I like to shop because it takes me out of the house, and out of Geekdom for a while. I also like being able to see and touch things before I plunk down my hard-earned.
I find that a bit of human contact, even if it's saying hi to the cheerful checker at Gelson's, leaves me reenergised and ready to take on new items back in the Geek Castle:-).
Besides, how could I check out the latest Apple stuff without visiting the Apple Store?
D
Re:The Wow Community
on
Cobol Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know Cobol, but it wasn't hard to understand.
But boy would it be a royal pain to write!
Encoding the message in that bizarre way made my eyes ache. I suppose you could, irony of ironies, use a Perl program to generate it automatically:-).
There were no advertisements on that page, and the original question was something on the order of "what types of ads would be shown on that kind of query".
I'm working on my kids' TV show and other business ideas while I would normally be watching TV.
I own a TV - actually, I own two - but they're used as monitors while I'm filming, nothing more.
Gotta tell you, I love your church. I had a Legomaniac ex-girlfriend, but she wasn't nearly as creative. I'm not religious, but I can appreciate talent when I see it. You should get it built for real!
I was a Windows loather who used mainly SGI and Linux, but when I decided to get into video in a big way in 1998, I decided to get a Mac because I was told the experience would be seamless.
It was, by 1998 standards, anyway, and I really liked the overall design of the system. But I still used the Unix machine for emacs and programming.
When the public beta came out, I put it on my dual processor G4 and switched almost entirely to the Mac immediately. I've been really happy with it ever since, so now I have a G5 at home, a G4 tower at work and a G4 PowerBook for the road.
Great systems, all of them. I couldn't be happier.
His PC has to get orders from the remote sites to be of any use to the baddies. NAT prevents inbound communication from the outside, thus taking care of the problem quite neatly.
It's probably cost-effective for such huge consumers of computer power to swap out their equipment on roughly an annual basis. The difference between, say, a dual 2ghz and a dual 3ghz system would be huge for them.
Now that I'm doing more video production I'll probably be doing that too, and using my current dual G5 as a render farm for my new main machine. Based on the results I'm getting and the speeds I get, it would be well worth the money to do that.
Finally, I don't think Pixar's stockholders are in much of a mood to be cheap. Say it costs US$1 million a year to replace their equipment. Finding Nemo is a well over billion-dollar property. Do stockholders care about spending $1 million to make sure the (most likely pretty high paid) people over there get the best equipment?
Virii and spyware kill Windows machines stone dead.
Apple will have to increase their market share by 400% or more before it proves truly worthwhile to make a Mac virus designed to spread virulently, or to write Mac spyware programs.
There is so much spyware under Windows that even the anti-spyware applications aren't keeping pace. And of course multiple spyware applications on the same PC do their best to stomp on each other, creating an environment more like a war zone than anything else.
Because Safari is not "an integral part of the operating system", it can't be used to install software and therefore you cannot manipulate it to install things automatically without the system asking for a root password. This is a huge advantage of the Mac over Windows security-wise, so even if the Mac were to gain ground over Windows it would still be a lot harder to plant unwanted software in a machine.
Microsoft was downright stupid to make their software update mechanism rely on using their browser instead of a standalone update application, as is done on the Mac. Being able to update software through the web means that, well, anyone can do it.
All of this makes Macintosh support a walk in the park compared to Windows' walk in the ghetto.
I'm not sure how good that argument is, considering that an encyclopedia published in Gallileo's time would be subject to similar pressures and would probably also claim the earth is flat.
I bought an iPod primarly because I figured it's a good backup device, and because of the music functions I'm less likely to lose it.
For a while, I tried taking it everywhere I went and using it more or less continuously. I discovered two things:
* Earbud earphones are downright painful for me; and * I found the sense of isolation from the world downright unpleasant, as though I was missing opportunities.
It turns out that I prefer experiencing the world around me to staying in my cocoon. So I wound up hooking it up to my home stereo system and I find it much more convenient than iTunes to control it, because I don't have to pull up or run iTunes. I also find that I can tolerate mixing of sound from multiple sources better than one; I can keep my music running in the background on my home stereo while editing video on the G5, even though the video itself has its own soundtrack. For some reason I couldn't do that when I had both my music and my soundtrack both playing on the G5.
So my iPod wound up being extremely useful to me, just not in the way I thought it would be.
I echo the endorsement of Canon as a company that plays more fair than the competition. For one thing, when I bought my Canon inkjet, it had full-use cartridges included, unlike HPs which have special partially-filled ones. They also have separate cartridges for each colour, so you can buy the individual colour when it runs out with no problem. Finally, the printer seemed to be a cut above the competition in durability.
