I've worked remotely and managed remote workers. Sometimes offsite contracting works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's nice to have an in-person brainstorming or design session. Right now, I want local candidates.
In this job market, what are the odds that the only qualified candidates are remote?
My company needs Java developers. We're looking to build a list of available contractors to do work over the next year as demand for our services grows. If you want to work in S. Florida, e-mail me.
I'm sure there are similar opportunities elsewhere. You just have to find them. A recruiter might be a good place to start.
Perhaps what we will see from this then is 2 flavors of Mac OS X. One that costs $1200 that you can install on any machine and get no support for, and one that costs $120 that you can install on Apple branded hardware.
That wouldn't work though, because the fundamental problem is that Apple isn't (or shouldn't be, anyway) allowed to impose that restriction after the sale because it infringes on the buyer's property rights and violates the Doctrine of First Sale and the Uniform Commercial Code.
In order to do what you describe, Apple should be required to present a contract on the outside of the $120 box and have the buyer (or rather, licensee since it's no longer a "sale") sign it, in ink, in the presence of an Apple employee, before handing over his money!
This is easy to get around. Every Mac can ship with a "$1080 off your next purchase of OS X" coupon.
I'm not advocating this, I'm just pointing out that it can be done in a way that does not violate any laws.
Yeah, Android is the first thing I've seen to tempt me away from my Treo. It's a shame Palm dropped the ball. If they'd kept developing, today's Treos would be years ahead of the competition. The 650 is only missing WIFI and a publicly accessible implementation of the GPS api (damn you, Sprint!).
... iPhone brought in the first touch screen, and now everybody and I mean everybody is coming out with touch screens...
Are you serious? I have had nothing but touch screen phones since 2001.
VisorPhone
Samsung SPH-I300
Samsung SPH-I330
Treo 600
Treo 650p
The models I used actually started out as pure touch screen and then added keyboards (retaining the touch screen) because you can type faster with buttons (and the Xerox graffiti lawsuit). You can also touch-type with buttons.
The iPhone has nothing really new except that it was marketed to everyone and not just PDA users. Suddenly smartphones are "cool" because Apple makes one. That's fine.
I've been a Mac user for over 20 years. I'm typing this on a Mac. I'm glad Apple is doing well.
I'm also glad that people still make real smartphones like Treos, because I am a PDA user and I refuse to give up meaningful features for marketing fluff and looks. My four-year-old Treo model has many, many features that the iPhone lacks, including multimedia features like stereo bluetooth support and over a decade's worth of third-party software available directly from the people who developed it.
NoScript lets you do that. Just tell it to block embeds from all sites (including trusted ones). Then you can enable JavaScript and Flash individually as needed. There's no need for flashblock if you have NoScript properly configured.
HyperTalk was also the basis for Lingo (Macromind Director's scripting language). HyperCard is Flash's earliest ancestor. HyperCard could have brought Flash-like apps to the Internet in the late 80s.
The act of establishing an orbit around one body by using the gravitational attraction of another is a staple of hard science fiction. I read about it in a book published before the Apollo missions.
Anyone who doesn't realize that the moon can move things must never have noticed the tides.
Most fields do not wind up dominated by a monopoly. Who has a monopoly in the tire industry? What about the stapler market? Nobody holds a monopoly in screen-ruler software.
Being foremost in your field does not make you a monopoly.
Both Ubuntu and Apple have real competitors. In order to be a monopoly you have to have no competitors of note. There's also nothing illegal about being a monopoly.
In order to be an illegal monopoly, you have to use your lack of competition in to prevent others from entering the market to compete with you (perhaps in another field). Remember when Microsoft effectively forced the OEMs not to sell Linux PCs? That's a monopoly at work. Neither Apple nor Ubuntu has that much power.
* Visual voicemail. New functionality on this order demands special implementation. I had a similar feature via the web from CollegeClub back in 2000. Voicemail looked like e-mail with audio attachments. You could also check your e-mail and voicemail by calling their 888 number.
Most VOIP providers I've dealt with also have visual voicemail via an app or a website. The phone has a browser and an e-mail client. Visual voicemail shouldn't require carrier exclusivity.
