Well most hospitals I've been to in the US without private insurance keep we waiting for at least 4 hours in the ER. At least in SC.
I waited for 4 hours after a car accident where I was clearly and visibly burned and injured. The ER wasn't packed either. Some kid with the sniffles came in and left before I was even seen once.
You don't have 4 hour waits if you've got awesome insurance they can bill for $10,000 for a case of the sniffles.
I would take nationalized crap health care vs no healthcare any day. I'd be willing to pay 35% or so in flat income taxes with no returns.
Insurance for my family (me, wife, 2 kids) through my employer would cost $1,200/month. I make 30k/yr. Do the math. That's half my salary BEFORE taxes. I don't qualify for Medicaid. That's with the employer paying a chunk and that's a plan with a $2,000 deductible.
Now I've got the state putting tax levies on me because I couldn't pay for the last year on a $12,000 hernia surgery that my wife needed and my son's visit for a ruptured ear drum. They are talking about seizing my property. I make just enough to make my rent and basic utilities. I have had impacted wisdom teeth for 4 years. I need dentures as well. I drive a paid-for beat-up vehicle with 200,000 miles on it because I can't afford a car payment. My wife is unable to work due to the cost of daycare for the kids in proportion to what she'll make with little experience in the workforce.
So if they are against people like me, an educator and a community-oriented person who goes out of their way to help people having access to health care then FUCK THEM. I deserve to live too. Just because I'm not some privileged prick or some bottom-feeder unemployed welfare case, doesn't mean I don't deserve health care too.
In my opinion, even as a libertarian, ensuring everyone has affordable equal access to health care (via taxes if necessary) falls right in line with securing the rights of the people. The right to LIFE. Part of remaining alive means remaining healthy. Allowing hospitals to destroy my livelihood financially without even a court hearing just because I want to stay alive and no longer be in pain is the opposite of securing MY rights.
Only because they are trying to regain lost users. And Win7 is far from lean but it performs a bit better. Microsoft will never innovate on their own and their products still end up being unimaginative and second rate at best.
Why keep giving them chances? Any other company who makes such huge blunders would be out of business overnight. But everyone's says "This sucks!" then MS says "Oh, we promise next time it will be much better and it'll only cost you $400 to upgrade! You don't want those other lousy products anyway!". Why keep giving them 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th chances to get it right?
I guess most Americans just like getting screwed. MS should have never made it this far just because they wrote a cheesy single-user OS for a crap IBM personal computer architecture that IBM didn't even really like. Especially since IBM really wanted CP/M anyway. I could have done that within 6 months had I been born a few years earlier (I was in diapers still when PC-DOS was released).
They got lucky and people keep giving them undeserved chances. The only decent product they've ever had was MS Office which was ironically a mac product for years before a Windows version existed.
Heh. They've been dying since 1977 according to most industry analysts.
Re:mac w128K of RAM - so little power, but powerfu
on
Happy 25th, Macintosh!
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· Score: 3, Informative
Ummm.... the Mac plus had SCSI and the 512 supported a hard drive they made for the floppy port. I think that drive worked with the 128 as well. The floppy port HDD's were pretty slow but they worked.
When the Plus was a new machine, I had an Atari ST at home though. The ST was cheaper, just as fast, had built-in MIDI, an awesome audio chipset, color graphics, an ugly GUI and much cooler games. I got a Mac Plus later.
I literally shed a tear when DEC got bought by Compaq. They were one of the early pioneers in cost effective computing and had some of the coolest machines I've ever laid hands on. We still have an old AlphaServer 4000 in production use at work.
You don't have to bet.... I just tested it with Mini vMac and turned throttling off.
It takes less than 1/2 a second to boot System 7.01 on an emulated Mac Plus even when loaded up with lots of extensions. This is on a 1.42Ghz eMac G4 w/ 768MB of RAM.
