I had an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 (built around a Canon engine, IIRC) that I bought new in 1994 last me until mid 2011. HP was putting out some damned good printers back then, too, before Carly Fiorina came in and turned HP into peddlers of second-rate shit.
Honorable mention to the TV in my basement, an RCA F35751MB-- the biggest CRT TV I could find in 1994. I don't yet own a flatscreen, because I'm just letting them get better and cheaper until the RCA finally gives up the ghost.
I've been doing it for years. I found that the best learning technique for me is to build something, blow it up, and then build it again, until the moving parts are second nature to me-- so it's handy to have a server/network I can blow up without getting fired.
A lot of the techniques and scripts I've developed on my network at home have ended up in use at client sites, and vice versa.
>The number of people who still "specifically need" the Mac Pro aren't very different since Apple hasn't upgraded the expansion capacity of their other headless Macs.
Yes, I know. I thought that in the context of my statement, "the abilities of a Mac Pro" pretty clearly referred to its greater expandability.
IIRC, Tim Cook already publicly stated a redesigned Mac Pro would be released in 2013.
The other Macs in the lineup have grown more powerful over the years, so the number of people who still specifically need the abilities of a Mac Pro is relatively small. It would make no financial sense for Apple to address these regulations by changing the current Mac Pro design. The best move was what they did-- simply giving those people some warning so anyone who was planning future Mac Pro purchases could decide if they needed to buy the existing model or could afford to wait for the redesigned model to be announced.
On Black Friday, one of my coworkers bought a new laptop that came preloaded with Windows 8. Last week she brought it in and asked me to look at it because she couldn't get anything with Flash to work in IE.
I know Flash in the "metro" IE is supposed to be severely limited in what it can do, but even the desktop mode IE refused to run Flash. This despite the add-on being present and showing as enabled. After googling around and fucking with it for about 45 minutes, trying to get something to work that should have just worked right out of the box, I gave up and just installed Chrome for her so she'd have something that could run Flash stuff.
She later managed to find a Windows 7 laptop somewhere, bought it, and returned the Windows 8 laptop. When she returned it, the clerk asked her why, and she told him it was because Windows 8 was awful. He told her that Windows 8 machines were being returned to that store in droves, and every person he asked gave him the same reason.
Messing with her laptop was my first experience with Windows 8, and if I can help it, it will be my last. I found it to be a jumbled mishmash of confusing crap, and I've been doing IT for 20 years-- I can only imagine how hard non-techies are going to reject it. I am going to cling to Windows 7 for as long as I can.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
