of back bills that are killing me that they handed over to the state department of revenue to collect on and my wife and I are still screwed.
We even thought about getting divorced and have her claim I left so she could [fraudulently] qualify for Medicaid. Our senses got the better of us.
Not trying to continue to whine and give personal details but this is the reality of how bad it is out there for a lot of us. And this is a severe button pushing issue for me and I think people really need to understand the reality of the situation.
Not all of us whiners wanting national healthcare are poor, commie pinko, handout-seeking, bottom-feeder, crack addicted losers.
LOL, well said.
I always thought NT on Alpha kinda sucked. It's too stale these days as well. Our AlphaServer 4000 runs FreeBSD 6.3 at the school.
We would love to keep it going but with everyone dropping Alpha support slowly, we are considering just dropping $1,000 to build a low-end socket AM2 quad-core opteron with a SATA RAID.
I'd take it home but I already have a VAX 4000-200 in my living room as an end table. I don't need any more massive power hungry antiques.
My son was born at 28 weeks and weighed 2lbs 8oz back in 2003. He spent 7 weeks in the NICU on several machines. His expenses were over a quarter million dollars. Fortunately my wife and I weren't married yet and Medicaid picked up the tab but otherwise we would have been HORRIBLY screwed.
I would have down to a bankruptcy lawyer's office quicker than I could blink. I've been able to put off bankruptcy until now but due to medical expenses and predatory companies, I'm going Chapter 7 next month.
So only rich aristocrats deserve to breed? Fuck you. I'm not that broke, I just took a job in education that only pays $30k but still.... fuck you.
Actually, the truly impoverished and unemployed bottom-feeders have it easy with Medicaid which covers an awful lot including prenatal care.
Most "poor" people live better than I do. And just because your poor doesn't make you a thug drug dealer.
It's us lower middle class folks that are getting fucked.
I make $30,000/yr with a family of 4 and I don't qualify for Medicaid nor do I make enough for real insurance. My kids have recently qualified because I took a pay cut (from $32,000). My wife and I are truly screwed however.
This income bracket really sucks. The lower middle class (or upper lower class) are extremely abused these days and we make up a very large portion of the population.
Most of us don't have 60" TV's. I can't afford the TV or fucking health care. I have a 27" analog CRT that's 10 years old thank you.
We aren't all privileged, arrogant and ignorant you insensitive clod!
I support a family of 4 on $30,000/yr and most people here in this area do the same.