Johnny's Software Saloon

Weblog where I discuss things that really interest me. Things like Java software development, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Macintosh software, Cocoa, Eclipse IDE, OOP, content management, XML technologies, CSS and XSLT document styling, artificial intelligence, standard document formats, and cool non-computing technologies.

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Location: Germantown, Maryland, United States

I like writing software, listening to music (mostly country and rock but a little of everything), walking around outside, reading (when I have the time), relaxing in front of my TV watching my TiVo, playing with my cat, and riding around in my hybrid gas/electric car.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

MacDailyNews - Headless iMac for $499 [rumor] - and the PC performance paradox of 2005

MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home

A company that Apple reportedly is sueing announced yesterday that Apple is going to be selling a wonderfully compact, decently powerful Macintosh computer at an unimaginably low price for a Mac - under five hundred dollars.

Osbourne computers went out of business under the burden of such a rumor, started by Osbourne himself, the company's owner and founder, back in the 1980s. It was a rumor because it never came true. The company had intended to make the computer but they ran out of engineering money, so they could never finish designing it. Why did they they run out of money? Because everybody about to buy a new Osbourne computer juset put their plans on old so they could buy the new computer which was supposed to be lighter, faster, and more powerful.

Is ThinkSecret tring to pull an Osbourne-style economic assualt on Apple computer? Time will tell. Time will tell.


<dream>
Personally, I would love to be able to buy a really compact Macintosh with a lot of RAM and a really fast processor and a WiFi connection but no monitor. Because then I could use it as a compute and application server from my regular desktop and notebook Macintosh's.

With Apple's Remote Desktop service running on it, I could access it to run GUI applications from any Macintosh in the house - I would just have to buy Apple Remote Desktop client licenses. With VNC (virtual network computer) server running on it, I could run GUI applications on it from Mac or Linux box in the house - and VNC is free.

If it ran really cool, was really small, had a WiFi connection and didn't need a computer or monitor hooked up to it, I would buy several of them, over time, and just let them run on a bookshelf. I could run them off of a filtered 5 plug power strip. With no internal hard drive, a momentary loss of power would not be able to corrupt their storage - they have none let us say - and reboot time would be virtually instantaneous because they would just boot the OS and run applications off flash memory.

I do not expect such a Macintosh computer to be developed any time soon though. It is so obvious a computer to make, that I think Apple would have made it by now. Though perhaps before this year it would have been a little expensive to make due to the price of flash memory. Apparently flash memory is cheap has heck now, though. I bought a 1 GB USB flash memory fob a month ago for under a hundred dollars at Staples and it was not even on discount - someone I know saw one selling for $79 mail order! So, Apple probably could make a kick-ass diskless server for way under a grand if they wanted to do so.

To further build castles in the clouds, I could let my imagination run away with me and visualize that this server Macintosh computer that does not exist and probably never will would have a USB port to connect things like the new RadioShark, so any computer in the house could play any radio station and be controllable from that Mac without me getting up from my Mac - streaming MP3 audio is great. If it had a Firewire port on it, I could hook up an Apple iSight and have a bit of a home security system. "Hey, cat! What are you doing approaching my Mac micro server on the bookshelf? I see you!!" I could just imagine watching the started, guilty look on my cats face as I observed her on the screen of my Powerbook from upstairs while she tried to quickly rearrange her features into a semblance of innocence at the sound of my voice.
</dream>







Although, I do admit - the PC market has never been such an easy nut for Apple or anyone with a non-Microsoft OS as it is right now.

The second part of this article I am blogging about and musing over mentioned that the latest PCs, which I know have very fast processors and come with Microsoft's latest and most expensive OS, actualy run very slowly in real life. Way slower than a Mac.

The person who wrote the article recounts the story of a family friend whose own family computer was not a Mac. It was running Microsoft Windows XP. It was so "infested with adware and spyware" that it ran at a crawl. He asked them if they had ever done anything remove that stuff. They replied that yes they had. Just three weeks before they had taken it to Best Buy and paid $30 to have the spyware they had beck then removed.

Just leaving the risks of having so many unknown digital footpads wares running on a personal computer system aside, it is a really serious performance issue for PCs now days. It is not any issue at all for Macintosh's. Macintosh's come with pretty fast processors and a fast OS with an unbeatable graphics hardware/software combination. Check one out in a store (Apple, Microcenter, etc.) and you will see what I mean.

