Posts by Glenn Amspaugh 233 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2007
Man, talk about a decent game of buzz-word bingo. It was like listening to three web designers try to explain what Web 2.0 means. I really don't get what all the folderol is; you have server(s), you have clients, you have data flowing between them. As someone who's still using the same login name I was using for bbs'ing back in the early 80's, I'm not seeing a whole lot of difference. Sure, there's some new shiny and clients are getting thinner (physically) and more mobile but, um, d'uh! That's how things have been going for the last 40 years.
/beer, 'cause I like beer.
I mean, why would anyone spend $500 on up for a system that won't run a compiler, doesn't have a command line and can't run Flash like all the other phones and such? I mean, all those (l)users are now locked out of 90% of the internets. And forget about installing Office or Outlook on this thing. No one's gonna' wanna thumb in their emails and spreadsheets and such. Bleah! I bet people will be selling these of used for $25 bucks in a year.
... is that it does not appear able to stream music/video wirelessly from a machine with an iTunes collection. I have 350 or so movies ripped to m4v, collected in iTunes on a Mac mini. My AppleTV and various Macs around the house can all stream movies from this system but my iPods and iPhone; they all have to be physically connected to iTunes system and then have a subset of items synced to them. Was really hoping iPad would not have this limitation but looks like I hoped in vain. Maybe version 3 will have that.
And a video camera somewhere on there. That would be cool.
Wait, Apple's desktop share is up to 20%? is that just last quarter sales for installed base? I thought Apple was required by law to have less than 10% market share.
As for tablet, why wait on a laptop? Picked up new MacBook in October. It's not like the tablets (if they exist) will be available any time soon. And they'll probably be pretty expensive to start with. Wait a couple years, get the cool hardware/software updates in and the price drops and then, yeah, start thinking about getting a laptop.
I like how that other company that represented itself as eBay just has to stop doing that. I mean, I go around and stand in front of a bank and say I represent them and ask people for money, they'll lock me up. But if you're a scammer who's taken in lots of money over the internet, they just tell you to stop. I gotta' get in to a better line of work.
I'm running Seven on same hardware as my WinXP system (2.66 dual core Xeon/2 GB RAM) and, while better than Vista, still not XP. And I'm not running high end apps; just a ticketing system, Office 07, and some SMS tools.
Am getting ready to butt heads with management over my going back to XP again. It just works better.
I've never shot up a computer but I did take some old AMD and Cyrix processors out to the range. On one, I'd tried drilling through the brown ceramic coating over the chip but just scratched it with a high speed steel bit. Turns out a .45 ACP and 7.62 Tokarev both made the chips shatter very prettily.
At my work (gov't related business), we're not allowed to have any hard drives/data storage devices leave our premises. We have a big old grinder that eats hard drives, ram, disks, etc. The rest of the kit; local public school system gets first pick and then the rest gets sold at auction. Frequently, the schools pass and you can find some nice bargains at auction. Last year, I picked up 2 G5 towers and two 23" monitors (Apple display adapter ones) for $600.00. There was no RAM or hard drive but they both had DVD super drives, video cards, logic board. These made some nice movie players, streaming ripped DVD's from my Mac Mini server.
/Mine's the one with the old Newton in the pocket
I'm not so much interested in an Apple tablet as a book reader but as a media player for our home server. Currently, have a Mac Mini holding 360+ movies, several gigs of music, and family iPhoto collection. It's hooked to our tv and can stream movies and such out to a laptop and sync files up to iPhone. Would be nice to have a larger screen than the iPhone that's lighter than the laptop and able to browse and play from home server, wirelessly, without synching.
@SandscriptSharpie
Check Snopes. (http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/blairholt.asp)
Looks like this Rep. Bobby Rush has introduced his bill again and it's once again languishing in committee. Just like the Republicans won't go near abortion in the federal legislature, Democrats won't go near gun control any time soon. Basically, smart politicos are realizing they have to play for the middle.
-- The well armed Lib'ral
I work tech support at a large research lab (15 year college drop out; kept changing major without graduating). At this place, new hires with PhD's first go through an internship. Sure, they're doing research and getting their names on papers but they're also the ones tasked with calling in to tech support when the printer's offline or the boss's Blackberry isn't sync'ing. Summer is always fun as that's when new hires come on board and get a quick lesson in priority. There's always a few who call in an issue and then call back within 10-20 minutes wanting to know whey they're still waiting. Basically, unless you meet with the U.S. congress and such, you get your issue handled in order it came in.
