MrTonyD

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241.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Agreed. I feel like this is a "can't see the forest for the trees" story. A median moving a few percent is pretty much meaningless in the context of the many millions who are struggling and suffering. The fundamental causes o
242.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Or just don't buy Dell. Why should I have to examine every supplier's fine print to figure out whether I need to go through a reseller?
243.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Here in Silicon Valley a buddy of mine works with major contracts for startup financing and taking companies public (at a major player where they've handled lots of big names you'd recognize. I won't say more than that). Over
244.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I remember Matt Lauer asking Bernie Sanders why people were responding to his campaign. Sanders answered that it was because he was talking about things that the media doesn't cover - inequality, lack of healthcare, lack of education,
245.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I'm dumping Ubuntu. They think that all these churning changes are improvements and they are too swayed by their own intellectual arguments as Engineers. If you look at history, Windows overtook Apple when Apple broke compatibility to
246.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I do a lot of training too...so I appreciate ideas to make it better. At the same time, I found myself thinking: Is this the equivalent of a Gilded Age course on "How to be a good manservant or lady's maid". It just seems som
247.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
None of those names sound right to me. Back in those days someone could write some software, put it on a floppy, xerox some instructions and put it all into a big plastic sandwich bag. Our computer store would then put it on a shelf to sell
248.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I remember an interface that was changing quickly. The first release was pretty useless - great demo but almost no useful purpose. Each release was dramatically different - lots more colors and more additions of their custom basic to try to
249.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I don't think it was Reflex...I think I was still on CPM. It seems like an early precursor to that program though. Honestly, my memory is pretty fuzzy - it wasn't much of a database program, it mostly just reorganized the tables i
250.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I think I used that software too. I don't remember the name either. It was sold as a database program (those were early days for relational) and they tried to present a database as tables in WYSIWYG. So everything was filling-in graphi
251.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Thanks...followed the Wikipedia link to the Rob Cox demo video. Mind blowing to have an editor as an OS filesystem that can intercept OS events. If I hadn't spent the last 20 years learning vi I would grab a copy and give it a try.
252.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Never heard of Acme -- can you elaborate?
253.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I create and deliver a lot of presentations. What I notice: I often use PPT "slide sorter" to reorganize slides. My presentations are usually hundreds of slides, and I can't imagine hunting through markup for my frequent (dai
254.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Hmmm...sounds like a lot of things being conflated. I do think that the 1% has too much of the wealth, but I'm not sure how that is related to other things that I've said. You may disagree with that, but I'm not sure that jus
255.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
If it's any consolation, I've been downvoted a bunch of times when I tell stories about my time working for Steve at NeXT. People just don't seem to like hearing things that disagree with whatever perspective they hold. (And
256.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Yeah, that factory sure was impressive, wasn't it? I would sometimes go out of my way just to visit - hoping that they were running (it took a long time to get it started, and after that it took a long time to get it stable. Really, it
257.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
It certainly wasn't my intent to criticize any Linux contributor. I think that there are a lot of people doing the right things for the right reasons. They do that work in a social context, though. And I think that we need to understan
258.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I knew OS people from NeXT, Microsoft, and several other companies at the time. None of us took Linux too seriously - it was too unreliable and too immature. But by the time that Oracle got it fixed (and IBM "took over" Red Hat to
259.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Yeah, I guess the connection isn't obvious. Bill had decided to start competing in the SQL space. He announced a bunch of features that matched Oracle's enterprise features 1:1 and promised to make SQLServer scalable and supported
260.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Exactly. When I started doing the port of Oracle to Linux I had been reading the newsgroups - and they had been claiming POSIX compatibility. But system calls were missing many options, and entire sections of library code were missing. I&#x
261.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I'm just a geek who grew up in Silicon Valley. I soldered and wire wrapped chips I picked up from Haltek/Halted and the sales offices of local chip manufacturers, and taught myself programming using switches to enter binary codes
262.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
At the time it didn't seem like anything significant - nobody really wanted to do a Linux port of Oracle. But I did a test port and wrote up the many missing system calls and many incomplete system calls and many missing library implem
263.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
It's easy to forget the early days of Linux. If you go back and read the articles of the time they often pointed out that Linux made a good print server. But that was about all it could do - get lpr-style requests and talk to a printer
264.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't ha
265.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I don't really know if skill level should be the only consideration. I think that every country has an obligation to consider its citizens. I'm not saying that citizenship should be the only consideration - but I do think that it
266.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
That does sound similar. One difference I notice - my friend's boss met routinely with executive staff and senior managers at HP to go over future projects. They all made an effort to keep their entire organization secret - even rentin
267.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I had a friend at HP - who worked in a group arranging for "tourists" to staff HP projects. It was a "secret" group offsite from HQ and they got lists of major development projects. Then they worked with recruiters world
268.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I remember my college theology class - we discussed how laws are often created in an effort to reflect and communicate community values. I find it interesting that someone would insist that laws are more important than the values being comm
269.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
We may never know the real story. Steve and Bill used to meet in Bill's jet flying over the ocean so that they could avoid any monitoring as they made deals to benefit each other (the whole "we're competitors" was largel
270.
by MrTonyD 10y ago
I'm talking about a system where it is legal to collect vast sums of money and hide it using opaque financial instruments (offshores, derivatives, charities, fake accounting). Most people reading this blog - probably all - are not the

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