Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Apple II Turns 30 -- 1:07 pm CST, Update by The Master

eWeek has an article on Apple II Marks 30 Years as PC Breakthrough. My first computer was an Apple //c. I owned an Apple III for a short time.

It's funny. With all the awesome stuff you see on modern computers, I really miss the days of poking around in the Apple monitor, and hand assembling code for an adventure game written primarily in Applesoft BASIC. The days when a programmer could really KNOW what was going on under the covers.

Microsoft STRIKES Again! -- 8:24 am CST, Update by The Master

Microsoft threatens its Most Valuable Professional -- I know, I know. What am I doing linking The Register? Well, this story is unreal. Jamie Cansdale goes and writes an excellent debugging tool, which wins him an MVP award from M$. Then, a M$ exec starts threatening lawsuits over the same tool. Why? Because Cansdale made his tool work with Microsoft Visual Studio Express, which is a free tool. Since M$ ain't makin' money on Express, they're gonna crush the programmer who made a useful tool for it. How dare he. And yet, they gave him an MVP award. What?

Monday, June 4, 2007

Pondering . . . Not Much At All -- 9:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, it's been some time since I last posted. Why, you might ask? I've found very little to post about. Quite frankly, the whole tech scene is boring me to death. I've pretty much given up on PC gaming, partially because of my move to Linux but mostly because I cannot justify upgrading my box just to play games anymore. There was a time when I could say I needed more CPU horsepower for something. For all my computing tasks except gaming, my Athlon XP 1800+ handles things just fine.

I've basically decided that when I do "upgrade" my box, I'm going to get a low-end laptop (probably one of the Dell ones with Linux pre-installed). Gaming will be handled by my PS2 until the PS3's price drops enough for me to justify buying it.

I used to write a bunch of Linux tutorials, but so much stuff "just works" out of the box these days, that tutorials are becoming pointless. That leaves me with precious little to write about. With my kids growing up and my "real-life" responsibilities increasing, my time to devote to this has shrunk dramatically too.

Unless something major happens, I'll probably remain an infrequent poster on The Haus. Most of my attention has switched to modding my Charvel Model 7 guitar. But even there I only post a handful of times per month.

Quite frankly, we live in rather boring computing times, IMO. AMD and Intel are cranking out faster and faster processors but there's not much interesting to make use of all this power. Sure you can load up Windows Vista and let it consume all your resources, but where's the point in that? This is the first release of Windows that I can remember that has been greeted by a round of indifference.

Maybe when I finally get a PS3 I'll be inspired to write a bunch of stuff about that. You know for sure that I'm going to get Linux running on it. I also hear it plays games--assuming that some come out for it. Hopefully the new Ratchet and Clank will be cool.

There's an old Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times." It seems that right now in the field of computing, we aren't particularly cursed.

No Old News

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