* Unlimited data. Regardless of 3G or EDGE, data on *any* cell phone that's not specifically a 3G modem tends towards ridiculous fees. If Apple had released an unlocked iPhone and asked for unlimited data plans, the carriers would laugh and ask if they also wanted a pony. I have unlimited data for $15 from Sprint on a platform where you can actually do useful things with that data (Treo 650).
I can run ssh and a powerful e-mail client. I can take the full-sized SD card out of my camera and stick it in my phone. Then I can e-mail the pictures. These are things that the newer, more expensive, carrier-exclusive iPhone can't do.
* To gain a foothold in the total clusterfuck that is the US mobile market. This is the only valid point in this list. AT&T exclusivity got the iPhone out there. Now that it's an established product, Apple should start selling it unlocked at a price that covers the kickback AT&T pays them on the contract.
For which app do we have thousands of copies of the source code stored around the globe?
If you have the source, you can get it to work again in the future. If you don't then there's no guarantee that the app will exist, no matter how popular it is today. Source availability is a much better indicator for longevity than current popularity is. Nobody can take ooo away. Microsoft can take Word away whenever they want (or if they go out of business).
Why in the world would you want your data to expire? If it was worth creating, it should be readable for a long, long time. Imagine if all documents (books, carved tablets, etc.) faded away after 20 years. We'd have no history at all.
Formats based on open standards guarantee that it is possible to write a reader from the spec no matter how long ago the document was created. I don't think there's a single legitimate argument against this.
The GP is not alone. I haven't lied in many years. I know several other people who don't lie. You only have to be hurt by a lie once to realize that lies are evil.
Excel was released for the Mac 1985. Word was released for the Mac in 1984. Word for Windows wasn't released until 1989. Excel for Windows came out in 1987.
There has never been a time when Word and Excel existed on Windows but on on Mac. Even Office as a suite came out for Mac first: 1989 vs 1990 for Windows.
The plans are cheap. You can tether. You can install any Palm software you want -- and there's a lot of it. You can also write your own. It's a good phone that also takes photos and videos, plays videos, plays audio, displays pdfs, has imap and pop support out of the box, supports the gmail and google maps apps, has a full-sized sd slot, comes with editors and viewers for MS docs, and supports ssh (client, not server). It doesn't run Linux, but other than that, it's darn near perfect.
The Blackberry and the iPhone have nothing (important) on this 4-year-old Treo.
The early pda phones lacked keyboards. I've had three such phones. The lack made them a pain to use as a phone.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which there won't be a Bluetooth or iPod-dock keyboard for iPhone, but I simply cannot. If you are one of the rare people who wants a keyboard for your iPhone I'm sure you will have a choice of 3-4. Expect one or two from PC keyboard manufacturers, and one or two from iPod accessory makers.
An external keyboard doesn't count. The early keyboard-less PDA-phones had those too. It's nice tohave the option, but it's also as inconvenient as needing an external optical drive for a laptop. Portability and usability suffer.
Try using a touch screen for navigating a touch-tone menu. You have to pull the phone away from your ear to press the buttons.
You can clearly use the included headphones with microphone, which are recommended anyway because you can listen to music playback between calls. There is also an Apple-branded Bluetooth headset coming, and you can use other ones also.
On many phones you have the buttons right below the screen it is the same situation.
You also have less reason to use a touch-tone menu, because you have a full-scale Web browser in iPhone.
That doesn't account for required touch-tone menus. What if the service doesn't offer the features I need in a website? What if I'm trying to contact a person at a company so I can talk to them? This is much easier on my Treo (with keyboard) than it was on my Samsung (without).
Not everyone will use their smartphone in the same way. The ability to install custom apps and memory allows the vendor
> to sell one system that all customers can customize to meet their needs.
You could say the exact same thing about iPods and the iPhone has all the iPod features and more.
There are 3000 accessories that have zero IT overhead, you just plug them on and they work, the software is already inside. There are also installable games for iPod, the same will be true for iPhone.
I don't know how many Web sites there are right now, or how many qualify as Web apps, but they all run on iPhone. That is a lot of apps that you don't have in a typical smartphone that doesn't have a real Web browser.
People don't expect to be able to install applications on a music player. They do on a PDA. I can write software for mine, I can't for the iPhone. Even if I wasn't a programmer, having an open API helps: I've got lots of Free Software installed on my Treo. I like TCMP, it lets me watch movies I've downloaded from archive.org's collection of public domain content. I can store movies on sd cards, so I can carry as big a library as I want. I've never had to do this though because my 2gb card has more than enough space for several movies. I could carry some more on another card if I wanted to though. I couldn't do that with an iPhone.