I need to mod my eMac with an LCD though, the analog board for the CRT is slowly dying. While I'm in there I'll move a couple resistors so it runs at 1.67GHz. I'll take an eMac over a G4 iMac or mini any day.
I don't know though.... a Mac 128 really was a joke but I can't think of much I do now that I wasn't doing with my old Mac IIci I had w/ 128MB RAM. It just took a little more patience for things like 3D rendering in Strata3D. I had Adobe premiere and a VideoSpigot card after a while as well.
I had MacOS 7.5, A/UX 3 and NetBSD/mac68k on separate SCSI drives and 2 extra NuBus video cards (for 3 monitors total).
Running a modern browser on it today would kinda suck but running software from the same time period, it was quite an effective machine. It was a bit slower than the monster IIfx I replaced it with though.
For basic computing tasks, the old Mac Plus (my first real 16-bit machine) w/ 4MB RAM was an OK machine for word processing, BBS'ing, light database work and playing with HyperCard. The 128 was obsolete before it left the production line.
OSX has pretty solid SMP support. NeXT never had an SMP machine so your point there is moot. OS X has always had decent SMP support. Grand Central in 10.6 is going to be awesome as well.
Quartz (especially after Quartz Extreme in 10.2), a better windowing system, more accurate font rendering, better stability, better scripting environments (TCL and AppleScript vs VBScript and CMD), less security holes, a much more rich command line environment that isn't feeble and borderline useless, API's that aren't near as annoying as Win32, free development tools, etc. I'll take XCode/Objective C over Visual C++ any day.
NT has always been a joke and even though it was touted as a "unix killer", it has NEVER been able to do the deed.
One, they both ripped off Xerox PARC's Alto. Two, Apple genuinely does it BETTER most of the time. It's not just a desperate attempt to win back users with a poor blatant clone that's just different enough to not get sued.
No but it had something similar to the start menu and another menu for switching tasks. Was just as functional and less intrusive.
OS X was far more advanced than NT/2000 or Win9x upon release. NextStep was FAR more advanced than WinNT or the classic MacOS which is funny considering the first version was released in 1988.
Windows attempts to reimplement successful features [poorly] of other OS's usually in a desperate attempt to win back users after years of stagnation.
If it weren't for Next/Apple/Sun/SGI you'd still be running a bastardized version of Win3.1 and LIKING IT.
Didn't they call those handheld PC's and handheld PC Pros about a decade ago? Most ran WinCE 2 or 2.11. Most were also capable of running Linux or NetBSD/hpcmips at some point. There were some with Hitachi SH3's as well.
Some of the less educated called them PDA's but they weren't quite what I would call a PDA. The only true PDA I've ever owned was the Apple Newton MP2100. It actually put the "A" in PDA.
It's our responsibility as people educated in dealing with technology to help the less skilled make better tech decisions. It benefits all of us in the long run.
"Not making people care" is why there are still a lot of people out there running IE6 on Win98 sucking up a lot of available bandwidth because they are part of a spam botnet. This affects me.
So yes, I will attempt to make them care.
It's called doing the right thing. Not socialism. Caring about your fellow man (especially when it benefits you) does not make you a commie pinko. Grow the fuck up.
Oh and most of their printers were rebranded Lexmark and Brother's with modified firmware to only accept ADP's cartridge ID's. They had a couple Kyocera models as well.
Shhhh......
Most of this can be found out anyone that spent an hour with their hardware and a shell prompt. Doesn't even have to be a root account. I can't see them being able to scream "trade secrets" with stuff so obvious.
LOL large chunks of their dealership management solution is written in TCL based on filesystems I pulled apart. They use ck as well to provide a tk-like interface using curses.
As field monkeys, we were NOT supposed to know this. Fairly big chunks were not even obfuscated. Shhhhhh......
Fuck'em, let'em sue me. It's been well over a year. My NDA/non-compete LONG expired.