But the great thing about Macs is they don't slow down once you have used them a while. They don't soak up adware popup programs and spyware keyboard sniffer programs and email spam relay station enslavement programs like a leaky boat taking on water within minutes after you hook them up to the Internet. In fact, if you do not install Microsoft Office for the Mac on them, the threat of such things does not exist on Mac OS X. And Mac OS X has been out almost four years - longer than MS-Windows XP by about half a year.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

News of Comair's flight staffing computer glitch that shutdown airline on Christmas day and the day after

News

Oh, wow, this is tragic.

Travelers stranded away from home on Christmas day due to a Comair airline's computer glitch. That is too bad, especially in light that there have been other similar glitches at other airlines earlier this year. I wonder where Comair's software got itself written?

Maybe there is a common thread and this whole thing can be debugged before it happens again.

Update, December 30: I read a day or two ago that the whole problem was caused by a defective computer program that used a 16-bit signed integer counter to keep track of staffing changes. When the number of staff changes for flights reached some number in the tens of thousands, the program just lost it. Unfortunately in winter time a lot of people get sick and a lot of people's plans change at Christmas time.

Ironically, this is when the airline needed this program to work the most. Programmers and designers need to design their programs such that people who use them a lot do not wind up not being able to use them at all. Anyway, the airline was already in bankruptcy and this glitch apparently caused by a software bug, resulting in passengers and planes being grounded for a couple of days, did not help financial matters out at all. Also, it probably coat them in terms of goodwill (financial term to describe how likely a company is to get return business from existing customers) at all.

DOT Says Air Traffic Overhaul Is Flawed (washingtonpost.com)

DOT Says Air Traffic Overhaul Is Flawed (washingtonpost.com)

Excellent. And I hope they won't use any Microsoft Windows in it. Because we have all seen how often that locks up.

National Air Traffic Controllers Association

National Air Traffic Controllers Association

Granted, it sounds like there might possibly be some stress from returning burdens of high air traveler traffic this year.

However, there does not have to be a problem resulting in overcrowding, delays, more lost luggage, incidents, etc.

While tourism is something you pretty much have to be someplace else to experience, a lot of travel in the US is business travel.

Business travel usually occurs on shorter notice - mere days or weeks advance notice - as opposed to the months of advance notice vacation travel for vacations or going to or from colleges benefits from.

Because of this - and possibly because businesses have more money to throw around, business travel is more expensive.

Business travel seems like it is often unnecessary. It is done often as a formality or as a grand showing in the face of less then grand endeavors. These are not sales call situations where you need to be there to press the flesh and sign the documents.

A lot of travel by technical and administrative people's could be eliminated by videoconferencing - which today has practically no costs associated with it.

Millions of US homes now enjoy broadband access to the Internet. I have to believe that most US businesses enjoy an Internet connection on their premises or have one nearby. I would expect most of them would have broadband connections available to them.

Broadband connections are excellent for live video conversations.

Apple's Macintosh's come with audio-video (AV) conferencing software called iChat. It has been shipping with the computers since October 2003.

For a couple of years, Apple has been selling an excellent videocamera for teleconferencing on the Macintosh which they call the iSight. It works great with iChat and it has a suggested retail price of only $149. It is different than the $29 cams you get for PCs.

They have plastic lenses, iSight's is glass. They have no physical security (and yes, on MS-Windows it is not unknown for a cam and mic to get hi-jacked) whereas the iSight has a closable shutter. They use a slow USB connection that limits the quality of the video transmitted; the iSight instead uses a high speed Firewire connection and gets correspondingly excellent video.

When you consider the price of a typical rush rush business trip will easily cost over a thousand dollars per person for round trip airfare, car rental, hotel accomodations, tolls, gasoline, staff time wages, meals, customer entertainment expenses, delayed handling of routine business work - paying $149 for a camera or even a half grand or a grand for a computer to boot, is not such a high price to pay. In fact, it is a savings.

