Yeah, but isn't it Jobs who chooses the direction that their gadgets finally take? Just because he's not the one to engineer them, doesn't mean he doesn't have a gigantic impact on how they operate.

I remember reading about the guys who developed the PalmPilot. One of the people carried around a block of wood the targeted size of the unit, pulling it out and pretending to write on it, "using" it whenever he would use the real device. He wasn't the engineer, he just had the vision. It takes both -- the guy with the vision and the engineer to realize the product.

I have no real idea about how much influence Jobs has had over the ipod or iphone. My reading has implied he had a lot to do with it, but I can't be sure. But my point is the best engineers and designers in the world can make a really horrible product. It takes the vision and willingness to see beyond what is now and what we think is possible to make a great product.

Preserve as much as you can, but just as important is that the kids spend time with their mother, doing things they both enjoy. Not big things, but Mom reading to the girls. Cooking if she enjoys it. The normal day to day things around the house that they can do together. Those are things they will treasure and remember.

On the other side, I'd make time to actually interview your wife. Take the time, when she's able and willing, to ask her about her life and get it recorded. It may never mean anything much to your children, or it may be one of the most important things they have when they get older. But give them a chance to have those memories about their mother.

Contrary to what some others have said, I don't believe that recording her memories is selfish. Well, maybe it is, but not in a bad way. You're the one who is going to have to answer your daughters' questions about her as the years come and they grow older, and spending time now recording her memories will let you do that.

Remembering someone intensely isn't the same as dying with them, isn't the same as giving up on life because they aren't there any longer.

"by the time he'd paid £50 for the recovery disc, paid for a new hard drive and paid for the labour of installing the device, it made more sense to buy a new machine."

I think the key words there are "it made more sense to buy a new machine". Doesn't surprise me. And isn't that what the manufacturers want? Buy that new machine, spend just a little more money, and feel like you've gotten something better when in all likelyhood, you really haven't.

They don't burn a different image for each machine shipped. Not even each model shipped. I recently had to restore two Dell machines. Each came with a base Windows disk with a bunch of different base drivers for a bunch of different machines. Then came the drivers disk, which supported a bunch of different models as well. Each of those two disks probably supported hundreds of different models.

Hmm. Well, if I go see The Transiberian Orchestra, I better see them performing the music, or yeah, I'm going to feel cheated. If I were to go see Miley Cyrus (though why I would, I can't imagine), I'm going to see Miley Cyrus, not her backup band. The people I personally make an effort to see make their livings being real musicians, and I'm going to see them play their own music. I go because I want to see them perform live, perhaps even meet them. (I don't go see the really big artists. Not interested 99% of the time.)

Regardless of what I go see, there are still a lot of muscians out there who play real music. If people want to see them perform their music live and go for that experience, it doesn't make them "suckers".

Because some of us can tell it's not a real person playing a real violin, or cello, or trombone, or whatever. And no, playing musical scores is not something done better by a machine, especially when that machine needs to act and react to what is going on onstage with a real person. The sounds aren't the same and the playing isn't the same.

Why not recordings? I've seen it done -- not on Broadway, but for amateur productions. Again, it isn't the same. The people on stage are forced into a certain tempo and style, and that's not the best thing for a live show.

In a live show the musical director should be able to vary the orchestra according to the mood of the current evening. Sometimes a bit slower, sometimes faster. Sometimes pausing because the audience found one particular line particularly amusing that evening.

In theatre, in stage productions, things change from night to night, and the actors, actresses, and musicians should be able to change as well. Anything else and you don't get the best performance possible.

Insightful? Not really.

Once you've learned a non-OO language like C, any competent programmer should be able to learn any other non-OO language in a short time. Same for OO -- learn one, and a competent programmer can learn the next very quickly.

Programming languages aren't like spoken languages. They have a regular syntax and a very small vocabulary. And no conjugations. Sure, you've got to learn what string functions are available, and what libraries do what, but you aren't really learning anything new. So, you have to keep a cheat sheet (the web, for example) that tells you strlen() is now length(). So what? After you do it a couple of times, you've learned it and you move on.

Point is that learning syntax should be easy for a programmer, and since syntax is what a programming language is, a decent programmer will pick up and use any language that he or she needs. Different languages are just tools in a developer's kit.

But then, when you actually drove the two cars, then nice shiny one despite being well cared for and looking sporty, had a top speed of 80 MPH and about as much acceleration as a snail, while the dull and faded one had a top speed of 180 MPH and a 0-60 time of 4 seconds.

Now which one do you buy?

Graphics help. But gameplay is everything. (And what kind of gameplay I like is probably entirely different than what kind of gameplay you like.) Some people will look at the nice shiny car and ask why anyone would ever want to go over 80 MPH and buy that one. Some people will look at the not so shiny car and say "That one will be more fun to drive, so I'll take that one."

Which one is better is an entirely personal opinion.

Sean.

No, a month to get the order approved, sent out, machine delivered, racked, OS installed, SAN attachment approved, cables run for eth and SAN, SAN configured, SAN attached, and at least one user on the system for the project.

That's not at all an unreasonable timeline in a medium to large company.

Of course, where I worked, none of that would even start until the project was approved. Then we could start the process of getting hardware.

S.

Er, which desktop? I took it to mean a non-technical, non-server instance of Linux, certainly not KDE or Gnome specifically. If we're talking about Linux for the non-technical user, then it really doesn't matter which "desktop" is on the system.

Unfortunately, I do still see issues with major distributions installing easily, and being used easily on systems. Last fall, fedora 10 refused to reliably recognise my network card. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. I solved it by installing another network card I had laying around. Ubuntu seemed to install on an older (not too old) system, but then crashed very reliably whenever I tried to use it.

The computer I'm using -- the Fedora 10 system where I had to install the extra network card -- still won't play mp3s. I did *finally* get flash to work on it, but since this is my work system, playing mp3s is way down my list of importance.

Maybe it's true that most people don't need a lot of games, and that solitaire and the like are okay for them. However, for the person that wants something more complex, Wine really isn't a solution. It's just too slow.

My point is that as much as I dislike the Windows OS as an OS, it provides a couple of things that Linux can't. It provides an easy to use system that for the vast majority of people will just work for everything they need, and it provides the gaming platform for computer based games.

As a server OS, I *really* hate Windows. Linux is a far superior OS in many, many, ways. But then we're not talking about servers, are we?

Sean.

Knowing that a thing *can* be done is not the same as having the ability to build it.

In the case of the time machine, the teleporter and the perpetual motion machine, you don't even know if any one of them is possible.

I don't know much about circuit boards either, but I bet I could, with a tiny bit of research, make a good determination if a thing was possible within the parameters I set.

Let's see... for example, I know that it would be possible to build an amature radio handheld that would allow you to input your ID and someone else's ID, then your radio would only respond when the other ID was calling you, and your transmissions would be the only ones heard by the other ID (assuming that radio had similar software and hardware). We can go a bit farther and make it a standard, putting a switch on all handhelds that either limits your transmission and reception to certain ID, or opens it wide up so everyone can hear you and you can hear everyone else.

It's certainly possible. (It's also probably not viable and potentially illegal based upon interference problems.)

The point isn't that this is an invention, good or bad, the point is, first, that a person can certainly "invent" something without knowing exactly how to build it, and, second, simply because you don't know exactly how to build something doesn't mean you don't know it can be built.

Sean.