I know this for fact since I am working on a system I put together for partners here and in India for selling prescriptions online. Our site is 100% legal, yet we don't have a huge budget, so Google and other search engines were our main hope. However, this looks to have now changed.
For proof of fact that it is big money lobbying congress and the search engines, take a gander at this article (one of many on the subject). Drugstore.com and others are part of VIPPS, which is a 'licensed' group of online pharmacy companies. Getting VIPPS certification is not cheap and has particular requirements.
While I believe in making sure pharmacies are legit and safe, I think this approach is not the best and only benefits the ones who are raking in cash hand over fist.
but... This does little while we're locked into yearly and even double yearly contracts. I just went to look for a new phone last week - all we're rip off's. At least $150 and up. And (this was AT&T) they all required two year contracts.
So, for the average consumer, number portability will do you no good while locked into a contract. Step in the right direction tho..
Just like with IE vs. Netscape, M$ doesn't expect a profit. And it needs to do two things with their music service that will provide advantages in the long run.
1. Tie users into their DRM. Plain and simple. 2. Tie users to their media player which will be restricted to their DRM.
Number 2 kills the following companies on the Win platform: Real, MusicMatch, BuyMusic, Napster and even iTunes so long as iPod sales for Windows drop off. iTunes will still exist for the Mac tho.
Cringley's latest article has some excellent points on M$' whole DRM, platform agenda and why they lose money in most of their non-Office and non-OS ventures.
Frankly, this smacks of the same shit that happened a few years back with the browser wars. M$ sees threat, launches their money losing alternative. Then bundles it, forces relevant M$ apps to use it, and then breaks compatibility. And thanks to huge lock on the desktop - along with, really, apathy on the developer and user base - presto, competition eliminated and monopoly suceeded. With their media player, a similar thing will happen. But instead of breaking standards, M$ will force their propreitary format on everyone who wants to use their player, thusly creating the artifical standard. Deja'vu all over again.
I really hope the EU kicks their ass on this front and them releasing a music (then video, I'm sure) service could potentially add more fuel to the fire. These guys (M$) are due a good ass kickin. We don't need their vision of computing nor their abuses. The real world does not have just one car maker or one company who builds all the houses everywhere, or even one company who makes a variety of cd players. The software world should be no different.
One reason I can deal with Apple's DRM is because I can take the songs, burn them to a cd and then rip them back in. I still have very good quality, but the songs are not restricted and in a more widely usuable format - mp3. And in the end, compatibility with all my machines is the gold standard of which I try to live by. It's hard, long road, but not an impossible one.
So I started out w/RH 9. Then a few months back, was keeping pretty up on the Rawhide releases. Then, a few weeks ago, I started running the NPTL kernels and the latest XFree release.
I don't like the gui services boot - which I know can be disabled. The only other honking issue I've run into is external FireWire drive support. Apparently there have been some issues with that lately, altho, it worked perfectly in 9.
I prob won't move to Fedora just yet until I read some better things about it. But my hybrid - while a pain to get installed right - seems to work well. I've got pretty recent releases of GTK2, Gnome, Moz, Gaim, Open Office and other apps. They all seem to work well. But, like I said, maybe it's the hybrid nature I took updating things.
Five years ago what young people were interested was technology. Raise a political point on slashdot and you would get slapped down with offtopic. Today what people are interested in is politics, there is a war going on out there which matters a damn sight more than what Hilary Rosen or Bill Gates might have said.
Comment noted. However, a lot has changed in the last five years. Most of the web innovation is not being driven by a handful of companies, but is being controlled and, frankly, bitch slapped by one company and one company only.
I don't mind competition or even Windows itself. I choose to use it as little as possible where and when I can. However, when you come up against a monopoly of thought and culture as Micro$oft (and for that matter, any other closed-minded group) there is little room for you to move.
The technology is still interesting. However, there are forces at work slowing things down and trying to syphon off as much progress and innovation as possible. And frankly, when one company decides that they want to lead an initiative to tell me what I can and can't do with hardware I buy, then that's when the gloves come off.
Like any movement or group that gains significant power and interest from others, it ends up getting political and I accept that. When I'm 60 I still want the ability to write code and work with machines to do other things. I'll protest, pay money, bitch, moan - whatever, to get that because I know there are others that want the same. You might not and that's fine, that's your opinion and luckily, you're still allowed to voice it - for now.
Anyway, I've been participating in/. for quite a long time and the whole va-linux conspiracy theory is stretching things a bit far now, don't cha think?
