I was a 14 year old working at UCLA part time writing code to transfer brain computer interface data from the Xerox 7929 to the Sigma 7 (Network Measurement Center arpa host #1) and then on to the CCN (UCLA Campus Computing Network 360 95's for FFA. In those early days I was just amazed about compiling a program in california and sending the object file to Virginia and the printout to Massachusetts. I was trying to tell my junior high school friends about the arpa network and what it could do, and I was thought weird because I was interested in such things. I guess that means that it is also the 40th birthday of the meditation on computer communication that has been going on in my brain ever since. I thought the net was the most amazing thing when it was comprise of leased line links at 2400 baud. Jon Postel was always hiding in his office implementing the latest NCP spec. MIT was trying hard to keep me from playing chess in the daytime. And FTP services were politely restricted to night-time, if you were polite. It is not important that it was a good protocol or not. It was a protocol, and got us thinking about writing services.
I have to wonder if the administrators who made the decision to arbitrarily extend the service life or reactor one, and other similar decisions will be facing substantial public shame over this. You would think that given Japan's previous experience with radiological disaster, Japanese people in such positions would be inclined to make the conservative decisions, but I guess the "almighty yen" is powerful there as well. What sort of punishment should these people face?
I have made a vow to not buy any more Sony products for the rest of my life. I get fooled now and then by a movie I rent, but my intention is clear. Too bad there aren't a million people who feel just like I do about them
You don't have to be very paranoid to realize that business issues about millions or BILLions of dollars can result is unexplained accidents. If PJ wanted to tell her perception of the truth about the actions of big players, a degree of anonymity is/was actually wise. I decided years ago to "keep my head down" about some issues in life. I am just a small fish and can get squashed relatively easily by big players.
While it is true that "puppet masters" are still out there, we are not paying SCO for Linux licenses. That is something we have won. Must we stay vigilant? Yes, absolutely. I wouldn't say PJ is throwing in the towel. The fight for freedom and justice is not a marathon, but rather a relay. I looked to see who made such hurtful and ignorant remark, and was not surprised to see it was Anonymous Coward (is that you Bill?). Nothing PJ ever said or did was "stupid".
Now I am sure I don't have a clue who to believe.
I just won't buy any more Sony products, even''
And I see no reason to buy a notebook from Samsung any way,
seeing as how I buy Apple equipment for my computing needs.
Once in a blue moon I do need to run Windows to blow a prom,
but I just grit my teeth and hold my breath until next time.
I wonder if LG put a keylogger in my washing machine?
I am participating in this program. I think America is way behind in the broadband area, and if the FCC doesn't know what the big players are really doing, they cannot make good decisions on our behalf. I believe there are people in the government that want us to stay competitive, if only to pay taxes. I have my doubts about what Comcast is doing to me for my money, and this program gives me access to great statistics. I for one like this program. There is nothing I am doing that I am concerned about them knowing anyway. Any business I do over the Internet is https anyway, and I assume if they want to look iside my encrypted packets badly enough, they can. My opinion anyway:-)
This is so sad. I thought patents were about more than simply the first time someone writes a subroutine.
What is next?
"Microsoft patents use of computer languages for writing programs" ?
Wake me up, I am having a nightmare.
In America you pay income tax, and if you buy something, then you can pay property tax, but you have to eat, so you go buy food and they tax you for that. If you try and operate a business, it gets worse still. Anyway by the time they income tax you, property tax you, sales tax you, communications tax you.. How many times is that?
If the truckers just decide they don't need the record company's money enough to transport the albums, I can see a sharp decline in album sales.
Or DVD's for that matter, or Blueray. There can't be that much money in media transport. Maybe a specific strike against the music industry would give them some perspective.
As I remember, the first product by the "two guys" was a Basic interpreter. Then they extended it, and began the long march towards owning BASIC.
Then they bought Seattle Computer Products 86DOS, enhanced it, and began asserting they had a trademark on "DOS".
Then they bought Lattice C, and began asserting they were an operating system and compiler company when both these products were bought elsewhere.
I am old enough to remember step-by-step how this company continued to acquire and absorb anything that they could afford that looked like people were interested in buying it.