But I have no trouble finding/buying Canon printers. Fry's, Best Buy and CompUSA all stock them, no problem.
Incidentally, I highly recommend my HP Color LaserJet 3500 - it's much cheaper per page even though you eventually have to replace the toner cartridges at huge cost.
Kudos for your work in finding that, but unfortunately (?) it doesn't seem like it works all that well:
I think that the only way to spread that virus from Mac to PC and back is to copy and run it "manually".
That fact will surely inhibit its spread significantly.
Oh, and it's not a MacOS X virus at all. It runs under MacOS 9 instead.
Nice try, and thanks for playing, but that's not a good example at all.
It's possible to run Office on the Mac instead of Office on the PC with very little retraining. It looks prettier, but it's otherwise the same program.
The pace of required Windows updates, which are time-consuming to install, is frightening, especially since they have been known to damage the Windows software environment. And Microsoft itself, with policies like the supposedly monthly updates, seems somewhat blase about security problems that can spread in days, or even hours. In the near future, because of the tremendous effort being expended on creating exploits, it may be literally impossible to keep a Windows machine secure.
My point (in this entire thread) has been that creating "a properly secured, updated Windows machine" is one heck of a lot of work. The time spent doing that work is best spent on something actually worthwhile, that adds value to what you're doing.
That's a truly awful example, because the same lock-breaking techniques that work on the $9.99 lock would work on the cheaper, less frequently deployed, dollar store lock too.
An exploit in the wild that's compromised thousands of Windows machines won't do a thing on the Mac. In the security environment we're in, where people are expecting commodity operating systems and attacking every system in sight just in case it is one, I think it's safe to say that security through obscurity is a lot better than no security at all.
A lot of accounting can be done through a custom web-based system that I'd develop for the company (similar to the one I already deploy), but there are some very boring programming tasks associated with accounting that are best left to commercial vendors.
Aren't there accounting programs nowadays that have web interfaces and could work with any clients?
I know there are at least some accounting packages for MacOS X, but I know there is maybe 1 for every thousand that exists on Windows.
* Spyware is created for purely commercial reasons. It is not commercially viable to create this kind of software for a platform with a 5% market share. I don't expect spyware to become a problem under MacOS X unless something happens that pushes its market share radically higher.
if 99.99% of virii and spyware are writen for Windows, the Mac and Linux are far, far safer. That's not "security through obscurity"; it's pure, hard-headed commercial reality.
* Most of the tricks used for "drive-by installs" of Spyware work because Internet Explorer is integrated with the operating system. In other words, you use Internet Explorer + an ActiveX DLL to install updates to Windows. Therefore, you can use the same combination to do Bad Things.
On the Mac, there is no such integration, so the only way to install software is to, well, install it. Period.
You pointed me to a spyware removal tool for the Mac, but I have yet to hear of any Mac spyware. Until proven otherwise, I consider that program bogus.
Because for better or for worse, I'm not a corporate drone. I believe users are people, not abstractions, and so I believe in giving them as much freedom as I can.
And I really, really don't like being called every time the clock drifts on one of the PCs and someone wants me to fix it.
I have better things to do than fixing it or installing software. So I delegate the power, and as much of the responsibility as people can bear, down to the users.
And users love me, because they know I have respect and sympathy for them.
I'm never going to be a Nazi-class administrator, even though I know it would solve a lot of my problems -- by, no doubt, creating newer and more frustrating ones.
* Microsoft Office is in many ways an excellent product, for all the criticism it gets here, and the Mac version works great. I tried installing OpenOffice on a couple of machines, and it made a complete hash out of their Word documents.
* It's a huge aesthetic step backwards, and everyone, including me, wants their computers to be nice to look at. I don't think this is frivolous, considering all the time we spend on our machines.
The reason I can't switch to another desktop OS at my current job is that we unfortunately have a phone system reliant on Windows. (For the grim details look at my posts and read the one 2-3 behind this one).
Spyware makes it on to 100% of the computers in my network. I have taught my users to put in, use and update ad-aware, but I think even with that there is spyware it's not recognizing. I come to this conclusion thanks to erratic behaviour in many of my machines that is not due to viruses.
Some of my users like spyware. Hotbar is a good example of a program that's actually liked by a number of people. But the programs that seem to do the most harm are the ones that try to stay invisible.
There are two computers on my network that never have spyware problems. One of them is the Mac I do all my web surfing on, and the other is the PC I do no web surfing on at all.
Any company I found is going to be Mac-only. There's little point in tolerating the huge overhead associated with running a Windows network.