Currently I have a few of the Shuttle boxes that run 1ghz p3 and 1.4ghz celeron & a white box generic Tyan 1.2ghz Athlon dually.
The p3-1hgz does my personal domain hosting - web (tomcat/apache), mail, openh323 gateway, ut server.
The celery does mail and public ssl egroupware portal for my home biz.
The dually is running rh 9 w/software raid across 2 ata-100 drives. It handles all my MySql stuff as well as the main repository for all my machines backups - it's on an the internal net. Once a week nightly backups are dropped to tape and once a month, the backup dir is wiped. So I always have at least 1 week of backups on tape, which I'm quite happy with. This is also my CVS server too.
All my development is mainly done on me 1ghz Powerbook. I also have a excellent 80gb Seagate Barracuda (fluid bearings) in an external firewire enclosure that has all my mp3z & mov/divx's. Sometime I just drop it on the dually and it mounts it up and shares it on my network, but most of the time I keep it local. My Powerbook is also dual head w/a 17" 760V Samsung LCD. Great monitor for the price.
My last machine is a kick ass little Shuttle box with a Athlon XP 2000+ and Maxtor ata-133 20gb drive. It's dual partitioned w/XP and Fedora. I use the Fedora side to develop for another Linux server that is just easier vs. doin it on my Mac. The XP boot is for Starcraft & UT.:)
All the machines have 1gb of ram except the two Intel Shuttle boxes. Everything internally is connected via a DLink Fast Ethernet switch. My external net is just a cheapie FE switch which is all bridged together via a even cheaper little broadband 'router'. It has dhcp, firewall and other things built it and has worked pretty well for me. My connecion is 1.5 down and 786 up DSL. No cable here. There's also an Airport Base station on the wall that provides wi-fi for family and friends when they drop by.
I've been running networks for many years outta my various cribs. The biggest and baddest was when the whole boom was goin on. I had a startup w/some friends and I had 9 machines in a closet of my studio apt. This included 2 big (1 size down from rack mount) UPS', a Dell quad Xeon 550 server (scsi 10k rpm drives with raid 5), 512mb ram and hot swappable everything - 4u also. This was out big app server. I was also running 2 RH 5 dns servers, 1 RH 5 mail server, 1 RH 5 ssh server, 3 dell p3-500 2u apache servers and one failover app server (Weblogic), 2 NT SQL 7.0 servers with full replication. I also had a separate tape backup box that was just a p2-350. Ah, the good 'ol days. After a bit we sold the company and I went traveling to Europe never to have another rack in my closet again.:)
Anyway, I love home networks and my two big obsessions now are: quiet and huge storage. I thought the article was kinda lame when I go to the video card and mouse part - something my servers have never really had or needed (cept maybe the nt junk). One thing I found higly annoying is when RH 9 required a mouse to install. I didn't like that much, but no big I guess.
So I have yet to find the magic bullet machine that will hold a 1TB array for cheap and for quiet. But maybe some day. Could it be that now that there's 5400 rpm 2.5" drives that that could be the thing??? Low power and quiet..
Indeed, that's exactly what the supply siders and starve the beasts want - no govt programs for the <= rich.
I have nothing against being rich, in fact, I hope to be financially secure one day. However, until that happens and everyone has a job or some sort of income, then there will be need for safety nets - for the good of society.
It is even more evident that the corporate crowd has blantently pitched its tent on the Whitehouse lawn and has no plans of leaving as long as this administration holds control. For the common person, these are dark times ahead. Next year will be our biggest chance to head off certain financial disaster. Make sure you vote!
for all those against this raping of the information age, if you go to Amazon AT ALL, you deserve to be dragged behind a slow moving pickup truck up in the yonder hills of Washington.
Vote with your f-ing pocketbook for christsake!! Then contact your representatives and congress schmoozers. Corporations do have the upper hand on this stuff, but we still have a voice, however small it may seem.
and I'm sure Bezos kisses the mirror every morning as much as the money grabbers kiss his patent loving ass every day. Unfortunate for sure, but this is the state of the U.S. shortsighted-corporation-uber-alles economic system. Will there ever be a sane balance again? Gee, I really don't know.
and in 20 years when you're not allowed to write any code without the proper patent licensing royalties, then we reserve the right to kick u in the behind and say see, we told you so!
