Slaughters.com

once in a good while :)

Yes, even Microsoft does something good once in a while:
Microsoft files 15 lawsuits against spammers

If you're a Slaughter, I have stuff for you. To all Slaughters, I offer the following (free of charge):

• POP account: yes, a real POP account hosted at slaughters.com with your own email address for life (ie [email protected])
• Email aliasing: if you currently have an email account such as [email protected], I can create an email alias at slaughters.com. So folks could send email to [email protected], and you would recieve it at [email protected]. The advantage of this is that you can change email providers or ISPs frequently, but keep the same email address
• Homepage: you can have a homepage very similar to my homepage or the slaughters.com homepage. You just have to email me and ask.

Furthermore, I'll soon be adding a message board for Slaughters discussion. I'll also be adding photos and other Slaughter family related information soon.

This site is going to be updated often in the next few weeks and months. So please check back. Yes, it's been dormant for a while. But the recent family reunion has sparked my interest, and I'll be putting some time in.

Just got back from the (Art) Slaughter family reunion. I'm going to be
turning this page into a blog style page shortly. I'll also be posting pix
from the reunion.

I'm also working bringing existing Slaughter geneaology info to the web,
including pictures, scrapbooks and other info. But this is a slow process.
If you'd like to be informed when I start putting this stuff up,

click here and send me mail.

Checking in from the road. I'm out in Nebraska, near Lincoln. Fortunately, the weather is still mild. But you can sense the arrival of the sweaty, hot, humid, buggy mid-western summer. I'll be out of here long before that.

I'm here for a family re-union. Slaughter family re-union. A different branch of the Slaughter tree. We'll see how that goes.

Later!

Next in our series will be our piece on the Apple Corporation in general.

Apple is generally considered very innovative and user friendly. And they are. They innovated the first PC user interface, for the most part. And that interface was very user friendly. But what Apple left out was the usefulness. While Unix computers were involved in UUCP and early popular TCP/IP networking, Apple computers were doing something called hyper cards or something. While powerful unix editors such as VI and EMACS were being perfected, Apple had, er, well, I don't know what they had until Microsoft came out with Word, but I'm sure they must have had something, and I'm sure it was useable. When Microsoft started catching on to the whole Internet thing, providing crude and barely functional TCP/IP networking, Apple provided even cruder and even less functional networking capability.

In fact, by the time Apple caught on firmly to the whole networking thing, they were already an also-ran. This is when they became obsessed with lawsuits and this silly, Albert Einstein, pot-smoking, "different" image that was supposed to somehow elevate them above functional computer systems.

Move ahead a few dull years, and we come to Mac OSX.

Now Apple decides, understandabley, to scrap their, useless, Mac OS in favor of something that works and that is free and that they can integrate with a bunch of pretty icons and sell for lots of money.

This was a good thing for Apple users who were already used to spending lots of money on pretty icons but weren't used to an OS that actually did anything. Now Apple fanatics had an OS with pretty icons and a functional operating system. But in the spirit of previous Apple OSs, Apple locked this thing up and prevented developers from easily developing Apple applications. They also neglected to contribute back to the community from which they took (the open source community) and refused to contribute their own software (itunes, the apple gui, etc.) back to the community).

I hear from folks that OSX is very pretty and has lots of nice wallpapers. I've seen it. Yes, it's very shiny and sparkling. Folks claim it's very stable, and I have to agree; FreeBSD has always been a very solid OS. But is Apple now much different than M$? They take other peoples technology and re-package it. It doesn't work very well, but it's "more stable" than the previous version. It's locked up like a drum, but should somehow magically be comatible with stuff that shows up a year or two from now.

Apple/Mac is no better than Microsoft, they just smoke more pot and spend more on fancy billboards on the 101.

Next installment: Why I hate Redhat