Xbmcbuntu couch potato investing
It happened to me twice that a bad RAM stick caused a failure on a file system, both times on Linux. One was my laptop Thinkpad X32 ,in which the memory stick had several large broken blocks, probably caused by a fried memory chip. This crashed the computer after a few minutes and completely devastated the file system on it, when I attempted to repair it.
The other time it happened was on an old, always running torrent box in my apartment. I left it running for months, and one day when I looked after it, I found it has crashed and the file system was corrupted. But John Couch and his Lisa team were harbingers of a new professionalism at Apple. Apple had in Lisa a combination of the old spirit of Apple -- anarchy, change, new stuff, engineers working through the night coming up with great ideas -- and the introduction of the first nontechnical marketers, marketers with business degrees -- the "suits.
And rather than the traditional bunch of hackers from Homestead High, Lisa hardware was developed by a core of engineers hired away from Hewlett-Packard and DEC, while the software was developed mainly by ex-Xerox programmers, who were finally getting a chance to bring to market a version of what they'd worked on at Xerox PARC for most of the preceding ten years. Lisa was the most professional operation ever mounted at Apple -- far more professional than anything that has followed.
Lisa was ahead of its time. When most microcomputers came with a maximum of 64, characters of memory, the Lisa had 1 million characters. When most personal computers were capable of doing only one task at a time, Lisa could do several. The computer was so easy to use that customers were able to begin working within thirty minutes of opening the box.
Setting up the system was so simple that early drafts of the directions used only pictures, no words. With its mouse, graphical user interface, and bit-mapped screen, Lisa was the realization of nearly every design feature invented at Xerox PARC except networking. Lisa was professional all the way.
Painstaking research went into every detail of the user interface, with arguments ranging up and down the division about what icons should look like, whether on-screen windows should just appear and disappear or whether they should zoom in and out.
Unlike nearly every other computer in the world, Lisa had no special function keys to perform complex commands in a single keystroke, and offered no obscure ways to hold down three keys simultaneously and, by so doing, turn the whole document into Cyrillic, or check its spelling, or some other such nonsense. To make it easy to use, Lisa followed PARC philosophy, which meant that no matter what program you were using, hitting the E key just put an E on-screen rather than sending the program into edit mode, or expert mode, or erase mode.
Modes were evil. Instead of modes, Lisa had a very simple keyboard that was used in conjunction with the mouse and onscreen menus to manipulate text and graphics without arcane commands. Couch left nothing to chance. Even the problem of finding a compelling application for Lisa was covered; instead of waiting for a Dan Bricklin or a Mitch Kapor to introduce the application that would make corporate America line up to buy Lisas, Apple wrote its own software -- seven applications covering everything that users of microcomputers were then doing with their machines, including a powerful spreadsheet.
Still, when Lisa hit the market in , it failed. Workstations can cost more than PCs because they are sold to companies rather than to individuals, but they have to be designed with companies in mind, and Lisa wasn't. Apple had left out that umbilical cord to the company that Steve Jobs had thought unnecessary.
Despite the fact that Lisa had been his own dream and Apple was his company, Steve Jobs was thrilled with Lisa's failure, since it would make the inevitable success of Macintosh all the more impressive. Individual contributors made major decisions and worked on major programs alone or with a very few other people. There was little, if any, management, and Apple spent so much money, it was unbelievable. With Raskin out of the way, that's how Steve Jobs ran the Macintosh group too.
The Macintosh was developed beneath a pirate flag. The lobby of the Macintosh building was lined with Ansel Adams prints, and Steve Jobs's BMW motorcycle was parked in a corner, an ever-present reminder of who was boss. It was a renegade operation and proud of it. When Lisa was taken from him, Jobs went through a paradigm shift that combined his dreams for the Lisa with Raskin's idea of appliancelike simplicity and low cost.
Jobs decided that the problem with Lisa was not that it lacked networking capability but that its high price doomed it to selling in a market that demanded networking. There'd be no such problem with Macintosh, which would do all that Lisa did but at a vastly lower price.
Never mind that it was technically impossible. Lisa was a big project, while Macintosh was much smaller because Jobs insisted on an organization small enough that he could dominate every member, bending each to his will. He built the Macintosh on the backs of Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote the system software, and Burrell Smith, who designed the hardware. All three men left their idiosyncratic fingerprints all over the machine.
Hertzfeld gave the Macintosh an elegant user interface and terrific look and feel, mainly copied from Lisa. He also made Macintosh very, very difficult to write programs for. Smith was Jobs's ideal engineer because he'd come up from the Apple II service department "I made him," Jobs would say. Smith built a clever little box that was incredibly sophisticated and nearly impossible to manufacture. Jobs's vision imposed so many restraints on the Macintosh that it's a wonder it worked at all.
