Posts by Inspector71 158 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2009
/watch nerd on
The even better news is that you are entitled upon approval and presentation of your (used) ejector seat serial number to a very special edition Bremont MBI watch. It's subtly different to the "civilian" model but if you know ..you know. An owner's club with a very exclusive membership all of whom would probably liked never to have joined.
/watch nerd off
Each of us has our own idea of the perfect laptop. For me this period of Thinkpads hits the spot, Build quality, design, functionality were all just right for me. At one point I had 5 from this period X61s, X61Tablet, T61p, X301 and X201. You could take it completely apart and replace practically every part and screw. At the time I remember that after IBM sold the hardware business to Lenovo a lot of people thought it would all go downhill fast but for a period they hit it out of the park.
I've been very tempted to get either of the upgraded X63 or X210.
Yes, Doonesbury pretty much marked the Newton handwriting recognition for all time. :-)
To give it it's due by the time Steve Jobs killed the Newton when he returned to Apple they had improved on the infamous recognition a lot and it functioned really well. The last model, the MessagePad 2000/2100 was a really good product only (plus ca change) way too expensive and niche for the time. Powered by ARM cpus as well so a harbinger of the future in one way.
Having period flashbacks here.
For those of us on the Mac side of things, mid to late 90's networking brought us the wonders of Appleshare, the glory of Open Transport and if you wanted to pollute the network with Windows then of course you needed Dave. Not a bloke called Dave, there really was SMB networking software called Dave.
Functionality for all this was of course at times optional.
Extension Manager was your best and only friend.
That assumes that any of those parts work in the first place. It had better be simpler to work on because it is rarely out of maintenance. The F35 has been barely able to fulfil its role(s) properly since day one and has been dogged with airframe, systems integration and god knows how many other problems.
Don't get me wrong I admire it as an engineering and technical exercise, it's quite an achievement. But as a front line aircraft deployed both on land and at sea it is as they say, sub optimal. Aircraft Techs have a more choice phrase I believe.
It's an absolute classic product of the military/industrial complex. A $1.5 Trillion (and rising) tribute to pork barrel politics.
Yes for all we have a go at the fruity one and boy do they deserve it at times they are pretty canny that way. Their biggest aquistion ever I believe was when they bought Beats for $3 Billion which is verging on change down the back of the sofa for them considering the cash pile they are sitting on.
Yep
I got my very first IT "job" through my aunt one summer in the local council computer dept. She was in charge of the "punch room" where a gang of very lively women punched all the data on to cards and I got to load them on and off the I/O card reader in the computer room.
Have to say that that I think there was a point when Apple could have made a dent in at least the SMB enterprise market. They should have pushed Mac OS X Server and the XServes as a all in one business in a box solution like the old MS SBS product which Microsoft was breaking up when they thought they could make more money by selling separate products.
The "proper" OS X Server around Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard and the G5 and Intel Xserves made it a really good solution IMHO.
But then along came the iPhone and Apple Computer became Apple Inc, OS X Server became just an "app" and the Intel Xserves were killed off and they started offering Mac Minis as "servers". They just lost interest.
It's less DJing now and more live "producing" now that you can essentailly have a complete recording studio on your MacBook. Layering not just effects but actual instruments over the tracks and then doing the mixdown live as you go. Be it automated or manually tweaking it with a controller. The next step is no doubt going to be an AI DJ. (shudders)
In the end the real skill of a DJ is not being able to put together a seamless mix or knowing where exactly to place the drop or being able to scratch 3 decks at once, it's simply about choosing good music to create a mood as it always has been. Be it in a hip club at 2.00am or your cousin's wedding.
Right I'm off to Discogs....
Agreed but nostalgia apart, there is/was a greater sense of theatre with a box of 12's, a pair of SL-1200s and working the crossfader on an SH-DJ1200. I was a very poor amateur but when you saw DJ Shadow or Z-Trip or DJ Hype do a vinyl set live (as I have several times over the years) it was some experience.
It's all too perfect today where you can fade in the breakdown to the thousandth of a millisecond and you can pretty much pre program your set. Even the old school DJs who have embraced the digital age still have a little xtra something to my mind as a lot of them still use it in an analog way with all the imperfections that implies.
I know, I know, rose-tinted.
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