It's sad that my four-year-old Palm has a better feature set than this as-yet-unreleased phone of the future.
That's just dumb.
Ok, so what can the iPhone do that is amazingly better than a Treo 650 with additional software installed other than use two fingers on the touch screen and play DRM AAC (I do have a bunch of those)?
My Treo can view and edit documents and spreadsheets, play movies and music in a variety of formats, help me calculate the DOF for my digital camera, play ring tones I've created, ssh into my server (or my Mac at home), use push e-mail, use pull e-mail, use google apps like gMail and Google Maps, use a neat directory assistance software that lets me see maps and add contacts to my phone list, manage photos and videos, run Java applications, and play a variety of games. It can store quick memos, mana
I've read and modified both Word and Excel docs on my Treo 650. I'd rather not have to, but it's nice to be able to tell someone to just send you a file for revision on your PDA rather than having to find an actual computer .
I'm a loyal Apple customer with three Macs at the moment. I've been using Macs since the System 4 days.
The iPhone is a joke. The early pda phones lacked keyboards. I've had three such phones. The lack made them a pain to use as a phone. Try using a touch screen for navigating a touch-tone menu. You have to pull the phone away from your ear to press the buttons. It's a pain. There's a reason that modern pda phones have keyboards. It's not an oversight. It was a requested feature.
The ability to run custom apps is the reason I have a Treo. I have SSH, media players, document editors and viewers, games, photography software (DOF calculator), gmail, google maps, a directory assistance app, and much more.
I also like my Treo's SD card reader. I can pop the card out of my camera and into my phone to e-mail a photo to someone. I can use the card as a modern-day floppy: cary as many as you want, share them with others, read them in any computer with a USB port. Just having a big HD doesn't cut it.
Not everyone will use their smartphone in the same way. The ability to install custom apps and memory allows the vendor to sell one system that all customers can customize to meet their needs.
Apple may manage to market this into a commercial success, but I know that this is one Apple product that totally fails to meet my needs. It's sad that my four-year-old Palm has a better feature set than this as-yet-unreleased phone of the future.
What kind of employer is ok with their employees choosing to sleep in once in a while?
Most of the companies for which I have worked were more interested in results than making sure I was sitting at my desk at a particular hour of the morning. Heck, if sleeping in once in a while will improve my productivity for the rest of the day, what intelligent employer wouldn't allow it?
How can you get anything doen with only 5?
on
How Many Windows?
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· Score: 1
Well, I have 20 windows open right now. This window has two tabs: one for reading the discussion and one for writing this response. The reason the number is this low is that I just restarted my browser and e-mail client. I also shut down all of my X11 apps last night. So sometime last night I had well over 50 windows open plus many tabs in most browser windows.
This is on my 3-year-old PowerBook with 512MB of ram.
The 1.5-year-old ThinkPad I use at work has twice as much ram and usually has a hard time when I go over about 40 windows plus assorted tabs. Windows keeps losing task bar entries and I have to use Alt-Tab to bring them back.
I frequently work on something for a while then switch to doing something else. I also keep lots of text editor windows open for jotting down notes.
My browser windows frequently have over a dozen tabs open. Each window will have a particular topic. Let's say I'm trying to track down the meaning of an obscure error message. The first tab will be Google. The next 20 or so will be the results of middle-clicking on any promising results from the various searches I've done in the first tab. Once I think I have enough links open, I'll go through the tabs one-by-one closing the ones that don't have useful data. The tabs have been loading in the background, so I don't have to wait for pages to load. I do the same thing whenever I'm confronted with a list of links: on e-bay and amazon, searching realestate listings, and reading forums. It just seems natural to do it that way.
When programming, I have several editor windows and terminals open. If I'm writing a web-app, then I have browser windows open and more terminals for scanning logs.
I can't understand how people use a browser with only a few windows and/or tabs open. Do those people like watching pages load? Do they never have to look up more than one thing at a time?
For extra craptacularity, do this while installing a system update. Then you get to manually install the update in single user mode before your system will be bootable again. When I say manually, I mean manually extracting files from the pax archive and copying them to the appropriate location because systemupdate thinks that everything is OK despite dozens of system files modified by the update being mysteriously zero bytes in length.
