The Blue Screen of Life

WP 5.1 was undoubtably the best word processer made. Compared to its rivals - notably Wordstar, to a much lesser extent Word (<esc> to configure? That's like clicking "Start" to power off. Oh, yeah, same company) - it was head and shoulders above everything.

(Must say though that while I never cared for WordStar, I still use their CTRL-Key combos all the time.)

There are two features I very much miss from WP, unavailable in anything out there today:

* The ability to left, center AND right justify words in a single line of text.

* Reveal Codes.

This latter was an awesome feature, albeit required if you started delving into complicated docs.

Macro capability and customizable keyboard layouts were pretty cool too.

I swore off WP when the 'doze version came out. Knew they had lost the war, but didn't blame them at all. It was M$ they were up against, after all; the same guys who stole compression from Stacker, back when a 40 meg hard drive was considered huge (and cost twice that of the last 2TB USB I got from the local office supply store).

All this is making me wonder if I could somehow coerce 5.1 to run on my Macbook Pro. Sans Parallels, of course.

Then again, try as I might I can't successfully get my SuperDrive to read a 5.1" floppy, so installation may not be so easy a task...

#Define Open

The solution is simple: Google sells Android to Oracle.

Those guys are *so good* at open source, it'll be forked within a year.

Perhaps it will be called "Lor".

2394 Days & Counting

What took the plaintiff so long?

Steve Jobs Cannot Be Played

There is only one choice: Chuck Norris!

Where's Waldo?

This whole "location awareness" thing is being overblown.

For one thing, the President of the United States works from home, so chances are most times you'll find him at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. As an American, I'd be upset if you took a crack at that house, but hey, that's where the man lives. It's public record.

Furthermore, just because he uses a BlackBerry doesn't mean the service has to initially run through RIM servers. I'm sure there's a nice dedicated box at a certain compound in Virginia whose sole existence in life is to happily NAT the *real* device.

Hopefully the No Such guys have a sense of humor, and leave some of the dummy-but-actively-broacasting gadgets in fun places like Yemen, Euro Disney, or a variety of "burlesque" establishments operating conveniently near the aforementioned domicile.

I could just see the hacker's face when he thinks he's found the Prez based on his IP, and it turns out to be someplace, as Messrs. Chapman, Jones, Idle, et have said, "completely different"...

Archive Schmarchive

I don't understand the big hooplah.

Three little letters would solve the entire problem: bcc

Just spool a copy to another box, have that routinely harvested to present his correspondence to the public, and everyone's happy.

Maybe *I* should try out for that new tech czar position...

Westworld

AFAIK, he never wrote WestWorld, but it was a pretty good movie, like something he might have written. Similarly, Coma was actually a Robin Cook novel, but he did a pretty good job directing it.

Sad to see another author go. Have to agree with some of the other comments, he was a good writer, but had a lot of crappy endings.

My favorite would probably have to be Eaters of the Dead, though that was so atypical of his work. Timeline & Sphere were rubbish. Disclosure & Prey amongst the better of his later works. For the older stuff, I'd have to go with Terminal Man.

We'll miss you, Michael!

Keeping Up With The Vistas

Sayeth the Register: "Punters will also need to make sure their 6930p uses not only one of Intel's new 80GB solid-state drives but also an 'HP Illumi-Lite LED display'. They'll have to run Windows XP - not Vista, you'll note; so much for the latest technology."

Funny, I thought Vista was still in Beta. I certainly wouldn't use it in a production site.

Wouldn't that actually make XP the latest technology? At least the latest *stable* technology...

Silicon vs Plastic

Whatever happened to the Solar Tower project they were working on down in Australia? (environmission.com.au)

Seems covering the land surrounding the generator with a huge tarp (sic) & feeding the resulting hot air past the tower's turbines would cost *much* less than building scads of movable mirrors.

Historically, sand and gears have not been the best of friends; keeping moving parts to a minimum is always a good idea, no matter what you're designing.

IIRC, the Australian project was a 1 kilometer tall tower that would produce up to 200 MW of electricity. Based on a 60 foot tall German prototype built in the 90's, it relies on the temperature differential between the ground and the top of the tower to draw air past some 30 turbines located around its base.

The tarp sits a few feet above the surface of the ground surrounding the tower, basically acting as a greenhouse to heat the air. As its only method of escape is through the top of the "chimney", the air will move of its own accord past the turbines.

Me Like Fire - NOT

It's about time we stop lighting things on fire just to get from A to B. Or leave the porch light on. Or re-heat yesterday's burrito...

There's plenty of energy available from the sun, wind, wave action, heat differential between ground & sky; the list goes on.

Instead of investing billions just to figure out a different way to burn things, why not be as smart as the guys who discovered fire in the first place, and refine these processes which we already know exist?

Oh, yeah, I remember why. The money those poor, suffering corporations would miss if humans had their own methods of capturing energy, instead of having to rely on some modern day alpha male to dole it out.