Dot Con is much more specific as far as the whole Quattrone thing goes. It's amazing cuz I went thru that with a company that I help found (like many others I'm sure) and it's just phenominal the greed that ensued and how investment bankers and investors just took most of the public for a ride.
I'm actually glad that I never invested during this time, however, I had many friends and family that did and just got sacked. If the majority of the public really knew what went on during this period of time, I doubt they'd look to invest again. Of course, nothing like this in tech will probably happen again any time soon, if ever.
Hmm, I don't remember Panther being touted as a 64-bit OS at all. In fact, that's all on the G5 side of things.
Regardless, 10.2.8, as mentioned earlier, is free. And there are some significant things that make this worth the upgrade.
A lot of things have been sped up/optimized. PDF viewing, file searches, graphics in general.
The file system is fully journaled.
File Vault provides full 128-bit encryption of user files - with no or little speed degradation. A very handy feature for people with laptops that might possibly get stolen.
All the Samba stuff works much better.
iChat AV. I video call my relatives on the west coast and this is a billion times better than the phone; I don't care if people think it's cheesy or not.
X11 is a lot tighter than in previous versions.
etc.., etc.., etc..
As far as the G5 goes, what other PC, PC mind you, can you have 8-gigs of ram on or that comes stock wither SATA drives?! None yet. Apple is doing it right. They're introducing things that work well and will then provide incremental upgrades that bring in tested features, such as 64-bit. I think a lot of people are just too used to the Windoze way of release crap asap and then fix. Charging along the way as well.
Hey, as far as iChat AV goes, Net Meeting does not work as effortlessly (as with most non-Mac things) nor has there ever been any significant effort to market it as anything spectacular. Although iChat does require either a AOL or.Mac account, there are NO firewall issues at all. Period. With Net Meeting - now some other MSN Messenger something - there are not only issues connecting thru firewalls but it also claims to adhere to h323, while, as usual, brakes various things such as directory lookups.
While I agree that this is not 'revolutionary' I think it is significant as far as speed goes and has some interesting features. Apple still supports OS projects such as Apache, Samba, and OpenSSH/SSL - you won't see any of these coming out a a M$ distro soon. Or ever for that fact.
So, while there still is competition and choice out there I'll continue to vote with my pocketbook.
This is exactly what the article is saying. It will be more akin to competing with Google's yet unreleased service, Froogle. There's not some almight, generic Google-killer in the works (at least not yet). Amazon is strictly interested in prodcuts.
So I don't see how this threatens the main search biz of the almight G.
I don't wanna sound too doomsday, but that whole way of thinking like a corporate lawyer - where all property is ownable and only by those who can afford it - is only going to hurt everyone else. Sure it'll be fine for the privileged, but that's about as useful as only being able to see to the end of your nose.
One of my favorite movie lines is in Back To The Future 2:
Doc: Look what happens to your son!
He gives Marty the paper - USA Today Hill Valley Edition. The headline reads Youth Jailed For Attempted Robbery.
Marty: My son?
Marty looks at the picture.
Marty: God, he looks just like me. (reading from the paper) "Within two hours of his arrest, Martin McFly Junior was tried, convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in the State Penitentiary." (To Doc) Within two hours?
Doc: The justice system works swiftly in the future, now that they've abolished all lawyers.
--------------------- Lawyers are for sucks. - Doug McKenzie
I tried Prevayler and even loaded in 50k records from an old product table and object-ized them.
Yah, it was fast. Searches were great. I even figured out how to do complex object joins. But I started having trouble when I tried to figure out how all the transactions worked. This was complicated by the wiki they're using, which was quite useless to me. It lead to many dead ends.
However, the real reason I found that I could not (possibly ever) use Prevayler is becuase it seemed the approach was for one machine and one machine only. There were no distributed mechanisms at all. Or at least, not how I'm used to working.
All the systems I've worked on in the past five years have all been with clusters of app servers. If all the objects on one machine were all in memory, then I couldn't think of an easy way to get them into the memory of the other machines. There was some talk about using Java Spaces, but that's kinda where I dropped off.
And the other issue was getting to the data from non app server machines. Like stuff to do back end reporting and things like that. I bascially figured out that for n-machine access, I needed something that, well, acted like a database.
I thought the idea was very interesting and maybe these things have been addressed. But when I really sat down with it for a few weeks, it just didn't pan out for me.
While I agree that if you use Linux in your environment, then there's probably no reason to use anything else the PHP. I've done a ton of Java development - some really big projects - and for home, I pretty much use PHP. So, I agree up to that point.
