What's interesting is that it seems Apple's product announcements are the only remaining tech that gets everyone talking, whether pro or against, people do talk about it. Dell might have released half a dozen new systems last week, but who'd know? I was in a tmobile store the other day and saw a number of Android-based handsets that I hadn't heard of. And even though I consider myself a geek, I have very little idea what the Xoom is, other than a Motorola tablet, and more to the point, why should I care?

I'm not saying that we should care about Apple product announcements, but Apple seems to be the only ones who can generate any significant buzz about whatever it is they're announcing.

What I mean is, what IBM products will be the beneficiary of the tech they developed to make Watson; DB/2? WebSphere? You've gotta think that the IBM execs only agreed to go forward with this whole thing with some thought to being able to leverage it in other products.

Personally, I've love to think this was a "pure research" thing, but I doubt anyone really does that anymore (though I hope I'm wrong).

As one of the two dozen people who got the "System going down now!!!" messages back in the late 80s, then waited for half an hour for the Vax running Ultrix to come back, I agree with the sentiment, especially since walking away from the terminal was essentially relinquishing it to the next person who was going to kick you off anyway.

The problem is that now you've got a box with relatively few actual logged-in users, but a whole lot of applications that can take awhile to start up. On one of the boxes we have, we have multiple instances of Oracle, WebLogic, and some other daemons, some home-grown, some from other software packages. And while it's not 30 minutes to get back to a running state, it's about 5-10 minutes, and those are very long minutes when you've got users screaming about the money being lost because the site isn't up.

Even on my Mac at home, I have to be careful about just rebooting because other family members may have been doing something important, and not everyone hits the 'save' button 30 times a minute like I do. I've gotten some angry looks at home that match the ones I get at work for exactly the same reason; I'm very very reluctant to reboot before asking everyone, anyway (and even then it doesn't always help...)

According to my clock, it's now 10:45 EST. I checked the links above but nobody as posted what the "big announcement" was all about.

Given the $$$ for the boxed set, which was way more than a poor college/post college programmer could afford, I promised myself I'd get these books when volume 4 came out. Over the years I've read through and copied, a lot of times by hand, his algorithms while sitting at B&N or someplace, and I always would finish by saying "Why don't I just buy this and save me the trouble?" Then suddenly everything was on the internet, and I could refer back to my notes, and then I didn't need to look at my notes any longer, but I kept wanting to buy the books, if anything to show gratitude. Now that the 4th is out, I'm going to do it.

It must have been 10+ years ago since I last played a game on the PC, switching over to consoles. Damn right I'm gonna be picking this up. Think I'll break out my original copy of DN3D and give that a play-through as well. Hmm...wonder if it plays okay in DOSBox...

Funny enough, I was just thinking about this insofar as my backup disk died, while the main disk in the machine is still running fine. I've listened to enough TWiTs and the like to know about Drobo and checked out the site. I like that the size can be increased over time (up to whatever limit the firmware supports in the enclosure). I was thinking I could also justify it by getting the version that sits on the network as a NAS and use it for all my Time Machine backups, etc.

I also have a separate external disk (not a Drobo or NAS or anything fancy) that I do an overnight copy of all the important files using rsync with the disk plugged directly into the Firewire 800 port, then I take the disk with me to my folks house and let it sit there. After a week or two I bring it home and the whole process repeats.

I've also got a private vpn to a Linux machine I set up, but even though I did a full update on it for backup, rsync takes forever (many many hours) to determine what files need to be updated/added, and the machine gets pretty bogged down. Still working on a good solution for automatic offsite backups...

I'd be interested to know what others think of the Drobo before plunking down the $$$ for one.

After convincing my boss and *his* boss about the benefits of Skype, yesterday was the day I was going to demo it to show how it works, benefits, video, etc.

Suffice to say, the demo did not go well.

I use GWT. It's a pretty nice toolkit for web pages that is all Java; it compiles the Java to Javascript so there are some classes that you can't use (AWT, Swing, etc.). I've found the performance to be good (certainly better than the big Flex apps I'm using it to replace) and being able to stick with one language through everything is a big plus. You can still use CSS to format the output, so you don't have to stick with a single look or have to dive into the html/javascript to change it.

It's definitely an interesting take on an idea dominated by things like JQuery, Delicious, etc.

Cobol might be a pretty easy joke for obsolescence, but remember that Cobol was written by a woman in a time where the industry was far more male dominated than it is today.

Though I've never programmed in Cobol, it made a big impression on me as a kid to show that anybody could program a computer, or use a computer to create something cool.

I got "lucky" to solve a problem for someone back in college: she had written her thesis on a 3.5 floppy, had no backup (this is when you had to go to the "computing center" to work, as practically no one had a machine of their own, so you had to take all your stuff with you), and had run the disk through the washing machine.

She came in, crying hysterically (it actually took a few tries just to figure out what was wrong), and realized what had happened. I had one of the few "eureka!" moments of my life, and grabbed another floppy, carefully cut it open, did the same with her disk, then air-dried it. I put the platter in the "new" disk, with its dry fabric covering (whatever that stuff was...), taped it shut, and put it in the Mac (SE...no hd) and yep, the disk was readable and I was able to get her thesis off and onto a network drive, then we copied it back onto a new disk and assured her I'd hold onto the thesis on the network drive until the end of the semester.

Funny thing, she kept the disk I had used, taped around the edges, and the next year I saw her again and asked how things were, and she was still using it. Go figure.

Wow...from the Wikipedia article I went to the product's homepage, and most of it is filled up with a big blue box that has a two sentence blurb that invites you to click more to get ... a few more sentences, emphasizing its ODBC and JDBC connections. The rest of the page seems to be general support and contact stuff. Pretty sad product homepage.

So the article itself is /.'ed, but using Google, I can't seem to figure out what database CA has that everyone is theoretically migrating off of. I knew CA had a lot of products, mostly related to the mainframe, but an actual honest-to-goodness "select * from table" database? News to me.

I have a compact camera that fits in my pocket that takes *better* pictures than my big DSLR did; I have a (sadly, no longer working) Nikon D1X that is exactly what a professional camera looks like; big body, takes all Nikon lenses, but only shoots 5mp. Compact cameras can shoot up to 14mp, last time I looked. Say what you will about the lens, compact cameras can produce spy-agency-worthy images of ... uh ... whatever is spy-agency-worthy in Kuwait.