Reduced business travel would give the US air and transportation industries time to catch up. Accomodation industries like hotels could increase utilization of their facilitites for daytime functions like training, corporate awards ceremonies for saving businesses money and increasing their technical capabilities, more entertainment functions like no fuss catered birthdays and anniversairy parties, and more meetings of local businessmen seeking to increase local commerce opportunities.

It is pretty clear from events in November and December as well as earlier this year, that computers could use some improvement and need some slack time so their kinks can be worked out by the transportation industry. The public sector would also benefit from a levelling off or decrease in the workload if they have a sudden shortage of trained workers to fill specialized slots that require years of training.

Smooth improvements over several years are always preferable to drastic changes that lead to stress and inconvenience. It makes the time waiting more pleasant, and the time at the end of the several years more enjoyable.

In the meantime, people only have to think with an open mind. There are better ways to do some things.

Computer Hangs After 49.7 Days

Computer Hangs After 49.7 Days

Sad, how these Microsoft Windows problems linger, seemingly forever.

GAO urges better oversight for air traffic system

GAO urges better oversight for air traffic system

Well, Dell's main spokesperson was arrested for marijuana, they off-shored their technical support to India(November 11, 2004: Dell Opens Another Call Center In India), and personally I had one of the keys fall off new a Dell computer after I had used it for only 6 months.

Over the last 24 years I have used about 9 computers regularly for about 3 or 4 years each. Until this Dell computer, I have never had a key fall off while I was typing.

One consumer labeled Dell technical support a "travesty" just last quarter.

I see amongst the numerous problems he cited with his Dell computer, the keys falling off its keyboard is one of them.

"Dude, you're getting a Dell." Oh, no. Run!!

By contrast, I used PCs in the 1990s and they proved reliable (back then) and used Macs for the last two decades and only one of them required service and only then only one time. The PCs were much harder to do RAM upgrades on but at least they worked, upgrade difficulties aside. The one time I did a RAM upgrade on one of my Macs, it was a breeze.

I can see why Apple is winning the customer satisfaction awards and people who buy stocks are continuously paying more for Apple's stock this year as the company delivers one insanely great product after another.

FAA extends Harris weather and radar processor work

FAA extends Harris weather and radar processor work

Hopefully this one does not automatically lock up every 49.7 days as the west coast air traffic control radio system tries to do unless technicians actively intervene to shut it down every month. Wait a minute, they are supposed to shut down the air traffic control system every month - that is how it operates? Uh, how does it operate when it is shut down on purpose as opposed to by a flaw? I mean, it is down either way, right? Seems being down would prevent ground to air communication while the system was shutting down as well as rebooting and starting up again.

Can't Harris afford to buy Linux? I mean it's free and it doesn't have a checkered traffic record with safety systems. Then we can all understand the careful thought and choices that went into its change-over from a Unix-based system to one that suffers from typical MS-Windows lockups.

I mean if MS-Windows crashes on your office desktop, you only lose your documents in the crash. It's not like then there is a real crash.

The New York Times> Search> Abstract

The New York Times> Search> Abstract

The technicians forgot to reboot the MS-Windows servers to prevent them from locking up. That is not a safety inspection. A safety inspection would be reviewing the choice of operating system to discover if it had critical defects.

Techworld.com - Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up

Techworld.com - Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up

Why does the United States' west coast air traffic control system suffer from the same pathetic programming bug symptom as Windows 98's infamous every 49.7 days lockup bug?

C'mon, the US air traffic radio control system is not a Ferris wheel!

As for the claim that the bug was there to prevent "data overload" - malarchy!

The bug is a consequence of data overflow. Specifically binary integer data overflow. The carry overflow handerler in the case of Windows 98 for example is defective and locks the computer up. When? Exactly 49.7 days after the computer was turned on.

Why are they not using Linux which instead of being unable to run for a measly 2 months without rebooting can run for years without rebooting? Besides when you reoboot a Linux computer it is to replace OS with a newer version, not to prevent an imminent lockup.

Oh, and Linux is free and designed by computer scientists with advanced degrees. Ergo, it doesn't lock up every 49.7 days.

News

Man Gives $35,000 to Homeless sure proves to me that not only is the Christmas spirit alive and well but so is kindness in human nature.

The man who was once homeless helped quite a few people who are homeless. He did not judge them, he only decided they needed help.

Merry Christmas, sir.

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