In my defense, the update was taking a long time, the second monitor was a my TV, and my PowerBook is my DVD player.
Yeah, but if you had MacsBug installed, you'd just type ea or es and exit the offending application, never seeing the bomb at all. Without Macs bug, you could push the programmer's switch and type GO Finder, but that was less reliable.
Heck, I rarely even lost data in those crashes since I'd dump the offending application's data space to a logfile and reconstruct what I could from there.
Too bad I never could get mouse support for MacsBug working properly. That would've saved much manual retyping of addresses.
If Brazil does make it up to "first world" standards, and they don't do the intelligent thing and do everything in their power to eliminate all possible private transportation and improve the public transportation system to the point where it can handle people's transportation needs, then they will destroy themselves. You can quote me on that.:P
I can't speak for the rest of Brazil, but the public transportation system in Salvador, BA beats the pants off of most such systems I've seen in the U.S.
I've worked remotely and managed remote workers. Sometimes offsite contracting works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's nice to have an in-person brainstorming or design session. Right now, I want local candidates.
In this job market, what are the odds that the only qualified candidates are remote?
My company needs Java developers. We're looking to build a list of available contractors to do work over the next year as demand for our services grows. If you want to work in S. Florida, e-mail me.
I'm sure there are similar opportunities elsewhere. You just have to find them. A recruiter might be a good place to start.
That wouldn't work though, because the fundamental problem is that Apple isn't (or shouldn't be, anyway) allowed to impose that restriction after the sale because it infringes on the buyer's property rights and violates the Doctrine of First Sale and the Uniform Commercial Code.
In order to do what you describe, Apple should be required to present a contract on the outside of the $120 box and have the buyer (or rather, licensee since it's no longer a "sale") sign it, in ink, in the presence of an Apple employee, before handing over his money!
This is easy to get around. Every Mac can ship with a "$1080 off your next purchase of OS X" coupon.
I'm not advocating this, I'm just pointing out that it can be done in a way that does not violate any laws.
Yeah, Android is the first thing I've seen to tempt me away from my Treo. It's a shame Palm dropped the ball. If they'd kept developing, today's Treos would be years ahead of the competition. The 650 is only missing WIFI and a publicly accessible implementation of the GPS api (damn you, Sprint!).
Are you serious? I have had nothing but touch screen phones since 2001.
The models I used actually started out as pure touch screen and then added keyboards (retaining the touch screen) because you can type faster with buttons (and the Xerox graffiti lawsuit). You can also touch-type with buttons.
The iPhone has nothing really new except that it was marketed to everyone and not just PDA users. Suddenly smartphones are "cool" because Apple makes one. That's fine.
I've been a Mac user for over 20 years. I'm typing this on a Mac. I'm glad Apple is doing well.
I'm also glad that people still make real smartphones like Treos, because I am a PDA user and I refuse to give up meaningful features for marketing fluff and looks. My four-year-old Treo model has many, many features that the iPhone lacks, including multimedia features like stereo bluetooth support and over a decade's worth of third-party software available directly from the people who developed it.
NoScript lets you do that. Just tell it to block embeds from all sites (including trusted ones). Then you can enable JavaScript and Flash individually as needed. There's no need for flashblock if you have NoScript properly configured.
HyperTalk was also the basis for Lingo (Macromind Director's scripting language). HyperCard is Flash's earliest ancestor. HyperCard could have brought Flash-like apps to the Internet in the late 80s.
The act of establishing an orbit around one body by using the gravitational attraction of another is a staple of hard science fiction. I read about it in a book published before the Apollo missions.
Anyone who doesn't realize that the moon can move things must never have noticed the tides.
He still writes the occasional article and updates his blog regularly. In fact, he's already blogged about it: http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2008/02/powers-out.html
IBM uses AFS internally. It works. Use it.
Most fields do not wind up dominated by a monopoly. Who has a monopoly in the tire industry? What about the stapler market? Nobody holds a monopoly in screen-ruler software.
Being foremost in your field does not make you a monopoly.
Both Ubuntu and Apple have real competitors. In order to be a monopoly you have to have no competitors of note. There's also nothing illegal about being a monopoly.