Including the Berkeley TCP/IP stack and putting the independent protocol stack vendors out of business was a cheap shot. And the non-standard enhancements they have attempted to make to Internet protocols are obviously the fist step in an attempt to own the protocols of the Internet, something that must not be allowed to happen. They already seem to own both ends of the desktop, web-server at the cloud and web browser on the desktop. Then they bend the HTML spec out of shape and want to own that as well. I really don't like these people or the way this is going. I had great hope for the microcomputer revolution.
Then after Mac OS X arrived, I switched from Windows to the Mac, and have been joyously happy since. Except for a few nauseous moments now and then when I cannot avoid a quick dip into Windows because of some short sighted company only building tool that work there. I was so disgusted by Microsofts Windows CE versions, that I paid no attention when Microsoft entered the smartphone marketplace.
I don't plan on giving Microsoft any more money in this lifetime. That will have my best effort, anyway!!
My problem with time travel is that people arriving in the time and space, are like creating matter/enegy. If conservation of eergy is true, then you should be able to add up all the energy in the universe and call it e1, then convert all the matter into energy and call it e2. Add that together to get e(t). I believe me(t) should remain constant, and objects arriving (or leaving) throw that off.
As if dominating the computer software industry wasn't enough, Bill wants to control the vault full of un-genetically-modified seeds so that he can eventually control the world's food supply. He is in on that one with Monsanto (whatever they are called now).
The very appearance of MS on the list casts grave doubt on the process by which the list was created. Most likely some of the people involved were also involved in the scandalous behavior of the international standards organization and/or ECMA.
I guess I just can't see how any publicly traded company can be considered ethical when the only apparent factor in corporate decisions these days seems to be share price.
Well that's my opinion, FWIW,AFAIAC, seeing as IANABCL. But I am LOL at the though of "ethical" and "Microsoft" being used in the same sentence.
A while back I got a catalog where a company in Berkeley was selling tachionic devices. They claimed their products were imbued with tachions and would have beneficial therapeutic effects. They were also selling a "pocket Diode". It was said to emit ions that were the "good" kind for $25. Having lived once in Berkeley, I decided to make my own, so I took out a pencil, declared it to be a "pocket diode", placed it in my pocket, and proceeded to feel better, and still had my $25 in my pocket. Magical thinking at its best.:-)
Too many people have web sites that are hosted for free because they are heavily laden with advertising. Charging for the capped data and providing free hosting that comes with gratuitous streaming video is a blatant tipoff, so obvious that senators and congresspeople should be able to see it. Right up there with telling me computers without crapware would have to cost more.
I have a Comcast business account at my home and have for three years now. Several times when I lost my mind, I tried using their residential cable as well. After a few days I decide I don't like it and I take the set top box back. Then mysteriously, my business internet fails on sunday morning. A few days later they schedule a service call and a tech comes out and discovers that my cable has been disconnected at the box down the street because I had cancelled my residential TV account, and they didn't notice I had a business internet as well. Many times now since I had my business account, it has failed for stupid reasons that could have been prevented. Twice over the disconnection of residential TV, once because they were paranoid that I had cable internet and no TV (they installed a filter (backwards I may add) that killed my internet until they came around and fixed that), and twice my internet has failed, and they tell me there is nothing wrong, until the tech checks the box down the street, and suddenly it's working again even though the tech says nothing was changed. Comcast offers the lousiest Business class internet I have experienced from any vendor. Also I share bandwidth for my business connection with the home users down the street, so when my neighbors torrent on their residential internet connections, my bandwidth goes to hell. I guess the moral of that story is buying business class service delivered over residential last mile infrastructure is a joke. My alternative is Verizon DSL, which even in 2011 still can't go over 1.5/384 for $39/month. I guess what I don't understand is that there is a comcast POP a stone's throw from my house, no doubt attached to the fiber running down that street. Only half a mile further away is the telco pop, also attached to Fiber. I don't understand where the bottleneck it. Unless the whole town of Santa Maria is connected to the world through one leased line shared by all. I am under a mile from 101, and you would think it would be the perfect backbone for the coastal cities up and down california. Maybe CALTRANS should become an ISP.