But there's a few issues I have with the parent:
I just want to get the little database app that should be done in 2 hours done in 2 hours. Java has lots of type-checking, etc. that's usually unnecessary for my simple reporting/collection of database data.
Sure, for collecting info from a db, that might be ok. But 2 things:
1. Type-checking??? I don't find getting an Integer from a Number column too tough. I will say tho, that if your using Text/CLOBS, then that can be a pain, depending on your db.
2. As long as it's just reporting/collecting your fine. But get an app that needs calculations and stuff done and a strongly typed language becomes an asset.
Plus imho Tomcat is a pain in the ass to configure, and you gotta keep javac'ing, and so on.
Well, if anyone ever puts a compiler of any kind on a production server they should be shot. There are plenty of ways to precompile Java webapp JSPs and then deploy the WAR out to Tomcat with only a JRE installed. That will bypass any kind of need for any compilation. This is why your production boxen are different from staging/build boxen.
I'm not trying to bash the guy, but it's clear than many notions about why something sux or doesn't is due to lack of experience. I'm definitely of the mindset that there is a right tool for the right job. No way in hell would I ever try to do a enterprise scale app in PHP or Perl. However, for proof of concepts and small sites, PHP/Perl is great.
I dunno, this is kinda the typical stuff you get with people who haven't used Java very much and don't really understand how to apply it and what it is really meant to do and not to do.
You can get an OGG plugin for Quicktime, which iTunes - I think - can use to play the files. I'm pretty sure I've listened to OGG streams on my Tibook, but now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, I definitely know there's a QT OGG plugin.
I think the encryption is standard thru Bluetooth itself. When I had a T68i and wanted to use it w/my Tibook, I checked into this - being the paranoid one that I am. And apparently, Bluetooth, unlike WEP, is much more robust. Or at least, it hasn't been cracked yet.
Anyway, that's how I'm assuming - not being a Bluetooth expert - that's what they mean.
As much as I distaste the evil empire, I've been using the same split Natural Kbd for about 6 or so years. It has the basic alphabet, plus nice, big, pg up/down, home/end, insert/delete and arrow keys. The Natural Elite sucked some giganto salty balls when they made these keys smaller. Oh, the horror!
And, the numeric keypad on the right is a good size too. Other than that, yr usual F-keys and the 3 scroll lock keys. That's it. No email or volume (altho, I'd like a volume key, but I can map over a key combo for that), web browser - whatever!
True, the Natural kbd is a little big and it's ps/2 (I bought a ps/2 to usb adapter and use it on all my machines via a usb kvm switch), but it still works. It has a nice feel and I've made a lot of ca$h on it. So, if it ain't broke...
Dude, I know it sucks, but ctrl-button = right button. I agree, yah, right mouse button wld be cool, but it's not that big of a deal. At least to me.
Frankly, the only place that ever comes into play is when my Tibook is not at my desk. Which might be 10% of the time. Plus, there's other things in other apps, even on the Linux side that could require a key + mouse button. Stuff like opening other tabs in Moz, etc..
I use a 2-button optical mouse with my Tibook at my desk all the time and it works perfectly. In fact, unlike XP or even Linux (I'm thinking Kudzu on boot), it never bugs me about plugging in this or not plugging in that. So, I'll gladly take a non-intrusive OS over 2 mouse buttons.
I will agree tho with you point about the new Apple mouse not being able to recharged. That's pretty lame. And I'm not sure I'd ever buy a Mac mouse or keyboard anyway; I much prefer split kbds and I've been quite fond of Logitech mice for some time.
While this might not necessairly be innovation, Apple is usually always first out of the gate with hardware changes, this one included. I don't think any major PC vendor is going completely wireless, which totally rocks. But they can afford to do this because of their loyal minions.
So yah, the non-rechargable mouse is a big boo boo. Second mouse button, mm, I'm not too worried.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this for fact since I am working on a system I put together for partners here and in India for selling prescriptions online. Our site is 100% legal, yet we don't have a huge budget, so Google and other search engines were our main hope. However, this looks to have now changed.
For proof of fact that it is big money lobbying congress and the search engines, take a gander at this article (one of many on the subject). Drugstore.com and others are part of VIPPS, which is a 'licensed' group of online pharmacy companies. Getting VIPPS certification is not cheap and has particular requirements.