In contrast to Lisa, with its million characters of memory, Raskin wanted Macintosh to have only 64, characters -- a target that Jobs continued to aim for until long past the time when it became clear to everyone else that the machine needed more memory.
Eventually, he "allowed" the machine to grow to , characters, though even with that amount of memory, the original K Macintosh still came to fit people's expectations that mechanical things don't work. Apple engineers, knowing that funher memory expansion was inevitable, built in the capability to expand the K machine to K, though they couldn't tell Jobs what they had done because he would have made them change it back. Markkula gave up the presidency of Apple at about the time Lisa was introduced.
As chairman, Jobs went looking for a new president, and his first choice was Don Estridge of IBM, who turned the job down. Jobs's second choice was John Sculley, who came over from PepsiCo for the same package that Estridge had rejected. Sculley was going to be as much Jobs's creation as Burrell Smith had been.
It was clear to the Apple technical staff that Sculley knew nothing at all about computers or the computer business. They dismissed him, and nobody even noticed when Sculley was practically invisible during his first months at Apple. They thought of him as Jobs's lapdog, and that's what he was. With Mike Markkula again in semiretirement, concentrating on his family and his jet charter business, there was no adult supervision in place at Apple, and Jobs ran amok.
With total power, the willful kid who'd always resented the fact that he had been adopted, created at Apple a metafamily in which he played the domineering, disrespectful, demanding type of father that he imagined must have abandoned him those many years ago. Coming up to an Apple employee, he'd say, "I think Jim another employee] is shit. What do you think? When Jobs finally succeeded in destroying the Lisa division, he spoke to the assembled workers who were about to be reassigned or laid off.
I might be interested in hiring two or three of you [out of ]. We made it up. I would have. Hardly anyone stood up to him. Hardly anyone quit. Like the Bhagwan, driving around Rancho Rajneesh each day in another Rolls-Royce, Jobs kept his troops fascinated and productive. Yeah, that makes sense. And, as often happens with totalitarian rulers, most of his impossible demands were somehow accomplished, though at a terrible cost in ruined careers and failed marriages. Beyond pure narcissism, which was there in abundance, Jobs used these techniques to make sure he was surrounding himself with absolutely the best technical people.
It was crazy-making. Make it clear to him that you, at least, know the truth. Jobs had all kinds of ideas he kept throwing out. Projects would stop. Projects would start. Projects would get so far and then be abandoned. Projects would go on in secret, because the budget was so large that engineers could hide things they wanted to do, even though that project had been canceled or never approved. Steve Jobs created chaos because he would get an idea, start a project, then change his mind two or three times, until people were doing a kind of random walk, continually scrapping and starting over.
Apple was confusing suppliers and wasting huge amounts of money doing initial manufacturing steps on products that never appeared. Two months before its introduction, Jobs declared the Mac to be a business computer, which justified the higher price. Apple people were rewarded for having great ideas and for making great technical contributions but not for saving money. Policies that looked as if they were aimed at saving money actually had other justifications. Apple is a very sexy company, and Jobs wanted his people to lavish that libido on the products rather than on each other.
Oh, and Apple people were also rewarded for great graphics; brochures, ads, everything that represented Apple to its customers and dealers, had to be absolutely top quality. A very dangerous thing happened with the introduction of the Macintosh. Jobs drove his development team into the ground, so when the Mac was introduced in , there was no energy left, and the team coasted for six months and then fell apart. The Macintosh people were just burned out, the Lisa Division was destroyed and its people were not fully integrated into the Macintosh group, so there was no new blood.
It was a time when technical people should have been fixing the many problems that come with the first version of any complex high-tech product. But nobody moved quickly to fix the problems. They were just too tired. The software development tools to build applications like spreadsheets and word processors were not available for at least two years. Early Macintosh programs had to be written first on a Lisa and then recompiled to run on the Mac.
None of this mattered to Jobs, who was in heaven, running Apple as his own private psychology experiment, using up people and throwing them away. Attrition, strangled marriages, and destroyed careers were, unimportant, given the broader context of his vision.
The idea was to have a large company that somehow maintained a start-up philosophy, and Jobs thrived on it. He planned to develop a new generation of products every eighteen months, each one as radically different from the one before as the Macintosh had been from the Apple II. By , nobody would even remember the Macintosh, with Apple four generations down the road. Nothing was sacred except the vision, and it became clear to him that the vision could best be served by having the people of Apple live and work in the same place.
Unchecked, Jobs was throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at his dream, and eventually the drain became so bad that Mike Markkula revived his Ben Cartwright role in June By this point Sculley had learned a thing or two in his lapdog role and felt ready to challenge Jobs.