Don't buy it. It comes with horribly expensive software, ridiculously expensive annual fees, and customer-unfriendly support. I can't tell you how much it costs because my boss would kill me, but it was far more expensive than most phone systems now available with the same capacity.
Documentation is only through a $3,000 course you have to take in their beautiful, tourist-friendly headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Why don't these companies recognize that Honolulu is a much better place for training centres?)
If you yell and scream about this, they will grudgingly sell you 30 days of access to a basic course on the system for $1,300. After the 30 days, access to this documentation vanishes in a puff of smoke.
No matter what you do, they will NOT sell you paper documentation of any kind. A motley collection of "white papers" exists on the server, none of which ever seem to cover what you need to know.
And I didn't even mention that it runs on Windows, and typical systems are not protected well against virii. Their integrated messaging only works in conjunction with a special Outlook form which requires that the organization have Outlook and Exchange, witch I would otherwise move away from.
With a requirement for Outlook and Exchange, of course, and a requirement for a client on your PC to run your phone (which causes all kinds of tiresome problems), there's no way to leave Windows for as long as you use it.
Microsoft doesn't care about any profits SCO makes from its lawsuit. They probably think, as we do, that those profits are insignificant to none.
What they do care about is spreading FUD. I was bored the other day and read Optimize, one of the free magazines Ziff-Davis sends me on a regular basis. I almost lost my lunch when I read a lengthly article about the legal hazards associated with open source. It was written in a way that would make any Linux-using corporation fear for its life! It was so filled with distortions and half-truths that I threw it in the trash bin where it belonged, and ignored all the solicitations asking me to continue my subscription for free.
I don't want that garbage in my company - but we should be aware that it's there, it's floating around, and it wouldn't have even a mirage of plausibility without this lawsuit.
The longer this lawsuit lingers, the more time they have to spread the FUD and use it to their advantage. So it's greatly in their interest to fund SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
I like to shop because it takes me out of the house, and out of Geekdom for a while. I also like being able to see and touch things before I plunk down my hard-earned.
:-).
I find that a bit of human contact, even if it's saying hi to the cheerful checker at Gelson's, leaves me reenergised and ready to take on new items back in the Geek Castle
Besides, how could I check out the latest Apple stuff without visiting the Apple Store?
D
I don't know Cobol, but it wasn't hard to understand.
:-).
But boy would it be a royal pain to write!
Encoding the message in that bizarre way made my eyes ache. I suppose you could, irony of ironies, use a Perl program to generate it automatically
D
Actually, it's worse than that. They disabled the automated safety features of the reactor.
The accident was eloquent testimony to the power of human stupidity.
D
I don't think she'd like our speed limits :-(.
D
Sorry, I meant advertisements, not results.
There were no advertisements on that page, and the original question was something on the order of "what types of ads would be shown on that kind of query".
D
Why wonder when it's so easy to do?
As in, Here.
But in case you're too lazy to click on the link, the answer is none. None at all.
D
I'm working on my kids' TV show and other business ideas while I would normally be watching TV.
I own a TV - actually, I own two - but they're used as monitors while I'm filming, nothing more.
Gotta tell you, I love your church. I had a Legomaniac ex-girlfriend, but she wasn't nearly as creative. I'm not religious, but I can appreciate talent when I see it. You should get it built for real!
D
I was a Windows loather who used mainly SGI and Linux, but when I decided to get into video in a big way in 1998, I decided to get a Mac because I was told the experience would be seamless.
It was, by 1998 standards, anyway, and I really liked the overall design of the system. But I still used the Unix machine for emacs and programming.
When the public beta came out, I put it on my dual processor G4 and switched almost entirely to the Mac immediately. I've been really happy with it ever since, so now I have a G5 at home, a G4 tower at work and a G4 PowerBook for the road.
Great systems, all of them. I couldn't be happier.
D
Can't it?
His PC has to get orders from the remote sites to be of any use to the baddies. NAT prevents inbound communication from the outside, thus taking care of the problem quite neatly.
Unless I'm missing something?
D
SGI Octane + Irix + Maya +
Windows Box + Windows 2000 + Photoshop =
one kickass really expensive production environment.
Compared to what they used before, the G5's dirt cheap.
D
It's probably cost-effective for such huge consumers of computer power to swap out their equipment on roughly an annual basis. The difference between, say, a dual 2ghz and a dual 3ghz system would be huge for them.
Now that I'm doing more video production I'll probably be doing that too, and using my current dual G5 as a render farm for my new main machine. Based on the results I'm getting and the speeds I get, it would be well worth the money to do that.
Finally, I don't think Pixar's stockholders are in much of a mood to be cheap. Say it costs US$1 million a year to replace their equipment. Finding Nemo is a well over billion-dollar property. Do stockholders care about spending $1 million to make sure the (most likely pretty high paid) people over there get the best equipment?
