No I wouldn't, I use one almost every day. Unfortunately the console UI is a little quirky and they never brought in web developers familiar with RPG and the like to build attractive web interfaces for the more common uses, so it's probably going to be replaced with a bunch of Windows servers in the next few years.

IBM already got burned on a commodity OS that could run on non-IBM-but-compatible commodity hardware, ie, MS-DOS. Their attempts in the late eighties and nineties to mitigate that didn't work because cost ruled, and no one wanted to pay thousands of dollars for a Microchannel expansion card when an ISA card did the same thing for a tenth the price.

Windows 95 was still sitting on DOS to a large extent, just not as visibly or largely as before. When you "shut down" windows and got the black screen with orange text that said you could now turn off the computer, if you typed the MS-DOS "mode" command with an option like 40-column you unmasked the hidden DOS prompt and could still use the computer.

Windows 95 worked like a lot of 386-enhanced DOS-based games did, loading itself after using DOS as a means to get the program loaded. '98 and ME were similar, though when they tried to strip most of that out of ME they made things screwy.

Heh. I still remember how to install sound card drivers through the MCI control panel.

I also worked at an early commercial ISP, helping people install Trumpet Winsock on their Windows 3.1 machines. It was probably WfW 3.11 now that I think about it, given that there had to be at least a rudimentary stub of a TCP/IP stack.

I also worked with some interesting Novell applications where the diskless workstation would network-book to a Novell share, the user would log-in, get drive mappings in DOS, and from the server load Windows. Didn't work half-bad so long as the network connection was stable.

I don't know if it was so much a fragmented market as IBM still betting the farm on big iron computing, which was based around gaining shell access and running all of the programs on the mainframe. They do have a point, in the sense that the mainframe has a lot of benefits especially for highly-centralized functions like financial processing, but the eye-candy that is the GUI OS won out and IBM didn't bank on the size of the market that wouldn't involve centralized computing, like pretty much all small business.

Wasn't there some kind of licensing arrangement that allowed IBM to either use Microsoft libraries or else to have access to the APIs for 16-bit Windows, that did not extend to 32-bit Windows applications?

I do not discount the important evolutionary step in OS that Windows 3.0 was, but given that Windows 3.1 and then 3.11 for Workgroups fixed many of the problems that Windows 3.0 had and added the initial computer networking protocols, I just can't call 3.0-even the most important milestone of even the 3.x line, let alone Windows in general. I'd be more likely to label Windows NT 3.5 with that, as that was the first version where the server-side of things was robust enough to do something useful for corporate networks, and when they were still headed in a direction where the relatively light-weight GUI on the server box wasn't a horrible resource-hog for the running machine. Hell, they even had intended on taking NT into the embedded server market before they changed course with 4.0 and 2K.

Sometimes I wonder if the introduction of general-purpose computers into business environments was a mistake. Couple the general-purpose nature in that they run anything and everything with a connection to a global network and I wonder if the productivity gained through the use of a computer for many tasks has been taken away by the ability to be distracted.

Your local news is probably the closest to being a friend for broadcast television. By only running three or four hours of news every day, they don't have to sensationalize news in-general just to survive, the bulk of their other programming does that for them.

I personally like NPR and some of the PBS news, but they're not infallible and they've made mistakes.

My point in originally posting *yawn* it's worth taking with a grain of salt. I was judging the reporter, not the report. It may be factual, or it may be wildly inaccurate, or it might be factual from a technical perspective by narrowing or qualifying the statement, I do not know. I do know that I'm not going to take NewsCorp's word for it.

Fact of the matter is, I do not trust NewsCorp's motives as I do not know what those motives are in-whole, but the way I interpret their past direct actions, ie, that which they have themselves published or broadcast through their various properties, leads me to not assume that their intentions are what they seem to claim them to be. Even if they immediately decided to be wholly transparent and above-board it would probably take several years for me to be able to trust them, as there's usually no benefit in changing a negative opinion once it has been demonstrably earned.

I still have a Model 500 around here somewhere. As a teenager I had modified it to allow me to record telephone conversations to cassette tape.

Okay, post-acquisition, did WSJ make a point of investigating the Sarah Palin private yahoo e-mail that she used for business while in power as the Governor of Alaska to circumvent Alaskan law? I don't remember coverage of that being terribly strong. I also don't remember WSJ asking the public to comb through through the gwb43 e-mail personally.

Wouldn't that be 471 beads?

This isn't the first time that I've seen mention of this. If I'm remembering previous articles correctly, these beads are ending up being consumed by very small sea creatures, who cannot process them, who then are eaten by bigger sea creatures, who also cannot process them, etc, until they build up in large concentrations toward the top of the foodchain to poison those alpha predators. There's concern for humans that eat those largest animals too.

Honestly I'm surprised that they were legal in the first place, but if there wasn't an explicit law against them then I guess the companies that have manufactured and used them were free to do so regardless of any perceived morality on the matter.

In a world where an organization dedicated to publishing the damning evidence of cults is forced into bankruptcy and then purchased by one of those cults, who continues to operate the organization as a means to identify individuals against their cause, I'm generally willing to take the acquisition of a group originally with certain positions by a group with differing positions with a bit of a grain of salt.

The Wall Street Journal has been a decent publication, but is now owned by a media entity whose management staff has an agenda and has nakedly used its media holdings to advance that agenda. The very name, "NewsCorp," is doublespeak when the bulk of their prominent content is not news. I have no doubt that WSJ's acquisition was in part strategic.

Not that it's much consolation to an anonymous coward like you, but I don't exactly put a lot of stock in CNN or MSNBC or whatever they're currently called either. The 24-hour news cycle is one of the worst things in that because it's ad-revenue based, it has to continually attract attention to itself to remain profitable, so it makes much ado about nothing in order to keep its audience. That means polarizing the audience because there's nothing people love more than to have some feeling of theirs reinforced. They're all echo-chambers that feedback on their respective audiences.

I think that's the crux of it for ex-cons, but not for the reasons most people think.

When a former convict goes back into the same community that he committed his crimes in, he's probably going to fall back into roughly the same life that he had before as that life was probably the path of least-resistance for that neighborhood. Put him into a different neighborhood and he has to learn a new way to live, and there's a greater chance over the previous one that it will not include crime. No guarantee, but it's probably better odds.

Yawn...