I worked for ADP dealer services for a while. A rather short while. Their more recent installs were Linux based Intel boxes. Prior to that they used DEC UNIX aka OSF/1 aka Tru64 on Alpha hardware. Prior to that they used SysVR3 on motorola 88k boxes. YES, MOTOROLA 88100 and 88110 RISC boxes. Those things were f**kin neat.
Interestingly, ALL OF THESE were still in production use in the field at various sites. The 88k's were being phased out fast in 2004 though. I ran across sites that still had DECwriter III printing terminals in use but they usually weren't used for interactive logins anymore.
They supported and installed some Sun boxes for a third party which I can't remember the name of. I want to say Proquest though.
Dude, while funny, you need to at least hit wikipedia or something once in a while. Not even looking at a list and being the ignorant American I am, I can name one decent computer company that existed in the UK that's been split into several smaller companies.
Acorn
You can thank them for a lot of things including the ARM architecture.
Sounds an awful lot like a mandatory profile. Rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man in an AD user's profile and you get a similar effect. Any changes or additions to the profile are dumped when the user logs out.
He was specifically looking for open source. I may have to look harder at Zenworks though. Anything I can do to avoid Server 2008 will be a blessing.
I'm not picky, it doesn't have to be FOSS to make me happy.
The problem he may have though is he probably already has Windows server licenses that were bought and paid for. His superiors probably aren't going to be too keen on dumping it just to spend a bunch of money on Zenworks since it hasn't been "proven" in their environment.
He's going to be going up against people who believe the products they have are working just fine. Or at least "well enough".
Unless he can pull some FOSS out of his ass that has VERY CLEAR advantages to a layperson (in their point of view) and won't require a massive undertaking in retraining MS indoctrinated "technicians", he's fighting an uphill battle and will most likely lose.
A technician really doesn't have a whole lot of power or influence in most places. For him to suggest massive changes like this, he'll probably be quickly blown off by his superiors. At best he might be told he'll "make a good network admin when he grows up". I'm not saying don't try, just don't be upset if you fail.
I've fought this battle several times. It gets progressively worse with larger organizations. Smaller organizations it's a lot easier but you still tend to meet resistance.
If I had originally built the network where I'm at, believe me, I would have gone with thin clients for a majority of the labs. Would have cut our TCO dramatically. No moving parts, no HD's to fail and they are easily managed.
Thin clients are awesome in an environment like this if you can convince mgmt that you need a killer server. The thin clients themselves are cheap but you want something pretty beefy server-side.
Moving to thin clients at a previous employer for most things cut the number of helpdesk calls by at least half and failure rates weren't even 25% of what they were with PC's on their desk. There's some gotchas here and there but I didn't regret it one bit.
I'll have to check it out. If it works well I'd happily use it. I might be able to avoid having Server 2008 shoved down my throat during the next upgrade cycle.
With a 2 person IT department where both are forced to teach at least 4 hrs per day and both day and night classes this is not practical.
There is also no gap between semesters except a weekend.
Most of our servers are samba based but we keep a couple Win2k3 servers around for user and group management as well as group policy and automated software deployment.
Everything else is BSD based. The BSD machines are integrated with AD as member servers and also have a winbind PAM module installed so students can directly log into the UNIX servers for certain classes (TCP/IP, etc).
Samba 3 acting like a PDC is no more secure than a modern windows server. It even likes the old braindead NTLM protocols that are weak as hell.
I'll ditch the Win2k3 servers as soon as Samba 4 is ready for prime time.
The only benefit of moving to Samba for a domain controller is cost. We already had the Windows server licenses when I started.
Reimaging machines that often is probably not too nice for crap cheap hard drives in $400 desktops that schools tend to buy either.
Your method would INCREASE my workload and costs. Not decrease it.
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Well most hospitals I've been to in the US without private insurance keep we waiting for at least 4 hours in the ER. At least in SC.