For some reason, my Quadra 650 (132 MB RAM/512k VRAM) doesn't handle Mac OS 8.1 or 8.5x very well. Had to take it back down to 7.6.1. Still, Photoshop 2.5 runs nice and fast and my LaCie tabloid scanner works great.
I guess this summer will be time for Mac housecleaning. Time to reimage all the G4's and G5's and then sell them off. Might make enough for a new Mac Mini or two.
The SyFy author David Brin has the idea of setting up all cell phones so that , when regular cell tower service goes down, they can be used to pass basic txt message packets, from phone to phone, as a way of allowing communication in areas that have their infrastructure disrupted (New Orleans/Katrina).
Oh Really said... Hmmmm don't remember reading any Si-Fi story about the collapse of the banking system.
Pat Cadigan had a short story about a musician on a floating island complex, trying to work his way to Europe. In the story, the US economy had collapsed, due to several well placed EMP bombs. Not quite the same as a bunch of Goldman-Sachs bankers infiltrating the gov't and holding the US hostage for 2 Trillion Dollars, though.
Mine's the bindle on that stick.
"I don't think a semi-automatic actually counts as an assault riffle, I thought to be an assault riffle it had to be fully automatic, and those are banned even in the USA."
In WWII, assault rifles were either bolt action or semi-auto (M1 Garand). There's even a government program set up to sell Garands, Springfields, and sometimes even Enfields (M1917 rifle) to folk here. So, yeah, in a way, I have a government issued assault rifle, with a certificate with President Clinton's sig on it it. Cool!
As for owning full auto weapons, sure. One has to get a Class III license. This is signed off by both the FBI/BATF and your local/county law enforcement. Now, some counties' Sheriff will not sign off on Class III licenses at all. Is county policy set by county commissioners. One way around this is to form a corporation (LLC) and then have the corporation get a Class III license. I believe that corporations don't depend on local LE sign off. I know of a collector who's done this. Is not the cheapest thing to do. He's on the board of a bank and owns a construction company. Not the type to just go nuts. He's also had a bank safe built in his house (which is also alarmed like a bank) as his gun room. Says his collection is worth almost $1M, if he was to sell off.
Also, Class III weapons are very expensive. Usually run $2000-$3000 on up. Most regular folks, who want to own such things, tend to get the semi-auto versions. You can find just about any type of military arms sold as a semi-auto version. For myself, I'd like to pick up a semi-auto M2 .50 cal.
I was kicked out of 2 year college after my first year and even I know that this greenhouse danger stuff is all just a bunch of semi-communist scientist freaks who want to make everybody poor. If all the big companies have to change how they do things, they won't pay their employees as much and then those employees won't pay me as much to fix their cars and install fences (i work at a garage and after hours, do landscape construction). Why do the communists hate me? Why do they want me to make less than $30,000 a year?
Don't forget that Bill G's Dad was a high powered patent attorney, specializing in Intellectual Property law and that Bill's Mom is the one that got IBM looking at MicroSoft:
"In 1980, Mary Maxwell Gates, Bill's mother, got to know John Opel, the chairman of IBM, through their work at the United Way Foundation.
At the time, IBM was preparing to release the first PC, and it needed an operating system. Opel chose tiny Microsoft as its OS vendor partly on the strength of his connection to the Gates family -- a decision, Dash writes, "that ended up being the greatest turning point in the history of the biggest software company that's ever been created."" -Machinist's Blog, Salon.com
So, not a garage visionary, battling Goliath's, but a rich kid with connections, later willing to use MS leverage to spread FUD when running up against new tech, hoping to slow things down until MS could release their version. Heck of a vision, Billy!
So, as of Monday, our shop was told that we couldn't order Acrobat 8 any more and would have to order Acrobat 9. No problem, costs $8.00 more than 8 but customers are cool. Today, customers started receiving their Acrobat Install Key and a link out to Adobe's site. Only problem is that, apparently, Adobe isn't shipping Acrobat Pro/Std 9. They're just sending out install keys. Sigh.
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