It would be nice to think that a large and successful (by some measurements) company might cooperate with a large group of people who want to make sure there is some good software in the world. And Microsoft certainly is a large and successful (by some measurements) company.
There are many parables about what happens to good hearted creatures who ignore the basic nature of other animals they befriend. A scorpion is still a scorpion, no matter how much it assures you it just wants to get over to the other side of the stream.
Embracing is the first step, generally followed by Extending, and inevitably Extinguishing.
Maybe if we work with them they won't try to claim we are infringing on their patents. Oh yea they already did that.
Maybe if we work with them they won't try to get license fees for pre-existing free software. Oh yea they did that.
Maybe if we work with them, they won't publish their product specification, pretending they are open standards. Oh yea they did that.
Maybe if we work with them they won't litigate until the their opponents die of natural causes. Oh yea they did that.
I don't know, I have run out of ideas.
Back in 1991 I was an early adopter when appropriate usage loosened up. I got a telebit modem and a UUCP account with UUNET. Mail traveled pretty well over UUCP, and if you spamed someone, they punished you by sending you a 50 page appropriate usage document that costed you big bucks in bandwidth. Later on I got several SLIP connections and started hosting an email server for Fair Isaac that forwarded received email using a modem and UUCP. Mail still moved fairly well. Then I got ISDN, and found I was paying for multiple connections within a single minute. Around that time, spam started showing up. I had to go to DSL because ISDN was killing me financially. I was a newbie admin, and soon discovered my DSL was saturated with mail traffic using my open server. As my bandwidth increased so did the amount of hostile packets hitting my network. I was so proud of my class C network at home, but soon discovered my DSL was saturated again with probes on all 254 IPs in my class C. I would get on a packet sniffer and look at the packets hitting me, and I would find out that I was getting reverse DNS requests for blocks I had never heard of, and tons of SMB attach requests with a dictionary worth of user names. Eventually I installed a linux system with good reporting on security alerts, and discovered I was getting thousands of failed SSH attempts (from China, from Brazil...). It was FreeBSD days and I mastered inet.conf and services, and found I could set up services. I would no sooner set up a service, then some hacker would probe and discover my server port, and saturate my connection again hammering the services trying to get something to happen. As much as I wanted to have my own local server at home with a static IP, it was making me crazy. Now I use Apple Mobile Me for email. I host my domain registrations at Network Solutions, and I use my home connection mostly as a client. Now and then I set up a special purpose port for a colleague to communicate with a local embedded system using an encrypted protocol. If you have all the time in the world to spare, running your own local server is a fun hobby. But I had my (I thought it was locked down) server hacked and web site blown away, and the wife's internet store was offline until I could restore the machine. The FBI wasn't interested in my trouble because my damages were too small money wise. I just decided to give up being an amateur server operator because there are too many skilled hackers out there that take delight in thrashing my machine. Microsoft servers don't even need to be hacked, they fail on their own. Buffer overflow problems never seem to end no matter how much attention we pay to CERT. As well informed as I thought I was, being responsible for client's on-line services was just too much heartache. So I have sympathy for those still trying to run their own mail servers. The list of people trying to give you grief includes your ISP, the Govt, and a worldwide collection of unemployed hackers with not enough to do.:-(
I have a Comcast business account, but it is on the same cable as the neighbors video, and it is very flakey. When I have had business accounts with other vendors, I got real tech support. Every time I turn around, Comcast does something nasty to me that makes things unstable again. They keep opening my access box and putting filters, sometimes backwards, and everything goes to hell. Or they unplug my cable down the street because years ago I terminated a video account, and they don't check to see I am a business Internet customer. Blah Blah... You can't run a reliable server if the packets don't reliably come and go, no matter whether they filter certain ports or not.