While I believe in making sure pharmacies are legit and safe, I think this approach is not the best and only benefits the ones who are raking in cash hand over fist.
but... This does little while we're locked into yearly and even double yearly contracts. I just went to look for a new phone last week - all we're rip off's. At least $150 and up. And (this was AT&T) they all required two year contracts.
So, for the average consumer, number portability will do you no good while locked into a contract. Step in the right direction tho..
Just like with IE vs. Netscape, M$ doesn't expect a profit. And it needs to do two things with their music service that will provide advantages in the long run.
1. Tie users into their DRM. Plain and simple.
2. Tie users to their media player which will be restricted to their DRM.
Number 2 kills the following companies on the Win platform: Real, MusicMatch, BuyMusic, Napster and even iTunes so long as iPod sales for Windows drop off. iTunes will still exist for the Mac tho.
Cringley's latest article has some excellent points on M$' whole DRM, platform agenda and why they lose money in most of their non-Office and non-OS ventures.
Frankly, this smacks of the same shit that happened a few years back with the browser wars. M$ sees threat, launches their money losing alternative. Then bundles it, forces relevant M$ apps to use it, and then breaks compatibility. And thanks to huge lock on the desktop - along with, really, apathy on the developer and user base - presto, competition eliminated and monopoly suceeded.
With their media player, a similar thing will happen. But instead of breaking standards, M$ will force their propreitary format on everyone who wants to use their player, thusly creating the artifical standard. Deja'vu all over again.
I really hope the EU kicks their ass on this front and them releasing a music (then video, I'm sure) service could potentially add more fuel to the fire. These guys (M$) are due a good ass kickin. We don't need their vision of computing nor their abuses. The real world does not have just one car maker or one company who builds all the houses everywhere, or even one company who makes a variety of cd players. The software world should be no different.
One reason I can deal with Apple's DRM is because I can take the songs, burn them to a cd and then rip them back in. I still have very good quality, but the songs are not restricted and in a more widely usuable format - mp3. And in the end, compatibility with all my machines is the gold standard of which I try to live by. It's hard, long road, but not an impossible one.
After countless /. stories on Amaz0n patent abuses(?), people still link and buy from these guys! It's beyond me..
So I started out w/RH 9. Then a few months back, was keeping pretty up on the Rawhide releases. Then, a few weeks ago, I started running the NPTL kernels and the latest XFree release.
I don't like the gui services boot - which I know can be disabled. The only other honking issue I've run into is external FireWire drive support. Apparently there have been some issues with that lately, altho, it worked perfectly in 9.
I prob won't move to Fedora just yet until I read some better things about it. But my hybrid - while a pain to get installed right - seems to work well. I've got pretty recent releases of GTK2, Gnome, Moz, Gaim, Open Office and other apps. They all seem to work well. But, like I said, maybe it's the hybrid nature I took updating things.
Five years ago what young people were interested was technology. Raise a political point on slashdot and you would get slapped down with offtopic. Today what people are interested in is politics, there is a war going on out there which matters a damn sight more than what Hilary Rosen or Bill Gates might have said.
/. for quite a long time and the whole va-linux conspiracy theory is stretching things a bit far now, don't cha think?
Comment noted. However, a lot has changed in the last five years. Most of the web innovation is not being driven by a handful of companies, but is being controlled and, frankly, bitch slapped by one company and one company only.
I don't mind competition or even Windows itself. I choose to use it as little as possible where and when I can. However, when you come up against a monopoly of thought and culture as Micro$oft (and for that matter, any other closed-minded group) there is little room for you to move.
The technology is still interesting. However, there are forces at work slowing things down and trying to syphon off as much progress and innovation as possible. And frankly, when one company decides that they want to lead an initiative to tell me what I can and can't do with hardware I buy, then that's when the gloves come off.
Like any movement or group that gains significant power and interest from others, it ends up getting political and I accept that. When I'm 60 I still want the ability to write code and work with machines to do other things. I'll protest, pay money, bitch, moan - whatever, to get that because I know there are others that want the same. You might not and that's fine, that's your opinion and luckily, you're still allowed to voice it - for now.
Anyway, I've been participating in
Ah yes, all excellent. I love the home network.
:)
:)
Currently I have a few of the Shuttle boxes that run 1ghz p3 and 1.4ghz celeron & a white box generic Tyan 1.2ghz Athlon dually.
The p3-1hgz does my personal domain hosting - web (tomcat/apache), mail, openh323 gateway, ut server.
The celery does mail and public ssl egroupware portal for my home biz.