I waited for 4 hours after a car accident where I was clearly and visibly burned and injured. The ER wasn't packed either. Some kid with the sniffles came in and left before I was even seen once.
You don't have 4 hour waits if you've got awesome insurance they can bill for $10,000 for a case of the sniffles.
I would take nationalized crap health care vs no healthcare any day. I'd be willing to pay 35% or so in flat income taxes with no returns.
Insurance for my family (me, wife, 2 kids) through my employer would cost $1,200/month. I make 30k/yr. Do the math. That's half my salary BEFORE taxes. I don't qualify for Medicaid. That's with the employer paying a chunk and that's a plan with a $2,000 deductible.
Now I've got the state putting tax levies on me because I couldn't pay for the last year on a $12,000 hernia surgery that my wife needed and my son's visit for a ruptured ear drum. They are talking about seizing my property. I make just enough to make my rent and basic utilities. I have had impacted wisdom teeth for 4 years. I need dentures as well. I drive a paid-for beat-up vehicle with 200,000 miles on it because I can't afford a car payment. My wife is unable to work due to the cost of daycare for the kids in proportion to what she'll make with little experience in the workforce.
So if they are against people like me, an educator and a community-oriented person who goes out of their way to help people having access to health care then FUCK THEM. I deserve to live too. Just because I'm not some privileged prick or some bottom-feeder unemployed welfare case, doesn't mean I don't deserve health care too.
In my opinion, even as a libertarian, ensuring everyone has affordable equal access to health care (via taxes if necessary) falls right in line with securing the rights of the people. The right to LIFE. Part of remaining alive means remaining healthy. Allowing hospitals to destroy my livelihood financially without even a court hearing just because I want to stay alive and no longer be in pain is the opposite of securing MY rights.
Only because they are trying to regain lost users. And Win7 is far from lean but it performs a bit better. Microsoft will never innovate on their own and their products still end up being unimaginative and second rate at best.
Why keep giving them chances? Any other company who makes such huge blunders would be out of business overnight. But everyone's says "This sucks!" then MS says "Oh, we promise next time it will be much better and it'll only cost you $400 to upgrade! You don't want those other lousy products anyway!". Why keep giving them 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th chances to get it right?
I guess most Americans just like getting screwed. MS should have never made it this far just because they wrote a cheesy single-user OS for a crap IBM personal computer architecture that IBM didn't even really like. Especially since IBM really wanted CP/M anyway. I could have done that within 6 months had I been born a few years earlier (I was in diapers still when PC-DOS was released).
They got lucky and people keep giving them undeserved chances. The only decent product they've ever had was MS Office which was ironically a mac product for years before a Windows version existed.
Heh. They've been dying since 1977 according to most industry analysts.
Ummm.... the Mac plus had SCSI and the 512 supported a hard drive they made for the floppy port. I think that drive worked with the 128 as well. The floppy port HDD's were pretty slow but they worked.
When the Plus was a new machine, I had an Atari ST at home though. The ST was cheaper, just as fast, had built-in MIDI, an awesome audio chipset, color graphics, an ugly GUI and much cooler games. I got a Mac Plus later.
I literally shed a tear when DEC got bought by Compaq. They were one of the early pioneers in cost effective computing and had some of the coolest machines I've ever laid hands on. We still have an old AlphaServer 4000 in production use at work.
You don't have to bet.... I just tested it with Mini vMac and turned throttling off.
It takes less than 1/2 a second to boot System 7.01 on an emulated Mac Plus even when loaded up with lots of extensions. This is on a 1.42Ghz eMac G4 w/ 768MB of RAM.
I need to mod my eMac with an LCD though, the analog board for the CRT is slowly dying. While I'm in there I'll move a couple resistors so it runs at 1.67GHz. I'll take an eMac over a G4 iMac or mini any day.