Blowin' In The Wind

Whatever happened to the Solar Tower they were going to build in Victoria?

www.enviromission.com.au

The last news update is from 2 years ago, but they do have a financial statement from this past June.

Buy Windows, Save Money

Sorry to hear the *nix laptop is taking so long ... Dell usually ships very quickly.

Simple solution: Get a 'doze box with max memory, sell the COA on Ebay, load *nix yourself.

Just make sure you get XP, you probably won't be able to sell Vista to anyone with more than a quarter of a brain.

Front Row Seats

Don't see the problem - or the hoopla. Folks pay extra for premium access all the time. It's not like they got ripped off for a couple hundred bucks, it's more like they paid extra to be the first to show off their new toy.

Was installing some extra DSL lines at one of the stores just a few days before launch. A floor salesperson comes back on break, starts talking to another employee, says he's figured out what to tell people when they ask if the iPhone is out yet...

To customer: Wait a minute, let me check...

Pulls iPhone out of back pocket, speaks into it: ... Yes, uh-huh, right, OK, thanks!

Puts phone away, faces customer: No, sorry, it's not in yet.

Cheeky bunch, those MacHeads.

Vonage Has No Business Doing Business

It took letters to the FTC & Attorney General of New Jersey before they would admit the account had been closed.

At first we closed via email, as we had done with an earlier account (one set up for Dad). Then, after getting tired of the automated email replies, we call, only to be told the "system was down" and we needed to call back later.

Moved away from Vonage in April after 3 more or less satisfied years (so long as customer service was never involved) due to fears of their patent problems and potentially losing the home number we've had for 25 years.

Buddha must have been playing tricks that day, as we unwisely chose Sunrocket as the new carrier.

Our numbers didn't get ported over to Sunrocket until June, which effectively meant we could not use their service, as while we could call out, we had no inbound service through them. Oh, the reason the numbers finally got ported? We called Vonage customer service to see what was taking so long. The very next day we were off Vonage's network - but lost all inbound service for a week. Funny thing is, Vonage claimed they'd released the numbers a full week before, even though people outside their network could still call us. They must have majical phone lines, these Vonage people.

A month later, Sunrocket was kaput. Now we're still waiting for the numbers to be ported to the new provider, and honestly I don't know whether or not to believe them when they say the delay is on Sunrocket's side.

What are we supposed to do, go through our phone book and call *everyone*, giving out some crap temporary number? It's not like DNS, there's no propagation. Your software flips a proverbial switch, and you're with the new provider. It's not done physically anymore, there's no guy having to punch down a new set of pairs back in the CO. Honestly don't see the need for more than an hour or two's delay while the software gets queued to run.

So far as trouble getting off their service, Vonage's claim is that if you don't call in to cancel your account, it remains in an "active" state, and is thus billable. To this we replied that we were paying for a dial tone, not an account number, and asked that, having moved to a new carrier, exactly what service was Vonage still providing for which we should pay. Somehow, in all the automated email replies, that answer never came.

Sometimes I wish ATT had *never* been forced to divest!

My Eleven Cents Worth

Vonage has a lot more to do than fix patent problems if they want to keep customers.

We moved our two lines away back in the Spring, mainly due to the patent problems and fears of losing a long-held number. It took until August for them to admit we had even left them (how one remains a customer without a dial tone never was answered).

They also delayed allowing the port of our existing numbers to the new provider for as long as possible, so they could keep charging up until the last moment.

All that could have been forgiven, though, had we ever once gotten an actual, human reply from them regarding the cancellation of the account & the problems porting out.

It was nothing but canned non-answers, each one appearing to come from a different cubicle clone who didn't bother coming up to speed on the history of the case, preferring merely to click 'paste' and be done with it.

Getting customers is fairly easy. Keeping them, though, apparently requires more work than Vonage cares to offer. They do present themselves as a cool, hip alternative to Bell, but when it comes down to it they act just like any other monolithic company, uncaring of those who at the end of the day are the only reason their coffers remain full.

yrtemmyS

Shouldn't the title of this article have been:

"F5 gets symmetrical, lacirtemmys steg 5F" ???

;)

Apples & Oranges

Hi,

I live in the US, so don't have to deal with a lot of the stuff you folks talk about. My broadband connection runs a tad over 22 of your pounds a month, and I get around 6 megs downstream. They cap uploads at a very low number, around 450K, I guess to minimize sharing.

My cell phone is through Deutsche Telecom, as I have a SideKick. It's OK, but the internet service is a bit spotty. I like the fact that I have no roaming charges, no matter where in the country I may go.

What I'm curious about, though, is how you folks feel about Orange in general. See, I do freelance computer work, routers, commercial stuff, telephone systems, whatnot, and they've become the parent company for the group with whom I do most of my work.

Ever since opening their big call center in Cairo, I've noticed a drastic decline in both technical expertise and motivation in keeping the customer satisfied. I was just wondering if you end users are experiencing the same thing.