The dually is running rh 9 w/software raid across 2 ata-100 drives. It handles all my MySql stuff as well as the main repository for all my machines backups - it's on an the internal net. Once a week nightly backups are dropped to tape and once a month, the backup dir is wiped. So I always have at least 1 week of backups on tape, which I'm quite happy with. This is also my CVS server too.
All my development is mainly done on me 1ghz Powerbook. I also have a excellent 80gb Seagate Barracuda (fluid bearings) in an external firewire enclosure that has all my mp3z & mov/divx's. Sometime I just drop it on the dually and it mounts it up and shares it on my network, but most of the time I keep it local. My Powerbook is also dual head w/a 17" 760V Samsung LCD. Great monitor for the price.
My last machine is a kick ass little Shuttle box with a Athlon XP 2000+ and Maxtor ata-133 20gb drive. It's dual partitioned w/XP and Fedora. I use the Fedora side to develop for another Linux server that is just easier vs. doin it on my Mac. The XP boot is for Starcraft & UT.
All the machines have 1gb of ram except the two Intel Shuttle boxes. Everything internally is connected via a DLink Fast Ethernet switch. My external net is just a cheapie FE switch which is all bridged together via a even cheaper little broadband 'router'. It has dhcp, firewall and other things built it and has worked pretty well for me. My connecion is 1.5 down and 786 up DSL. No cable here. There's also an Airport Base station on the wall that provides wi-fi for family and friends when they drop by.
I've been running networks for many years outta my various cribs. The biggest and baddest was when the whole boom was goin on. I had a startup w/some friends and I had 9 machines in a closet of my studio apt. This included 2 big (1 size down from rack mount) UPS', a Dell quad Xeon 550 server (scsi 10k rpm drives with raid 5), 512mb ram and hot swappable everything - 4u also. This was out big app server. I was also running 2 RH 5 dns servers, 1 RH 5 mail server, 1 RH 5 ssh server, 3 dell p3-500 2u apache servers and one failover app server (Weblogic), 2 NT SQL 7.0 servers with full replication. I also had a separate tape backup box that was just a p2-350. Ah, the good 'ol days. After a bit we sold the company and I went traveling to Europe never to have another rack in my closet again.
Anyway, I love home networks and my two big obsessions now are: quiet and huge storage. I thought the article was kinda lame when I go to the video card and mouse part - something my servers have never really had or needed (cept maybe the nt junk). One thing I found higly annoying is when RH 9 required a mouse to install. I didn't like that much, but no big I guess.
So I have yet to find the magic bullet machine that will hold a 1TB array for cheap and for quiet. But maybe some day. Could it be that now that there's 5400 rpm 2.5" drives that that could be the thing??? Low power and quiet..
For the last time it's CG not CGI!!
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface.
CG stands for COMPUTER GRAPHICS
There is no 'I'-word in COMPUTER GRAPHICS or COMPUTER GRAPHICS ANIMATION!
In fact, the only other CGI out there is Computer Graphics International, which is part of the IEEE, Computer Society.
I just get sick of hearing 'CGI' all over the place when it is not the correct usage. Even John Gaeta used it and he should know better.
There, had to say it.
Excellent points.
Indeed, that's exactly what the supply siders and starve the beasts want - no govt programs for the <= rich.
I have nothing against being rich, in fact, I hope to be financially secure one day. However, until that happens and everyone has a job or some sort of income, then there will be need for safety nets - for the good of society.
It is even more evident that the corporate crowd has blantently pitched its tent on the Whitehouse lawn and has no plans of leaving as long as this administration holds control. For the common person, these are dark times ahead. Next year will be our biggest chance to head off certain financial disaster. Make sure you vote!
for all those against this raping of the information age, if you go to Amazon AT ALL, you deserve to be dragged behind a slow moving pickup truck up in the yonder hills of Washington.
Vote with your f-ing pocketbook for christsake!! Then contact your representatives and congress schmoozers. Corporations do have the upper hand on this stuff, but we still have a voice, however small it may seem.
What do all men with power want? More power.
and I'm sure Bezos kisses the mirror every morning as much as the money grabbers kiss his patent loving ass every day. Unfortunate for sure, but this is the state of the U.S. shortsighted-corporation-uber-alles economic system. Will there ever be a sane balance again? Gee, I really don't know.
Sad..
and in 20 years when you're not allowed to write any code without the proper patent licensing royalties, then we reserve the right to kick u in the behind and say see, we told you so !