In order to be an illegal monopoly, you have to use your lack of competition in to prevent others from entering the market to compete with you (perhaps in another field). Remember when Microsoft effectively forced the OEMs not to sell Linux PCs? That's a monopoly at work. Neither Apple nor Ubuntu has that much power.
* Visual voicemail. New functionality on this order demands special implementation.
I had a similar feature via the web from CollegeClub back in 2000. Voicemail looked like e-mail with audio attachments. You could also check your e-mail and voicemail by calling their 888 number.
Most VOIP providers I've dealt with also have visual voicemail via an app or a website. The phone has a browser and an e-mail client. Visual voicemail shouldn't require carrier exclusivity.
* Unlimited data. Regardless of 3G or EDGE, data on *any* cell phone that's not specifically a 3G modem tends towards ridiculous fees. If Apple had released an unlocked iPhone and asked for unlimited data plans, the carriers would laugh and ask if they also wanted a pony.
I have unlimited data for $15 from Sprint on a platform where you can actually do useful things with that data (Treo 650).
I can run ssh and a powerful e-mail client. I can take the full-sized SD card out of my camera and stick it in my phone. Then I can e-mail the pictures. These are things that the newer, more expensive, carrier-exclusive iPhone can't do.
* To gain a foothold in the total clusterfuck that is the US mobile market.
This is the only valid point in this list. AT&T exclusivity got the iPhone out there. Now that it's an established product, Apple should start selling it unlocked at a price that covers the kickback AT&T pays them on the contract.
For which app do we have thousands of copies of the source code stored around the globe?
If you have the source, you can get it to work again in the future. If you don't then there's no guarantee that the app will exist, no matter how popular it is today. Source availability is a much better indicator for longevity than current popularity is. Nobody can take ooo away. Microsoft can take Word away whenever they want (or if they go out of business).
Why in the world would you want your data to expire? If it was worth creating, it should be readable for a long, long time. Imagine if all documents (books, carved tablets, etc.) faded away after 20 years. We'd have no history at all.
Formats based on open standards guarantee that it is possible to write a reader from the spec no matter how long ago the document was created. I don't think there's a single legitimate argument against this.
The GP is not alone. I haven't lied in many years. I know several other people who don't lie. You only have to be hurt by a lie once to realize that lies are evil.
Excel was released for the Mac 1985. Word was released for the Mac in 1984. Word for Windows wasn't released until 1989. Excel for Windows came out in 1987.
There has never been a time when Word and Excel existed on Windows but on on Mac. Even Office as a suite came out for Mac first: 1989 vs 1990 for Windows.
Get a used Treo 650 that works with Sprint.
The plans are cheap. You can tether. You can install any Palm software you want -- and there's a lot of it. You can also write your own. It's a good phone that also takes photos and videos, plays videos, plays audio, displays pdfs, has imap and pop support out of the box, supports the gmail and google maps apps, has a full-sized sd slot, comes with editors and viewers for MS docs, and supports ssh (client, not server). It doesn't run Linux, but other than that, it's darn near perfect.
The Blackberry and the iPhone have nothing (important) on this 4-year-old Treo.
eMusic has been on slashdot dozens of times.
An external keyboard doesn't count. The early keyboard-less PDA-phones had those too. It's nice tohave the option, but it's also as inconvenient as needing an external optical drive for a laptop. Portability and usability suffer.
That doesn't account for required touch-tone menus. What if the service doesn't offer the features I need in a website? What if I'm trying to contact a person at a company so I can talk to them? This is much easier on my Treo (with keyboard) than it was on my Samsung (without).
People don't expect to be able to install applications on a music player. They do on a PDA. I can write software for mine, I can't for the iPhone. Even if I wasn't a programmer, having an open API helps: I've got lots of Free Software installed on my Treo. I like TCMP, it lets me watch movies I've downloaded from archive.org's collection of public domain content. I can store movies on sd cards, so I can carry as big a library as I want. I've never had to do this though because my 2gb card has more than enough space for several movies. I could carry some more on another card if I wanted to though. I couldn't do that with an iPhone.
Ok, so what can the iPhone do that is amazingly better than a Treo 650 with additional software installed other than use two fingers on the touch screen and play DRM AAC (I do have a bunch of those)?
