Tech.blog

Finally, after a few months of thinking of about it, my wife and I decided to switch to Macs from — no not Windows — but from Linux. We actually switched way back in April, but it’s only now that I’ve had time to write about it. We are a different breed in a sense as most switchers are coming off Windows.

I had decided as early as 2003 that I have had enough of Windows. I started with DOS in 1987 (I was in second year high school at the time) and eventually moved up to Windows 95 in 1996, Windows 98 in 1999, and XP in 2003.

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Our PC is nearing the end of it’s life. It has served me well for 5 years (and within those years, has served my wife and me for nearly 2). Hopefully, my wife and I can extract our data soon. The face is really starting to fade (monitor has lost brightness). There are times that it barely has enough strength to do anything (power supply doesn’t want to power up). The memory is going (memory module is acting up). The poor guy can’t even read it’s own handwriting (hard disk is failing).

My wife and I are planning on getting a Mac for our next computer. It’s really a different breed of computer from what we’ve heard, read, and seen. It doesn’t get sick (no viruses) or attacked (no security holes) that easily.

Way (way, way, way) back when I was in elementary school, we had to remember all these acronyms for our social studies class. Most of these acronyms had to do with United Nations (UN) organizations. These included UNESCO, WHO, and IMF. I couldn’t really appreciate all that remembering. I thought elementary (and then high school) were the last time I’d see acronyms.

But when I learned about computers, the terms CPU, RAM, ROM, and FDD were introduced to me. Of course there was also BASIC, COBOL, as well as EBCDIC, ASCII, and BCD.

As I entered college for my BS in Computer Science a lot more acronyms came along as computers now came with hard disk drives (HDDs) and CD-ROMs. Concepts on Operating Systems (OS), RDBMS, PROM, EPROM, OSI, TCP/IP, FTP, WWW, and VR gave my brain even more strain. With optical media nowadays there’s CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RW+.

Now that I’m an IT professional for nearly 10 years, the list just gets longer with SQL, HTML, DHTML, XML, PHP, ASP, to name a few. And if you’re not careful you and your colleague may be both talking about ASP but are referring to two totally different things: Application Service Providers or Active Server Pages. When I was a kid soap was just soap and Ajax was a brand of detergent. Now SOAP and AJAX are technologies used on the Internet.

With the abundance OSS (Open Source Software) there is an equivalent number of OSS Licenses. Take GPL, MPL, and LGPL. Of course there are the organizations that push OSS: FSF, OSI, and many others.

But it doesn’t really end there does it? With email, IM, and SMS (text messaging) now common means of communication, more and more acronyms get added to the list everyday. Can you keep up with CUL8R, BTW, IMHO, ROTFL, BCNU, or BRB?

Even love notes are embedded with acronyms. I won’t list them here lest I may accidentally divulge the cryptic codes I share with my wife.