Virtually Certain

Went to a virtualization demo the other day put on by a local Red Hat employee. While they have based their offering on Xen, it is a new fork being developed by them. It's based on Xen v3; we were told they waited for v3 to take advantage in improvements over Xen v2.

Pretty cool stuff, too, you could install locally or over the wire, give your child nodes min & max memory requirements, letting the child's available memory inflate on the fly.

We did run into an issue with the child nodes not wanting to grab IP for their network install (which was actually, physically a local install, just mounted the CD as a dir in Apache), but weren't sure if that was RHEL or the ThinkPad's problem. It was some sort of DHCP issue; the install machine hadn't been plugged into the LAN when it booted. A reboot with the net connected solved this, though perhaps one could just bounce the interfaces.

Due to their "sideways" model (both the primary & all guest nodes talk directly to the "hypervisor", or abstraction layer if you will), RH claims a significant performance increase on disk writes. Supposedly with VMWare, disk actually gets copied twice , once when the guest node tells it to, then again after that request has wormed its way down to their own abstraction layer. However, we did not have VMWare running side by side to verify this claim.

No specs were offered on required hardware, but of course the more the merrier. In the kind of environment these machines would be running, it wouldn't be uncommon to have 8, 16 or more gigs of memory.

Also, the master node apparently has inked a deal with Peter Parker, as its Spidey Sense tingles if a child goes down (say, the one running your web server), and it will automatically copy that one off to a different child. Down time was supposed to be in the milliseconds. Hardly slow enough to even require that second click as you wonder why your page isn't coming up.

You can also manage & copy nodes across the network.

Lastly, the RH employee indicated their cost is about 20% that of VMWare, and there are no additional modules to purchase.

Imperial Trouncing Across The Waves

Bit of a tangent here, but still relevant.

While a typical northern European mutt, I owe my love of Guiness to the Irish bits within me, which have actually been here in the States since before they were states.

So, of course I have a set of Guiness glasses, from which I can enjoy a tasty beverage after a long day of whatever it is I do around here.

Now, I know Guiness tastes nothing here in the U.S. like it does over your way, and one day I hope to sample the true thing. But for now, the product they make in those tall, fashionably black cans comes as close to the keg as one can reasonably expect to get on this side of the pond. Unless of course you have a keg, in which case you probably need to go to a meeting of some sort, or you own a pub.

So, imagine my surprise last Christmas, when the good folk in Dublin came out with a "New Look". At first I thought I'd bought a bad batch, as the cans were no longer filling up my Imperial Pint glasses. I had at least two inches of air at the top.

Tried another pack, same thing. Wrote to them, no reply. Finally my honey calls their U.S. offices, and we're astonishingly told that the "New Look" is actually less volume per can!

Apparently there are people here in America who don't understand the difference between a 16oz pint and a proper Imperial Pint. They kept making messes in the kitchen as that last four ounces overflowed their tiny glasses. They complained. Guiness listened, and made a marketing move. "Hey, now we can say there's this new look, justifying a raise in price. And we get to use less product per unit. Brilliant!"

Not sure how that's supposed to help sales, as I haven't bought one since, though I do occasionally have to make my way to a local pub for a true keg-served pint. In a proper sized glass.

So far as the metric thing goes, we tried that back in the early 70's. It didn't really work out. I was young enough, think my brain could have made the transition from quarts to litres. Our teachers on the other hand...

Perhaps, as they are so valiantly trying here in the States to teach two languages (one of the NOT French, go figure), you folks could try instilling school children with two measurement systems. Surely one of them will whip up a quick PHP script so he can natively think how he wants, and have his phone tell him the "proper" amount.

Just my two pence worth. ;)

Losing Faith In Vonage

Have been a faithful Vonage user for just short of a few years now, but will be switching.

Wrote to them asking about how I could ensure our home phone number doesn't get hijacked should they enter bankruptcy. Specifically asked for a reply from a human, not a boilerplated auto-answer. Figured as much trouble as they were having, they'd take the time not to lose a relatively long-term customer.

No such luck. The first response was completely automated and indicated nary a human had even laid eyes on my query.

Replied to the 'bot telling them I'd be moving on. Got another automated message.

I know, they have lots of customers, but thanks to this abysmally poor customer service, they're soon to have one less. I would have stuck with them to the end (which is probably fast approaching, thanks to their legal troubles), but don't think in this case it was too much to ask for a real, human reply.

Oh, my current broadband provider is actually offering quite a substantial discount for the first six months - roughly 30% - then will go up to about right about what I'm paying now after that. However, that's a deal, as their advertised rate for both lines would be nearly 40% more than I'm now paying.

Sorry to see you go, Vonage. Perhaps in the future - if you have one - you'll pay more attention to the folks who pay your bills and less to programming automated email.

Dance, Vulture, Dance!

Perhaps Reg's Second Life avatar could have his own web page, something to complement www.subservientchicken.com ???