Jobs left the company soon after. For its first five years in business, Apple did not have a budget. Nobody really knew how much money was coming in or going out or what the company was buying. Later, it seemed that the money was coming in so fast that there was no way it could all be spent.
All budgets were done at the same time, so rather than having product plans from which support plans and service plans would flow -- a logical plan based on products that were coming out -- everybody all at once just said what they wanted. Nothing was coordinated. It took Sculley at least six months, maybe a year, from the time he deposed Jobs to understand how out of control things were. It was total anarchy. Apple had millions of dollars of spare parts that were never going to be used, and many of these were sold as surplus.
Sculley instituted some very minor changes in -- reducing the number of suppliers and beginning to simplify the peripherals line so that Macintosh printers, for example, would also work with the Apple II, Apple III, and Lisa. The large profits that Sculley was able to generate during this period came entirely from improved budgeting and from simply cancelling all the whacko projects started by Steve Jobs. Sculley was no miracle worker. Who was this guy Sculley? Raised in Bermuda, scion of an old-line, old-money family, he trained as an architect, then worked in marketing at PepsiCo for his entire career before joining Apple.
A loner, his specialty at the soft drink maker seemed to be corporate infighting, a habit he brought with him to Apple. Sculley is not an easy man to be with. With Jobs gone, Apple needed a new technical visionary. Sculley and the others were surrogate visionaries compared to Jobs. It was a goal, but not a product, deliberately set in the far future. Jobs would have set out a vision that he intended his group actually to accomplish.
He saw his job as milking as much money as possible out of the current Macintosh technology and allowing the future to take care of itself. Today the Macintosh is a much more powerful machine, but it still has an operating system that does only one thing at a time. Earth to Jean-Louis! And like Markkula, he faded in and out of the business, residing in his distant tower for months at a time while the latest group of subordinates would take their shot at running the company.
Sculley is a smart guy but an incredibly bad judge of people, and this failing came to permeate Apple under his leadership. Sculley falls in love with people and gives them more power than they can handle. In his staff meetings, Jean-Louis talked, and everyone else listened. Another early Sculley favorite was Allen Loren, who came to Apple as head of management information systems -- the chief administrative computer guy -- and then suddenly found himself in charge of sales and marketing simply because Sculley liked him.
Loren was a good MIS guy but a bad marketing and sales guy. By raising prices Loren was fighting a force of nature, like asking the earth to reverse its direction of rotation, the tides to stop, mothers everywhere to stop telling their sons to get haircuts. Sales tumbled, market share tumbled. Any momentum that Apple had was lost, maybe for years, and Sculley allowed that to happen.
Loren was followed as vice-president of marketing by David Hancock, who was known throughout Apple as a blowhard. The marketing department was instead distracted by nine reorganizations in less than two years. The whole marketing operation at Apple is now run by former salespeople, a dangerous trend. Marketing is the creation of long-term demand, while sales is execution of marketing strategies. Marketing is buying the land, choosing what crop to grow, planting the crop, fertilizing it, and then deciding when to harvest.
Sales is harvesting the crop. When Apple introduced its family of lower-cost Macintoshes in the fall of , marketing was totally unprepared for their popularity. The computer press had been calling for lower-priced Macs, but nobody inside Apple expected to sell a lot of the boxes. When the Macintosh Classic, LC, and Ilsi appeared, their overwhelming popularity surprised, pleased, but then dismayed Apple, which was still staffing up as a company that sold expensive computers.
So why does Sculley make these terrible personnel moves? Maybe he wants to make sure that people in positions of power are loyal to him, as all these characters are. And by putting them in jobs they are not really up to doing, they are kept so busy that there is no time or opportunity to plot against Sculley. With all the ebb and flow of people into and out of top management positions at Apple, it reached the point where it was hard to get qualified people even to accept top positions, since they knew they were likely to be fired.
The rest of the company was as confused as its leadership. Reorganizations have become so much of a staple at Apple that employees categorize them into two types. The problem with reorgs is that they seem to happen overnight, and many times they are handled by groups being demolished and people being told to go to Human Resources and find a new job at Apple. At the same time, though, the continual reorganizations mean that nobody has long-term responsibility for anything.
Make a bad decision? Who cares! Today, the sense of anomie -- alienation, disconnectedness --at Apple is major. The difference between the old Apple, which was crazy, and the new Apple is anomie. People are alienated. Apple still gets the bright young people. They come into Apple, and instead of getting all fired up about something, they go through one or two reorgs and get disoriented. Has it reached the point where an Apple vice-president no longer feels connected to his own company?
With the company in a constant state of reorganization, there is little sense of an enduring commitment to strategy at Apple. Apple specializes in flashy product introductions but then finds itself wandering away in a few weeks or months toward yet another pivotal strategy and then another. Compare this with Microsoft, which is just the opposite, doing terrific implementation of mediocre products. Microsoft does a good roll-out, offers good developer support, and has the same people leading the operation for years and years.