Somehow I doubt it.
D
Virii and spyware kill Windows machines stone dead.
Apple will have to increase their market share by 400% or more before it proves truly worthwhile to make a Mac virus designed to spread virulently, or to write Mac spyware programs.
There is so much spyware under Windows that even the anti-spyware applications aren't keeping pace. And of course multiple spyware applications on the same PC do their best to stomp on each other, creating an environment more like a war zone than anything else.
Because Safari is not "an integral part of the operating system", it can't be used to install software and therefore you cannot manipulate it to install things automatically without the system asking for a root password. This is a huge advantage of the Mac over Windows security-wise, so even if the Mac were to gain ground over Windows it would still be a lot harder to plant unwanted software in a machine.
Microsoft was downright stupid to make their software update mechanism rely on using their browser instead of a standalone update application, as is done on the Mac. Being able to update software through the web means that, well, anyone can do it.
All of this makes Macintosh support a walk in the park compared to Windows' walk in the ghetto.
D
I'm not sure how good that argument is, considering that an encyclopedia published in Gallileo's time would be subject to similar pressures and would probably also claim the earth is flat.
D
I bought an iPod primarly because I figured it's a good backup device, and because of the music functions I'm less likely to lose it.
For a while, I tried taking it everywhere I went and using it more or less continuously. I discovered two things:
* Earbud earphones are downright painful for me; and
* I found the sense of isolation from the world downright unpleasant, as though I was missing opportunities.
It turns out that I prefer experiencing the world around me to staying in my cocoon. So I wound up hooking it up to my home stereo system and I find it much more convenient than iTunes to control it, because I don't have to pull up or run iTunes. I also find that I can tolerate mixing of sound from multiple sources better than one; I can keep my music running in the background on my home stereo while editing video on the G5, even though the video itself has its own soundtrack. For some reason I couldn't do that when I had both my music and my soundtrack both playing on the G5.
So my iPod wound up being extremely useful to me, just not in the way I thought it would be.
D
I echo the endorsement of Canon as a company that plays more fair than the competition. For one thing, when I bought my Canon inkjet, it had full-use cartridges included, unlike HPs which have special partially-filled ones. They also have separate cartridges for each colour, so you can buy the individual colour when it runs out with no problem. Finally, the printer seemed to be a cut above the competition in durability.
But I have no trouble finding/buying Canon printers. Fry's, Best Buy and CompUSA all stock them, no problem.
Incidentally, I highly recommend my HP Color LaserJet 3500 - it's much cheaper per page even though you eventually have to replace the toner cartridges at huge cost.
D
Kudos for your work in finding that, but unfortunately (?) it doesn't seem like it works all that well:
I think that the only way to spread that virus from Mac to PC and back is to copy and run it "manually".
That fact will surely inhibit its spread significantly.
Oh, and it's not a MacOS X virus at all. It runs under MacOS 9 instead.
Nice try, and thanks for playing, but that's not a good example at all.
It's possible to run Office on the Mac instead of Office on the PC with very little retraining. It looks prettier, but it's otherwise the same program.
The pace of required Windows updates, which are time-consuming to install, is frightening, especially since they have been known to damage the Windows software environment. And Microsoft itself, with policies like the supposedly monthly updates, seems somewhat blase about security problems that can spread in days, or even hours. In the near future, because of the tremendous effort being expended on creating exploits, it may be literally impossible to keep a Windows machine secure.
My point (in this entire thread) has been that creating "a properly secured, updated Windows machine" is one heck of a lot of work. The time spent doing that work is best spent on something actually worthwhile, that adds value to what you're doing.
D
That's a truly awful example, because the same lock-breaking techniques that work on the $9.99 lock would work on the cheaper, less frequently deployed, dollar store lock too.
An exploit in the wild that's compromised thousands of Windows machines won't do a thing on the Mac. In the security environment we're in, where people are expecting commodity operating systems and attacking every system in sight just in case it is one, I think it's safe to say that security through obscurity is a lot better than no security at all.
D
Actually, that's a very good serious question.
A lot of accounting can be done through a custom web-based system that I'd develop for the company (similar to the one I already deploy), but there are some very boring programming tasks associated with accounting that are best left to commercial vendors.
Aren't there accounting programs nowadays that have web interfaces and could work with any clients?
I know there are at least some accounting packages for MacOS X, but I know there is maybe 1 for every thousand that exists on Windows.
Anyone have good perspective on this?