I don't know though.... a Mac 128 really was a joke but I can't think of much I do now that I wasn't doing with my old Mac IIci I had w/ 128MB RAM. It just took a little more patience for things like 3D rendering in Strata3D. I had Adobe premiere and a VideoSpigot card after a while as well.
I had MacOS 7.5, A/UX 3 and NetBSD/mac68k on separate SCSI drives and 2 extra NuBus video cards (for 3 monitors total).
Running a modern browser on it today would kinda suck but running software from the same time period, it was quite an effective machine. It was a bit slower than the monster IIfx I replaced it with though.
For basic computing tasks, the old Mac Plus (my first real 16-bit machine) w/ 4MB RAM was an OK machine for word processing, BBS'ing, light database work and playing with HyperCard. The 128 was obsolete before it left the production line.
OSX has pretty solid SMP support. NeXT never had an SMP machine so your point there is moot. OS X has always had decent SMP support. Grand Central in 10.6 is going to be awesome as well.
Quartz (especially after Quartz Extreme in 10.2), a better windowing system, more accurate font rendering, better stability, better scripting environments (TCL and AppleScript vs VBScript and CMD), less security holes, a much more rich command line environment that isn't feeble and borderline useless, API's that aren't near as annoying as Win32, free development tools, etc. I'll take XCode/Objective C over Visual C++ any day.
NT has always been a joke and even though it was touted as a "unix killer", it has NEVER been able to do the deed.
One, they both ripped off Xerox PARC's Alto. Two, Apple genuinely does it BETTER most of the time. It's not just a desperate attempt to win back users with a poor blatant clone that's just different enough to not get sued.
No but it had something similar to the start menu and another menu for switching tasks. Was just as functional and less intrusive.
OS X was far more advanced than NT/2000 or Win9x upon release. NextStep was FAR more advanced than WinNT or the classic MacOS which is funny considering the first version was released in 1988.
Windows attempts to reimplement successful features [poorly] of other OS's usually in a desperate attempt to win back users after years of stagnation.
If it weren't for Next/Apple/Sun/SGI you'd still be running a bastardized version of Win3.1 and LIKING IT.
On what planet is Windows XP considered a "lean" operating system?
MIPS-based netbook eh?
Didn't they call those handheld PC's and handheld PC Pros about a decade ago? Most ran WinCE 2 or 2.11. Most were also capable of running Linux or NetBSD/hpcmips at some point. There were some with Hitachi SH3's as well.
Some of the less educated called them PDA's but they weren't quite what I would call a PDA. The only true PDA I've ever owned was the Apple Newton MP2100. It actually put the "A" in PDA.
It's our responsibility as people educated in dealing with technology to help the less skilled make better tech decisions. It benefits all of us in the long run.
"Not making people care" is why there are still a lot of people out there running IE6 on Win98 sucking up a lot of available bandwidth because they are part of a spam botnet. This affects me.
So yes, I will attempt to make them care.
It's called doing the right thing. Not socialism. Caring about your fellow man (especially when it benefits you) does not make you a commie pinko. Grow the fuck up.
Oh and most of their printers were rebranded Lexmark and Brother's with modified firmware to only accept ADP's cartridge ID's. They had a couple Kyocera models as well.
Shhhh......
Most of this can be found out anyone that spent an hour with their hardware and a shell prompt. Doesn't even have to be a root account. I can't see them being able to scream "trade secrets" with stuff so obvious.
LOL large chunks of their dealership management solution is written in TCL based on filesystems I pulled apart. They use ck as well to provide a tk-like interface using curses.
As field monkeys, we were NOT supposed to know this. Fairly big chunks were not even obfuscated. Shhhhhh......
Fuck'em, let'em sue me. It's been well over a year. My NDA/non-compete LONG expired.
I worked for ADP dealer services for a while. A rather short while. Their more recent installs were Linux based Intel boxes. Prior to that they used DEC UNIX aka OSF/1 aka Tru64 on Alpha hardware. Prior to that they used SysVR3 on motorola 88k boxes. YES, MOTOROLA 88100 and 88110 RISC boxes. Those things were f**kin neat.
