One Tough Job

My good friend Matt had a link to this article on his blog. Please take some time to read it in its entirety. I had a new appreciation of why the people in those blue uniforms stand apart from us mere mortals. And how some of the hardest missions of a Marine may not be in the teeth of battle.

In my many years of volunteering for the rescue squad, dealing with death was a part of the job. I never quite got to the point where I got callous about it or "comfortably numb" as they say. In all those years, I never had the unenviable task of telling someone their loved one had died. That was usually the Doctor's or the Police Officer's job. I only happened to do it once when we brought in a fellow EMT's brother in law who had a heart attack. We had tried our best for over half an hour and were unsuccessful in reviving him. As I walked out of the ER he saw me come out and asked me if they were still working on him. I just shook my head and all I said was "They called it". It was jargon, but it was something I knew he would understand. There were no other words I could utter, and I walked away and left him to comfort his sobbing wife. The doctor went into the waiting room with them to give them the official news.

How do you tell someone their loved one is dead? Not being sexist here, but it takes a REAL MAN to do that job. Especially when you have to do it over and over again. If you are like me, you will have tears in your eyes when you read this article. And hopefully, a real appreciation of what it takes to be a Marine.

Judge to SCO – “Be Specific”

Judge Brooke Wells has now put down in writing in an Order what most of us have been saying for years – “Where is the code? As always Groklaw has the gory details. The best part of the order to me was this paragraph.

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The court finds SCO’s arguments unpersuasive. SCO’s arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM sorry we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know. SCO received substantial code from IBM pursuant to the court’s orders as mentioned supra. Further, SCO brought this action against IBM and under the Federal Rules, and the court’s orders, SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated. Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table.

Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that “you know what you stole I’m not telling.” Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus’ entire inventory and say “its in there somewhere, you figure it out.”

Without more specificity than SCO has provided some very important questions that could materially impact this case are nearly impossible to answer.

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It is one thing for a blogger, columnist or tech reporter to say this. It is quite another for a Judge to render this in a legal Order. I wonder what Enderle, Didio and other Microsoft and SCO shills of the world have to say about this. After all THEY were the ones that have supposedly seen the “mountains of infringing code” and were trying to convince the world that Linux contained stolen code. So where are they now?

It is a sad and sorry state of affairs today that these so called “analysts” can state anything they want as fact, and when proved wrong, go on as if nothing happened. And the tech media keeps quoting them and treating them as some all knowing demi-God pundits. If Dan Rather had to pay for his falsehood with his career, so should these morons.

It's a good day for Truth and Justice. Thank you Judge Wells.

Another one joins the Mac Cult.

I came across this article today. A columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald describes why he is switching to a Mac. The words ring so true to me as they do to millions of people that FINALLY let go of their malware infested Windows bloatware and switched to a simple tool that lets you get on with life. Here's a snippet.

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"I HAVE had just about enough of Microsoft.

I've had it with rebooting my notebook and my desktop constantly because my applications crawl to a halt. I've had it with reformatting my drives every few months to get rid of all the stuff that accumulates on them.

I've had it with dysfunctional bloatware, inelegantly designed and inefficiently coded. I've had it with viruses and worms and Trojan horses and spyware and all the other rubbish that Microsoft lets in.

In a move that will delight many readers of this column, I am taking the plunge and going Apple Macintosh. My son has been using one for a year now, and Apple's OS X operating system is everything Microsoft's is not. I don't care about Vista; I'm moving now."

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I am sure there will be plenty of shills who will now include Graeme Philipson in the ranks of the Apple Cult or soon brand him as a Mac Zealot. The vast majority of those have never touched a Mac. To paraphrase the Morgan Stanley commercial, we measure success one switcher at a time.

Greame - Welcome to a better way of computing.

Lets antagonize the Mac Zealots

Dave Winer has posted a video of John Dvorak gloating over the fact that he deliberately antagonizes Mac users to get his ratings / hits up. He describes his modus operandi in the video, and how once he stirs up the pot enough, he changes positions to the exact opposite of what he started with. Those of us that have followed Dvorak’s drivel over the years are quite familiar with his flip flopping and know that he is just a common troll in the guise of a columnist / blogger. He is not alone in this and the Tech world is filled with so called analysts and columnists that make a living poking fun at Mac users. The bigger part of this story to me is the “Ha Ha” factor. The genius Dvorak now pointing out the stupidity and gullibility of the “Mac Cult” - for the amusement of Windows apologists the world over.

What these morons don’t see is that the reason the so called “Mac Cultists” react the way they do is because of the years of systematic FUD that Mac users have had to put up with and spend time and effort trying to dispel. Microsoft doesn’t have to spread FUD themselves anymore. They have an entire squadron of shills in the form of analysts and columnist blowhards that will spread their FUD for them. And every piece of FUD is then regurgitated as gospel by the tech media and amplified ten times over. It then becomes the story of the big lie repeated often enough. Mac users then only have two choices. They can ignore the troll and thus let the lie get bigger, or they can respond trying to correct the lie and be branded as zealots. As in every case there will be a few that will respond to idiocy with stupidity, and these emails will be then displayed to the world as the sample of the hate mail that the Mac Zealots unleash on the poor little blogger/journalist that dared to say something negative about Apple.

The fact of the matter is that PC users / Windows apologists can only dream of inspiring such loyalty among their customers. It astounds me that when Windows users choose malware infested, bug ridden PCs, they are supposedly rational people that are using the best tool for the job, but when someone chooses a Mac (or Linux for that matter) they are automatically branded Kool-Aid drinking ravenous zealots. I believe in the end these trolls will get what’s coming to them. In the journalism and now blogging business, the only currency one has of any value is credibility. Once you lose that, you can never get it back.

So, to the Dvoraks of the world, all I can say is keep it up. Your arrogance will be your downfall.