Over the years I have bought a slew of laptops and notebooks, TI, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, Apple... Without exception the Apple equipment lasted longer physically and stayed viable performance wise than other competing brands I tried. And it wasn't that I was buying cheap non-apple gear. The toshiba notebooks were all near the top of the line when I bought them, but each one soon displayed too much personality, and became troublesome. Each with so many software and firmware updates, it is near impossible to keep them straight. And so much junkware. The last toshiba I bought was a 17" hi-def multimedia enhanced Wonder-machine, except that after a short period of time, it would overheat and suddenly shut itself down unexpectedly. Not very healthy for data or OS. The Sony VAIO laptops I bought, don't get me started about the Vista Capable fiasco turned out to be junk. I bought the most expensive VAIO in the line at the time, fingerprint scanner and all. I am on my third battery. Keys constantly fall off the keyboard, The internal wi-fi is non-standard and flakey. and now it works fine, if you keep it plugged in, use an external keyboard, mouse, and display. The Apple hardware on the other hand, has faired better. Even the iMac 17" flat panel 1GHz PPC still runs leopard well enough to do mail, browse the web, and use iWork. That machine is now 7 years old, an working fine. I assure you I don't have any PC's that old that are worth plugging in. I have had a few problems with the hardware, and Apple promptly took care of the few things that have happened over the years. Apple's success is about choosing what to build, and supporting it well. They don't try to run every version of every operating system in the world, because there is no way to do QA for that. While brilliant in some respects because it allowed a healthy third party hardware add-in market, IBM opened a serious can of worms with the clone architecture, and even in the early days, it was hard to test all the configurations. but then a plethora of video cards, and audio cards, and motherboard hardware made PC tech support terribly painful. Plug and pray didn't help that much, and only PCI saved the architecture at all. The contemporary personal computer marketplace has enough choice for anyone, and we all have our favorites. I will continue to buy Apple and expect I will continue to have the same satisfaction level I have had for the last 7 years. Ever since Mac OS X, apple machines have been wonderful for me. But that's me. IMHO
If he had taken the job, he would have received a few dollars, then had to consider his regrets for perhaps many years, pondering whether the money was worth the compromise of his principles. I understand how hard it is to walk away from paying work. I have done it before. I turned down a contract at Autodesk when the chemistry wasn't good. We have to live by our values, and accept the results.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a 14 year old working at UCLA part time writing code to transfer brain computer interface data from the Xerox 7929 to the Sigma 7 (Network Measurement Center arpa host #1) and then on to the CCN (UCLA Campus Computing Network 360 95's for FFA. In those early days I was just amazed about compiling a program in california and sending the object file to Virginia and the printout to Massachusetts. I was trying to tell my junior high school friends about the arpa network and what it could do, and I was thought weird because I was interested in such things. I guess that means that it is also the 40th birthday of the meditation on computer communication that has been going on in my brain ever since. I thought the net was the most amazing thing when it was comprise of leased line links at 2400 baud. Jon Postel was always hiding in his office implementing the latest NCP spec. MIT was trying hard to keep me from playing chess in the daytime. And FTP services were politely restricted to night-time, if you were polite. It is not important that it was a good protocol or not. It was a protocol, and got us thinking about writing services.
I have to wonder if the administrators who made the decision to arbitrarily extend the service life or reactor one, and other similar decisions will be facing substantial public shame over this. You would think that given Japan's previous experience with radiological disaster, Japanese people in such positions would be inclined to make the conservative decisions, but I guess the "almighty yen" is powerful there as well. What sort of punishment should these people face?
I have made a vow to not buy any more Sony products for the rest of my life. I get fooled now and then by a movie I rent, but my intention is clear. Too bad there aren't a million people who feel just like I do about them
You don't have to be very paranoid to realize that business issues about millions or BILLions of dollars can result is unexplained accidents. If PJ wanted to tell her perception of the truth about the actions of big players, a degree of anonymity is/was actually wise. I decided years ago to "keep my head down" about some issues in life. I am just a small fish and can get squashed relatively easily by big players.
While it is true that "puppet masters" are still out there, we are not paying SCO for Linux licenses. That is something we have won. Must we stay vigilant? Yes, absolutely. I wouldn't say PJ is throwing in the towel. The fight for freedom and justice is not a marathon, but rather a relay. I looked to see who made such hurtful and ignorant remark, and was not surprised to see it was Anonymous Coward (is that you Bill?). Nothing PJ ever said or did was "stupid".
Thud!!