My Treo can view and edit documents and spreadsheets, play movies and music in a variety of formats, help me calculate the DOF for my digital camera, play ring tones I've created, ssh into my server (or my Mac at home), use push e-mail, use pull e-mail, use google apps like gMail and Google Maps, use a neat directory assistance software that lets me see maps and add contacts to my phone list, manage photos and videos, run Java applications, and play a variety of games. It can store quick memos, mana
I've read and modified both Word and Excel docs on my Treo 650. I'd rather not have to, but it's nice to be able to tell someone to just send you a file for revision on your PDA rather than having to find an actual computer .
I'm a loyal Apple customer with three Macs at the moment. I've been using Macs since the System 4 days.
The iPhone is a joke. The early pda phones lacked keyboards. I've had three such phones. The lack made them a pain to use as a phone. Try using a touch screen for navigating a touch-tone menu. You have to pull the phone away from your ear to press the buttons. It's a pain. There's a reason that modern pda phones have keyboards. It's not an oversight. It was a requested feature.
The ability to run custom apps is the reason I have a Treo. I have SSH, media players, document editors and viewers, games, photography software (DOF calculator), gmail, google maps, a directory assistance app, and much more.
I also like my Treo's SD card reader. I can pop the card out of my camera and into my phone to e-mail a photo to someone. I can use the card as a modern-day floppy: cary as many as you want, share them with others, read them in any computer with a USB port. Just having a big HD doesn't cut it.
Not everyone will use their smartphone in the same way. The ability to install custom apps and memory allows the vendor to sell one system that all customers can customize to meet their needs.
Apple may manage to market this into a commercial success, but I know that this is one Apple product that totally fails to meet my needs. It's sad that my four-year-old Palm has a better feature set than this as-yet-unreleased phone of the future.
What kind of employer is ok with their employees choosing to sleep in once in a while?
Most of the companies for which I have worked were more interested in results than making sure I was sitting at my desk at a particular hour of the morning. Heck, if sleeping in once in a while will improve my productivity for the rest of the day, what intelligent employer wouldn't allow it?
Well, I have 20 windows open right now. This window has two tabs: one for reading the discussion and one for writing this response. The reason the number is this low is that I just restarted my browser and e-mail client. I also shut down all of my X11 apps last night. So sometime last night I had well over 50 windows open plus many tabs in most browser windows.
This is on my 3-year-old PowerBook with 512MB of ram.
The 1.5-year-old ThinkPad I use at work has twice as much ram and usually has a hard time when I go over about 40 windows plus assorted tabs. Windows keeps losing task bar entries and I have to use Alt-Tab to bring them back.
I frequently work on something for a while then switch to doing something else. I also keep lots of text editor windows open for jotting down notes.
My browser windows frequently have over a dozen tabs open. Each window will have a particular topic. Let's say I'm trying to track down the meaning of an obscure error message. The first tab will be Google. The next 20 or so will be the results of middle-clicking on any promising results from the various searches I've done in the first tab. Once I think I have enough links open, I'll go through the tabs one-by-one closing the ones that don't have useful data. The tabs have been loading in the background, so I don't have to wait for pages to load. I do the same thing whenever I'm confronted with a list of links: on e-bay and amazon, searching realestate listings, and reading forums. It just seems natural to do it that way.
When programming, I have several editor windows and terminals open. If I'm writing a web-app, then I have browser windows open and more terminals for scanning logs.
I can't understand how people use a browser with only a few windows and/or tabs open. Do those people like watching pages load? Do they never have to look up more than one thing at a time?
For extra craptacularity, do this while installing a system update. Then you get to manually install the update in single user mode before your system will be bootable again. When I say manually, I mean manually extracting files from the pax archive and copying them to the appropriate location because systemupdate thinks that everything is OK despite dozens of system files modified by the update being mysteriously zero bytes in length.
In my defense, the update was taking a long time, the second monitor was a my TV, and my PowerBook is my DVD player.
Yeah, but if you had MacsBug installed, you'd just type ea or es and exit the offending application, never seeing the bomb at all. Without Macs bug, you could push the programmer's switch and type GO Finder, but that was less reliable.
Heck, I rarely even lost data in those crashes since I'd dump the offending application's data space to a logfile and reconstruct what I could from there.
Too bad I never could get mouse support for MacsBug working properly. That would've saved much manual retyping of addresses.
I can't speak for the rest of Brazil, but the public transportation system in Salvador, BA beats the pants off of most such systems I've seen in the U.S.