Glenn McDavid

Later in the afternoon I did some shopping while mia_mcdavid took a nap. I then made one of the changes to the post drill that I had thought of last night. Then a shower, and off to work. Fortunately, that just meant a trip to the basement, where, with a cable modem and VPN, it is almost like going downtown.

( The joy of MS Windows )

I am not a fan of Microsoft, or Windows (I am writing this on a Linux system). However, Windows is what I have to deal with on the job, and I seem to be pretty good at it. So I guess I am stuck with it.

Small, light, cheap, solid state storage (no moving parts), a keyboard, and Linux: The Asus Eee PC 900.

Also available with Windows XP, but why?

Another lap in the race to the bottom. Faster! Faster!

I got a call a little before 8 last night from the Windows OS staff at my job. A routine patching process (Microsoft systems need so much patching you might as well make a routine of it) had failed. They could not get the database system to start up.( Under the gun )

( geeky details )

( Fixed! ) The other guys were then able to patch windows and then restart the system, so our offices could open normally this morning and the public would not have to hear: "I am sorry, our computers are down."

( post-mortem )

This is funny:

Stay at Home Servers. See Microsoft's Brainwashing Children's Book for a copy that loads much faster.



From unknownpoet78 via rillaspins

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( Clann Tartan's business won't wait )

0%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

(From rillaspins)

A Mac is an elegant and expensive alternative to a Windows machine. Linux is another alternative to Windows, as elegant as you care to make it, and free.

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(If you let this monster in, you really cannot call it your computer any more)

Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems. Via Slashdot.

A great argument for open-source software!

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Got home about 5:30 tonight. I have spent most of my time since then ... working on computers. Tried to revive our oldest Windows 98 box. Eventually decided it was not worth saving. The only thing it had been doing lately was to function as a print server. I connected the printer to mia_mcdavid's workstation, found a driver on the internet (the original CD being lost), and we can print again.

Also checked e-mail from work. There was a SQL Server problem there on a new server. I guessed what might fix it, tried it, and it seemed to have solved the problem. This is what one of my old bosses called "Voodoo programming"--You cannot really explain why something works.

The last couple days I was shopping for computer parts and visited two local stores that have used/reconditioned computers for sale. At the low end of the price ranges in both stores I saw the same model Pentium III Compaq DeskPro for sale. One store wanted $59 for it. The other was asking $149. Is the second just being greedy? They had more memory on the box. At current retail prices that would account for $20. It may have had a bigger hard disk--perhaps another $10-20 at current prices for old hard disks (I did a little checking). That still leaves $50-60. Pure profit? No--the more expensive store was selling a functional system with Windows 2000. The cheaper store was selling a nearly naked box. It had just enough pieces of DOS to boot. Looking at the current price of Windows, that is not unreasonable. So I really cannot fault the second store.

But, don't you need Windows? No, you don't. Linux is free. That $50-60 goes straight to Bill Gates.