D
Two points:
* Spyware is created for purely commercial reasons. It is not commercially viable to create this kind of software for a platform with a 5% market share. I don't expect spyware to become a problem under MacOS X unless something happens that pushes its market share radically higher.
if 99.99% of virii and spyware are writen for Windows, the Mac and Linux are far, far safer. That's not "security through obscurity"; it's pure, hard-headed commercial reality.
* Most of the tricks used for "drive-by installs" of Spyware work because Internet Explorer is integrated with the operating system. In other words, you use Internet Explorer + an ActiveX DLL to install updates to Windows. Therefore, you can use the same combination to do Bad Things.
On the Mac, there is no such integration, so the only way to install software is to, well, install it. Period.
You pointed me to a spyware removal tool for the Mac, but I have yet to hear of any Mac spyware. Until proven otherwise, I consider that program bogus.
D
Because for better or for worse, I'm not a corporate drone. I believe users are people, not abstractions, and so I believe in giving them as much freedom as I can.
And I really, really don't like being called every time the clock drifts on one of the PCs and someone wants me to fix it.
I have better things to do than fixing it or installing software. So I delegate the power, and as much of the responsibility as people can bear, down to the users.
And users love me, because they know I have respect and sympathy for them.
I'm never going to be a Nazi-class administrator, even though I know it would solve a lot of my problems -- by, no doubt, creating newer and more frustrating ones.
D
Two points against it:
* Microsoft Office is in many ways an excellent product, for all the criticism it gets here, and the Mac version works great. I tried installing OpenOffice on a couple of machines, and it made a complete hash out of their Word documents.
* It's a huge aesthetic step backwards, and everyone, including me, wants their computers to be nice to look at. I don't think this is frivolous, considering all the time we spend on our machines.
The reason I can't switch to another desktop OS at my current job is that we unfortunately have a phone system reliant on Windows. (For the grim details look at my posts and read the one 2-3 behind this one).
D
Spyware makes it on to 100% of the computers in my network. I have taught my users to put in, use and update ad-aware, but I think even with that there is spyware it's not recognizing. I come to this conclusion thanks to erratic behaviour in many of my machines that is not due to viruses.
Some of my users like spyware. Hotbar is a good example of a program that's actually liked by a number of people. But the programs that seem to do the most harm are the ones that try to stay invisible.
There are two computers on my network that never have spyware problems. One of them is the Mac I do all my web surfing on, and the other is the PC I do no web surfing on at all.
Any company I found is going to be Mac-only. There's little point in tolerating the huge overhead associated with running a Windows network.
D
Interactive Intelligence.
Don't buy it. It comes with horribly expensive software, ridiculously expensive annual fees, and customer-unfriendly support. I can't tell you how much it costs because my boss would kill me, but it was far more expensive than most phone systems now available with the same capacity.
Documentation is only through a $3,000 course you have to take in their beautiful, tourist-friendly headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Why don't these companies recognize that Honolulu is a much better place for training centres?)
If you yell and scream about this, they will grudgingly sell you 30 days of access to a basic course on the system for $1,300. After the 30 days, access to this documentation vanishes in a puff of smoke.
No matter what you do, they will NOT sell you paper documentation of any kind. A motley collection of "white papers" exists on the server, none of which ever seem to cover what you need to know.
And I didn't even mention that it runs on Windows, and typical systems are not protected well against virii. Their integrated messaging only works in conjunction with a special Outlook form which requires that the organization have Outlook and Exchange, witch I would otherwise move away from.
With a requirement for Outlook and Exchange, of course, and a requirement for a client on your PC to run your phone (which causes all kinds of tiresome problems), there's no way to leave Windows for as long as you use it.
Microsoft doesn't care about any profits SCO makes from its lawsuit. They probably think, as we do, that those profits are insignificant to none.
What they do care about is spreading FUD. I was bored the other day and read Optimize, one of the free magazines Ziff-Davis sends me on a regular basis. I almost lost my lunch when I read a lengthly article about the legal hazards associated with open source. It was written in a way that would make any Linux-using corporation fear for its life! It was so filled with distortions and half-truths that I threw it in the trash bin where it belonged, and ignored all the solicitations asking me to continue my subscription for free.
I don't want that garbage in my company - but we should be aware that it's there, it's floating around, and it wouldn't have even a mirage of plausibility without this lawsuit.
The longer this lawsuit lingers, the more time they have to spread the FUD and use it to their advantage. So it's greatly in their interest to fund SCO.
That's Microsoft's real game.
D
Do you actually know that, and if so, how'd you find out?
Apple's great because they have some of the best-loved products on the planet. And I think the success of Slashdot's Apple section reflects that.
If Rob was bribed with a PowerBook, it certainly paid off well for everyone, including us as readers.
D