Now I am sure I don't have a clue who to believe. I just won't buy any more Sony products, even'' And I see no reason to buy a notebook from Samsung any way, seeing as how I buy Apple equipment for my computing needs. Once in a blue moon I do need to run Windows to blow a prom, but I just grit my teeth and hold my breath until next time. I wonder if LG put a keylogger in my washing machine?
I am participating in this program. I think America is way behind in the broadband area, and if the FCC doesn't know what the big players are really doing, they cannot make good decisions on our behalf. I believe there are people in the government that want us to stay competitive, if only to pay taxes. I have my doubts about what Comcast is doing to me for my money, and this program gives me access to great statistics. I for one like this program. There is nothing I am doing that I am concerned about them knowing anyway. Any business I do over the Internet is https anyway, and I assume if they want to look iside my encrypted packets badly enough, they can. My opinion anyway :-)
This is so sad. I thought patents were about more than simply the first time someone writes a subroutine. What is next? "Microsoft patents use of computer languages for writing programs" ? Wake me up, I am having a nightmare.
In America you pay income tax, and if you buy something, then you can pay property tax, but you have to eat, so you go buy food and they tax you for that. If you try and operate a business, it gets worse still. Anyway by the time they income tax you, property tax you, sales tax you, communications tax you.. How many times is that?
If the truckers just decide they don't need the record company's money enough to transport the albums, I can see a sharp decline in album sales. Or DVD's for that matter, or Blueray. There can't be that much money in media transport. Maybe a specific strike against the music industry would give them some perspective.
As I remember, the first product by the "two guys" was a Basic interpreter. Then they extended it, and began the long march towards owning BASIC. Then they bought Seattle Computer Products 86DOS, enhanced it, and began asserting they had a trademark on "DOS". Then they bought Lattice C, and began asserting they were an operating system and compiler company when both these products were bought elsewhere. I am old enough to remember step-by-step how this company continued to acquire and absorb anything that they could afford that looked like people were interested in buying it. Including the Berkeley TCP/IP stack and putting the independent protocol stack vendors out of business was a cheap shot. And the non-standard enhancements they have attempted to make to Internet protocols are obviously the fist step in an attempt to own the protocols of the Internet, something that must not be allowed to happen. They already seem to own both ends of the desktop, web-server at the cloud and web browser on the desktop. Then they bend the HTML spec out of shape and want to own that as well. I really don't like these people or the way this is going. I had great hope for the microcomputer revolution. Then after Mac OS X arrived, I switched from Windows to the Mac, and have been joyously happy since. Except for a few nauseous moments now and then when I cannot avoid a quick dip into Windows because of some short sighted company only building tool that work there. I was so disgusted by Microsofts Windows CE versions, that I paid no attention when Microsoft entered the smartphone marketplace. I don't plan on giving Microsoft any more money in this lifetime. That will have my best effort, anyway!!
My problem with time travel is that people arriving in the time and space, are like creating matter/enegy. If conservation of eergy is true, then you should be able to add up all the energy in the universe and call it e1, then convert all the matter into energy and call it e2. Add that together to get e(t). I believe me(t) should remain constant, and objects arriving (or leaving) throw that off.
If it really bothers you that much, figure out who proposed time travel to begin with, then go back and kill him.
As if dominating the computer software industry wasn't enough, Bill wants to control the vault full of un-genetically-modified seeds so that he can eventually control the world's food supply. He is in on that one with Monsanto (whatever they are called now). The very appearance of MS on the list casts grave doubt on the process by which the list was created. Most likely some of the people involved were also involved in the scandalous behavior of the international standards organization and /or ECMA.
I guess I just can't see how any publicly traded company can be considered ethical when the only apparent factor in corporate decisions these days seems to be share price.
Well that's my opinion, FWIW,AFAIAC, seeing as IANABCL. But I am LOL at the though of "ethical" and "Microsoft" being used in the same sentence.
What happens if you manage to sign on as root@universe.org, then do "rm -r -f *". The question is, do you delete god in the process.