Interestingly, ALL OF THESE were still in production use in the field at various sites. The 88k's were being phased out fast in 2004 though. I ran across sites that still had DECwriter III printing terminals in use but they usually weren't used for interactive logins anymore.
They supported and installed some Sun boxes for a third party which I can't remember the name of. I want to say Proquest though.
If you want to talk old-school pre-von Neumann computers.....
The Manchester Mark 1 and Colossus. I give more credit to Turing in helping computing along than Babbage.
Why don't the British make computers?
Dude, while funny, you need to at least hit wikipedia or something once in a while. Not even looking at a list and being the ignorant American I am, I can name one decent computer company that existed in the UK that's been split into several smaller companies.
Acorn
You can thank them for a lot of things including the ARM architecture.
Sounds an awful lot like a mandatory profile. Rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man in an AD user's profile and you get a similar effect. Any changes or additions to the profile are dumped when the user logs out.
If your using Access for a 50 user database with no other real RDBMS backend, you're an idiot and you're asking for trouble.
Your data integrity and performance must not be very important to you.
He was specifically looking for open source. I may have to look harder at Zenworks though. Anything I can do to avoid Server 2008 will be a blessing.
I'm not picky, it doesn't have to be FOSS to make me happy.
The problem he may have though is he probably already has Windows server licenses that were bought and paid for. His superiors probably aren't going to be too keen on dumping it just to spend a bunch of money on Zenworks since it hasn't been "proven" in their environment.
He's going to be going up against people who believe the products they have are working just fine. Or at least "well enough".
Unless he can pull some FOSS out of his ass that has VERY CLEAR advantages to a layperson (in their point of view) and won't require a massive undertaking in retraining MS indoctrinated "technicians", he's fighting an uphill battle and will most likely lose.
A technician really doesn't have a whole lot of power or influence in most places. For him to suggest massive changes like this, he'll probably be quickly blown off by his superiors. At best he might be told he'll "make a good network admin when he grows up". I'm not saying don't try, just don't be upset if you fail.
I've fought this battle several times. It gets progressively worse with larger organizations. Smaller organizations it's a lot easier but you still tend to meet resistance.
If I had originally built the network where I'm at, believe me, I would have gone with thin clients for a majority of the labs. Would have cut our TCO dramatically. No moving parts, no HD's to fail and they are easily managed.
Thin clients are awesome in an environment like this if you can convince mgmt that you need a killer server. The thin clients themselves are cheap but you want something pretty beefy server-side.
Moving to thin clients at a previous employer for most things cut the number of helpdesk calls by at least half and failure rates weren't even 25% of what they were with PC's on their desk. There's some gotchas here and there but I didn't regret it one bit.
I'll have to check it out. If it works well I'd happily use it. I might be able to avoid having Server 2008 shoved down my throat during the next upgrade cycle.
With a 2 person IT department where both are forced to teach at least 4 hrs per day and both day and night classes this is not practical.
There is also no gap between semesters except a weekend.
Most of our servers are samba based but we keep a couple Win2k3 servers around for user and group management as well as group policy and automated software deployment.
Everything else is BSD based. The BSD machines are integrated with AD as member servers and also have a winbind PAM module installed so students can directly log into the UNIX servers for certain classes (TCP/IP, etc).
Samba 3 acting like a PDC is no more secure than a modern windows server. It even likes the old braindead NTLM protocols that are weak as hell.
I'll ditch the Win2k3 servers as soon as Samba 4 is ready for prime time.
The only benefit of moving to Samba for a domain controller is cost. We already had the Windows server licenses when I started.
Reimaging machines that often is probably not too nice for crap cheap hard drives in $400 desktops that schools tend to buy either.
Your method would INCREASE my workload and costs. Not decrease it.