Two kickass reports about the whole 90's boom - one specifically going into some good detail on Quattrone - are viewable via Frontline.
Dot Con
Wall Street Fix
and even Bigger than Enron
Dot Con is much more specific as far as the whole Quattrone thing goes. It's amazing cuz I went thru that with a company that I help found (like many others I'm sure) and it's just phenominal the greed that ensued and how investment bankers and investors just took most of the public for a ride.
I'm actually glad that I never invested during this time, however, I had many friends and family that did and just got sacked. If the majority of the public really knew what went on during this period of time, I doubt they'd look to invest again. Of course, nothing like this in tech will probably happen again any time soon, if ever.
Hmm, I don't remember Panther being touted as a 64-bit OS at all. In fact, that's all on the G5 side of things.
Regardless, 10.2.8, as mentioned earlier, is free. And there are some significant things that make this worth the upgrade.
A lot of things have been sped up/optimized. PDF viewing, file searches, graphics in general.
The file system is fully journaled.
File Vault provides full 128-bit encryption of user files - with no or little speed degradation. A very handy feature for people with laptops that might possibly get stolen.
All the Samba stuff works much better.
iChat AV. I video call my relatives on the west coast and this is a billion times better than the phone; I don't care if people think it's cheesy or not.
X11 is a lot tighter than in previous versions.
etc.., etc.., etc..
As far as the G5 goes, what other PC, PC mind you, can you have 8-gigs of ram on or that comes stock wither SATA drives?! None yet. Apple is doing it right. They're introducing things that work well and will then provide incremental upgrades that bring in tested features, such as 64-bit. I think a lot of people are just too used to the Windoze way of release crap asap and then fix. Charging along the way as well.
And don't forget, XCode has distributed build capability. So for multi-server build environments the build time can drop significantly.
This is a good thing.
Hey, as far as iChat AV goes, Net Meeting does not work as effortlessly (as with most non-Mac things) nor has there ever been any significant effort to market it as anything spectacular. .Mac account, there are NO firewall issues at all. Period. With Net Meeting - now some other MSN Messenger something - there are not only issues connecting thru firewalls but it also claims to adhere to h323, while, as usual, brakes various things such as directory lookups.
Although iChat does require either a AOL or
While I agree that this is not 'revolutionary' I think it is significant as far as speed goes and has some interesting features. Apple still supports OS projects such as Apache, Samba, and OpenSSH/SSL - you won't see any of these coming out a a M$ distro soon. Or ever for that fact.
So, while there still is competition and choice out there I'll continue to vote with my pocketbook.
This is exactly what the article is saying. It will be more akin to competing with Google's yet unreleased service, Froogle. There's not some almight, generic Google-killer in the works (at least not yet). Amazon is strictly interested in prodcuts.
So I don't see how this threatens the main search biz of the almight G.
At least with .mov we - the non-m$ player bunch - have 1/2 a chance to watch it...
they mostly come at night. mostly..
I don't wanna sound too doomsday, but that whole way of thinking like a corporate lawyer - where all property is ownable and only by those who can afford it - is only going to hurt everyone else. Sure it'll be fine for the privileged, but that's about as useful as only being able to see to the end of your nose.
One of my favorite movie lines is in Back To The Future 2:
Doc: Look what happens to your son!
He gives Marty the paper - USA Today Hill Valley Edition. The headline reads Youth Jailed For Attempted Robbery.
Marty: My son?
Marty looks at the picture.
Marty: God, he looks just like me. (reading from the paper) "Within two hours of his arrest, Martin McFly Junior was tried, convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in the State Penitentiary." (To Doc) Within two hours?
Doc: The justice system works swiftly in the future, now that they've abolished all lawyers.
---------------------
Lawyers are for sucks. - Doug McKenzie
I tried Prevayler and even loaded in 50k records from an old product table and object-ized them.
Yah, it was fast. Searches were great. I even figured out how to do complex object joins.
But I started having trouble when I tried to figure out how all the transactions worked. This was complicated by the wiki they're using, which was quite useless to me. It lead to many dead ends.
However, the real reason I found that I could not (possibly ever) use Prevayler is becuase it seemed the approach was for one machine and one machine only. There were no distributed mechanisms at all. Or at least, not how I'm used to working.
All the systems I've worked on in the past five years have all been with clusters of app servers. If all the objects on one machine were all in memory, then I couldn't think of an easy way to get them into the memory of the other machines. There was some talk about using Java Spaces, but that's kinda where I dropped off.