A while back I got a catalog where a company in Berkeley was selling tachionic devices. They claimed their products were imbued with tachions and would have beneficial therapeutic effects. They were also selling a "pocket Diode". It was said to emit ions that were the "good" kind for $25. Having lived once in Berkeley, I decided to make my own, so I took out a pencil, declared it to be a "pocket diode", placed it in my pocket, and proceeded to feel better, and still had my $25 in my pocket. Magical thinking at its best. :-)
Too many people have web sites that are hosted for free because they are heavily laden with advertising. Charging for the capped data and providing free hosting that comes with gratuitous streaming video is a blatant tipoff, so obvious that senators and congresspeople should be able to see it. Right up there with telling me computers without crapware would have to cost more.
I have a Comcast business account at my home and have for three years now. Several times when I lost my mind, I tried using their residential cable as well. After a few days I decide I don't like it and I take the set top box back. Then mysteriously, my business internet fails on sunday morning. A few days later they schedule a service call and a tech comes out and discovers that my cable has been disconnected at the box down the street because I had cancelled my residential TV account, and they didn't notice I had a business internet as well. Many times now since I had my business account, it has failed for stupid reasons that could have been prevented. Twice over the disconnection of residential TV, once because they were paranoid that I had cable internet and no TV (they installed a filter (backwards I may add) that killed my internet until they came around and fixed that), and twice my internet has failed, and they tell me there is nothing wrong, until the tech checks the box down the street, and suddenly it's working again even though the tech says nothing was changed. Comcast offers the lousiest Business class internet I have experienced from any vendor. Also I share bandwidth for my business connection with the home users down the street, so when my neighbors torrent on their residential internet connections, my bandwidth goes to hell. I guess the moral of that story is buying business class service delivered over residential last mile infrastructure is a joke. My alternative is Verizon DSL, which even in 2011 still can't go over 1.5/384 for $39/month. I guess what I don't understand is that there is a comcast POP a stone's throw from my house, no doubt attached to the fiber running down that street. Only half a mile further away is the telco pop, also attached to Fiber. I don't understand where the bottleneck it. Unless the whole town of Santa Maria is connected to the world through one leased line shared by all. I am under a mile from 101, and you would think it would be the perfect backbone for the coastal cities up and down california. Maybe CALTRANS should become an ISP.
It would be nice to think that a large and successful (by some measurements) company might cooperate with a large group of people who want to make sure there is some good software in the world. And Microsoft certainly is a large and successful (by some measurements) company. There are many parables about what happens to good hearted creatures who ignore the basic nature of other animals they befriend. A scorpion is still a scorpion, no matter how much it assures you it just wants to get over to the other side of the stream. Embracing is the first step, generally followed by Extending, and inevitably Extinguishing. Maybe if we work with them they won't try to claim we are infringing on their patents. Oh yea they already did that. Maybe if we work with them they won't try to get license fees for pre-existing free software. Oh yea they did that. Maybe if we work with them, they won't publish their product specification, pretending they are open standards. Oh yea they did that. Maybe if we work with them they won't litigate until the their opponents die of natural causes. Oh yea they did that. I don't know, I have run out of ideas.