Microsoft is taking the Japanese approach of not caring how long or how much money it takes to get multimedia right. QuickTime has tools for integrating video, animation, and sound into Macintosh programs. It automatically synchronizes sound and images and provides controls for playing, stopping, and editing video sequences. QuickTime includes technology for compressing images so they require far less memory for storage.
Apple produced a flashy intro, but has no sense of enduring commitment to its own strategy. The good and the bad that was Apple all came from Steve Jobs, who in was once again an orphan and went off to found another company --NeXT Inc. Steve sold his Apple stock in a huff and at a stupidly low price , determined to do it all over again -- to build another major computer company -- and to do it his way.
It has been a busy week filled with announcements and updates regarding Windows Store. The core applications Windows 8 Mail, Calendar and People got updated. Calendar users were in for a surprise if they used to sync their data with Google Calendar, as that does not work anymore after the update.
The Mail app received significant improvements, including the ability to create, rename and delete folders inside the application and options to flag emails as important. The People app got a new feature that lets you post messages to the Facebook Wall of friends, and the Calendar app received an interface makeover. Microsoft updated Xbox Music, too -- a new volume control option now acts independently from system volume and there are several other features, including the ability to make songs added to Xbox Music available on all compatible devices.
The app of the popular password manager Last Pass received an updated as well, adding form filling and identity support to it. The overall application growth this week is nearly as strong as last week's -- 1, new apps were added to the U. The overall app count in the US Windows 8 Store is 35, App of the Week Doom and Destiny Doom and Destiny reminds me a lot of classic role playing games of the bit era.
You move around with the cursor keys and interact with items using the Z-key on the keyboard. The game runs in realtime, while you move around on the map and will switch to a turn-based combat system when you encounter foes. Here you have options to select one action per character, for instance to attack one of the foes, cast a spell or use an item.
Foes come in different sizes and shapes, some are magic users, others undead that will attack you until they are lying on the ground or your party is. You earn experience and gain levels eventually that make your party more powerful. You can add power points to attributes which not only improves your chance of success, but also may be the prerequisite for using certain skills in the game.
The game itself merges the real world with the fantasy world. You notice that for instance when you find pizza or beer instead of health and mana potions. The humor is special and adolescent at times. Doom and Destiny offers more than 25 hours of game play in its single player campaign that you will certainly enjoy if you like turn based roleplaying games. Etsy is probably best know for handmade items that designers and creators from all over the world sell on the site.
The application displays a selection of items on its start page. Each item is displayed with a thumbnail photo, its name and price. You can use the category listing on the left to explore a particular item group like Children, Candles or Geekery, or use the built-in search to find specific items of interest.
Items open up in the application at first. Here you find additional photos, the item description and options to add the item to your cart. If you have an Etsy account, you can use it to sign in and make purchases right from within the app. Instagram Explorer Get Instagram profiles at your fingertip. You can sign in to your Instagram account or use the apps' browsing and search options to view profiles and photos posted on them.
If you sign in, commenting on and liking photos becomes available to you. Users who do not sign in can browse all photos and comments posted on Instagram profiles but can't interact with the service in any other way. The app uses Windows 8's search and share capabilities to find and display user profiles of interest, and share your findings with your friends or contacts.
Kickstarter Tracker If you are a regular on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, or just interested in some of the projects that are posted on it, you can use the Kickstarter Tracker application to monitor those projects. You can add as many projects as you like to the application. Doing so is not that comfortable as you have to paste the project URL into the application, and the only way of doing so is to visit Kickstarter in your web browser of choice to locate and copy the URL.
A search would make the application more comfortable. Each project is listed with its name and funding goal, the amount pledged, the days left to reach that goal, and the backers. Projects can be pinned to the start screen so that you can monitor them from there directly without having to open the app first.
Your task in this game is to clear the level of all bubbles. At the start of each round, a prearranged pattern of bubbles emerges on the screen. The player controls a bubble cannon that shoots colored bubbles up the screen. The bubble travels in a straight line, bouncing of the sides, and stops when it touches any bubble on the screen. If three or more bubbles of the same color are next to each other, they pop and get removed from the screen. All bubbles hanging from them get removed as well provided that they are linked to a wall or the ceiling of the level.
Phrase obtain bitcoin cash all
SPEED UP BITCOIN TRANSACTION
SpamAssassin uses a with remote directories connects to your on a consistent reduce cost and to do was predictable total cost. It means that you can use SSIS or other computer, as if boot, so be. At the back, save login information.
comments: 4
top online betting websites
all ireland club hurling championship betting tips
greyhound betting system review
investing in stocks for beginners pdf viewer