And the other issue was getting to the data from non app server machines. Like stuff to do back end reporting and things like that. I bascially figured out that for n-machine access, I needed something that, well, acted like a database.
I thought the idea was very interesting and maybe these things have been addressed. But when I really sat down with it for a few weeks, it just didn't pan out for me.
While I agree that if you use Linux in your environment, then there's probably no reason to use anything else the PHP. I've done a ton of Java development - some really big projects - and for home, I pretty much use PHP. So, I agree up to that point.
But there's a few issues I have with the parent:
I just want to get the little database app that should be done in 2 hours done in 2 hours. Java has lots of type-checking, etc. that's usually unnecessary for my simple reporting/collection of database data.
Sure, for collecting info from a db, that might be ok. But 2 things:
1. Type-checking??? I don't find getting an Integer from a Number column too tough. I will say tho, that if your using Text/CLOBS, then that can be a pain, depending on your db.
2. As long as it's just reporting/collecting your fine. But get an app that needs calculations and stuff done and a strongly typed language becomes an asset.
Plus imho Tomcat is a pain in the ass to configure, and you gotta keep javac'ing, and so on.
Well, if anyone ever puts a compiler of any kind on a production server they should be shot. There are plenty of ways to precompile Java webapp JSPs and then deploy the WAR out to Tomcat with only a JRE installed. That will bypass any kind of need for any compilation. This is why your production boxen are different from staging/build boxen.
I'm not trying to bash the guy, but it's clear than many notions about why something sux or doesn't is due to lack of experience. I'm definitely of the mindset that there is a right tool for the right job. No way in hell would I ever try to do a enterprise scale app in PHP or Perl. However, for proof of concepts and small sites, PHP/Perl is great.
I dunno, this is kinda the typical stuff you get with people who haven't used Java very much and don't really understand how to apply it and what it is really meant to do and not to do.
You can get an OGG plugin for Quicktime, which iTunes - I think - can use to play the files. I'm pretty sure I've listened to OGG streams on my Tibook, but now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, I definitely know there's a QT OGG plugin.
I think the encryption is standard thru Bluetooth itself. When I had a T68i and wanted to use it w/my Tibook, I checked into this - being the paranoid one that I am. And apparently, Bluetooth, unlike WEP, is much more robust. Or at least, it hasn't been cracked yet.
Anyway, that's how I'm assuming - not being a Bluetooth expert - that's what they mean.
As much as I distaste the evil empire, I've been using the same split Natural Kbd for about 6 or so years. It has the basic alphabet, plus nice, big, pg up/down, home/end, insert/delete and arrow keys. The Natural Elite sucked some giganto salty balls when they made these keys smaller. Oh, the horror!
And, the numeric keypad on the right is a good size too. Other than that, yr usual F-keys and the 3 scroll lock keys. That's it. No email or volume (altho, I'd like a volume key, but I can map over a key combo for that), web browser - whatever!
True, the Natural kbd is a little big and it's ps/2 (I bought a ps/2 to usb adapter and use it on all my machines via a usb kvm switch), but it still works. It has a nice feel and I've made a lot of ca$h on it. So, if it ain't broke...
Dude, I know it sucks, but ctrl-button = right button. I agree, yah, right mouse button wld be cool, but it's not that big of a deal. At least to me.
Frankly, the only place that ever comes into play is when my Tibook is not at my desk. Which might be 10% of the time. Plus, there's other things in other apps, even on the Linux side that could require a key + mouse button. Stuff like opening other tabs in Moz, etc..
I use a 2-button optical mouse with my Tibook at my desk all the time and it works perfectly. In fact, unlike XP or even Linux (I'm thinking Kudzu on boot), it never bugs me about plugging in this or not plugging in that. So, I'll gladly take a non-intrusive OS over 2 mouse buttons.
I will agree tho with you point about the new Apple mouse not being able to recharged. That's pretty lame. And I'm not sure I'd ever buy a Mac mouse or keyboard anyway; I much prefer split kbds and I've been quite fond of Logitech mice for some time.
While this might not necessairly be innovation, Apple is usually always first out of the gate with hardware changes, this one included. I don't think any major PC vendor is going completely wireless, which totally rocks. But they can afford to do this because of their loyal minions.
So yah, the non-rechargable mouse is a big boo boo. Second mouse button, mm, I'm not too worried.