They would need a copy off ice-cream, oops, I mean coolstuff :-)
Back in 1991 I was an early adopter when appropriate usage loosened up. I got a telebit modem and a UUCP account with UUNET. Mail traveled pretty well over UUCP, and if you spamed someone, they punished you by sending you a 50 page appropriate usage document that costed you big bucks in bandwidth. Later on I got several SLIP connections and started hosting an email server for Fair Isaac that forwarded received email using a modem and UUCP. Mail still moved fairly well. Then I got ISDN, and found I was paying for multiple connections within a single minute. Around that time, spam started showing up. I had to go to DSL because ISDN was killing me financially. I was a newbie admin, and soon discovered my DSL was saturated with mail traffic using my open server. As my bandwidth increased so did the amount of hostile packets hitting my network. I was so proud of my class C network at home, but soon discovered my DSL was saturated again with probes on all 254 IPs in my class C. I would get on a packet sniffer and look at the packets hitting me, and I would find out that I was getting reverse DNS requests for blocks I had never heard of, and tons of SMB attach requests with a dictionary worth of user names. Eventually I installed a linux system with good reporting on security alerts, and discovered I was getting thousands of failed SSH attempts (from China, from Brazil...). It was FreeBSD days and I mastered inet.conf and services, and found I could set up services. I would no sooner set up a service, then some hacker would probe and discover my server port, and saturate my connection again hammering the services trying to get something to happen. As much as I wanted to have my own local server at home with a static IP, it was making me crazy. Now I use Apple Mobile Me for email. I host my domain registrations at Network Solutions, and I use my home connection mostly as a client. Now and then I set up a special purpose port for a colleague to communicate with a local embedded system using an encrypted protocol. If you have all the time in the world to spare, running your own local server is a fun hobby. But I had my (I thought it was locked down) server hacked and web site blown away, and the wife's internet store was offline until I could restore the machine. The FBI wasn't interested in my trouble because my damages were too small money wise. I just decided to give up being an amateur server operator because there are too many skilled hackers out there that take delight in thrashing my machine. Microsoft servers don't even need to be hacked, they fail on their own. Buffer overflow problems never seem to end no matter how much attention we pay to CERT. As well informed as I thought I was, being responsible for client's on-line services was just too much heartache. So I have sympathy for those still trying to run their own mail servers. The list of people trying to give you grief includes your ISP, the Govt, and a worldwide collection of unemployed hackers with not enough to do. :-(
I have a Comcast business account, but it is on the same cable as the neighbors video, and it is very flakey. When I have had business accounts with other vendors, I got real tech support. Every time I turn around, Comcast does something nasty to me that makes things unstable again. They keep opening my access box and putting filters, sometimes backwards, and everything goes to hell. Or they unplug my cable down the street because years ago I terminated a video account, and they don't check to see I am a business Internet customer. Blah Blah... You can't run a reliable server if the packets don't reliably come and go, no matter whether they filter certain ports or not.
Over the years I have bought a slew of laptops and notebooks, TI, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, Apple... Without exception the Apple equipment lasted longer physically and stayed viable performance wise than other competing brands I tried. And it wasn't that I was buying cheap non-apple gear. The toshiba notebooks were all near the top of the line when I bought them, but each one soon displayed too much personality, and became troublesome. Each with so many software and firmware updates, it is near impossible to keep them straight. And so much junkware. The last toshiba I bought was a 17" hi-def multimedia enhanced Wonder-machine, except that after a short period of time, it would overheat and suddenly shut itself down unexpectedly. Not very healthy for data or OS. The Sony VAIO laptops I bought, don't get me started about the Vista Capable fiasco turned out to be junk. I bought the most expensive VAIO in the line at the time, fingerprint scanner and all. I am on my third battery. Keys constantly fall off the keyboard, The internal wi-fi is non-standard and flakey. and now it works fine, if you keep it plugged in, use an external keyboard, mouse, and display. The Apple hardware on the other hand, has faired better. Even the iMac 17" flat panel 1GHz PPC still runs leopard well enough to do mail, browse the web, and use iWork. That machine is now 7 years old, an working fine. I assure you I don't have any PC's that old that are worth plugging in. I have had a few problems with the hardware, and Apple promptly took care of the few things that have happened over the years. Apple's success is about choosing what to build, and supporting it well. They don't try to run every version of every operating system in the world, because there is no way to do QA for that. While brilliant in some respects because it allowed a healthy third party hardware add-in market, IBM opened a serious can of worms with the clone architecture, and even in the early days, it was hard to test all the configurations. but then a plethora of video cards, and audio cards, and motherboard hardware made PC tech support terribly painful. Plug and pray didn't help that much, and only PCI saved the architecture at all. The contemporary personal computer marketplace has enough choice for anyone, and we all have our favorites. I will continue to buy Apple and expect I will continue to have the same satisfaction level I have had for the last 7 years. Ever since Mac OS X, apple machines have been wonderful for me. But that's me. IMHO
If he had taken the job, he would have received a few dollars, then had to consider his regrets for perhaps many years, pondering whether the money was worth the compromise of his principles. I understand how hard it is to walk away from paying work. I have done it before. I turned down a contract at Autodesk when the chemistry wasn't good. We have to live by our values, and accept the results.