Ironic that an agency that owes its very existence largely due to the reaction of a certain Mr Strowger to the lack of Net Neutrality should now revoke the rules that have made the Internet such an egalitarian adventure.
...where 295 human beings walked ahead of me not ten hours ago, who are no longer on this earth.
Geek or not, your heart has to break for them and their families. I only hope there is some small way some good can come out of all this, but I have no idea how that could be.
I've been in situations where I've been on the other side of the table to this, and lost developers 'cos they got a better offer. I've been as mad as hell about it, not because they've walked, but because I took my eye off the ball for long enough for the problem to develop...the irritation was with myself, not the guy walking. As it happens, the one guy I lost that I _really_ didn't want to was back 12 months later - when he and I finally worked out the issues that he'd been suffering in the first place.
The first thing I would do is wander into your boss' office, shut the door and have an off-the-record conversation with him/her. Explain the issues and tell them why you're considering moving and what needs to change. Be careful to phrase this as a "We have a problem, how can we work to solve it?" conversation rather than a "I'm leaving unless you fix these problems" conversation otherwise it sounds like blackmail. The fact is, you do feel some loyalty and obligation to your company and/or co-workers....so give that some rope and see what happens.
If the company you're working for has any sense and if you're any cop (and your boss is worth his salt), then they'll find a way to work with you to make you comfortable to stay. If not, or if you don't feel you even have the kind of relationship where you can have that closed door chat, then walk, you're losing nothing.
Note that opinions and attitudes to work vary widely across the world; you'll hear the mercenary "Do what's best for your money" at one extreme and the "Stay, it can't be that bad" at the other. The fact is that you have to do what's right for you, but you should always be able to look your ex-colleagues and bosses in the eye when you meet them in the pub later...
Quite happy to chat further on this if its useful, but/. open forum isn't the right place.
I second the DS1052E. It's a great little scope and it's got nice measuring facilities, fft (not so interesting if you're doing digital, I guess) and a fair bit of USB connectivity which I haven't explored in enough depth. That includes the ability to dump screens to a memory stick or print them via PictBridge. It also seems to have decent support communities around it. Having grown up on TEK I don't find it at all constraining - hell, if you don't like it, sell it on eBay for more or less what you paid for it.
The article is unclear, probably 'cos the journalist was. By 'colour coding' I'm pretty sure they mean Frequency Division Multiplexing which allows multiple wavelengths to be used on the same fibre. Obviously, since these are optical systems, this effectively means different colours (although often outside the range of human sight, and I don't advise you looking down one!) which is the way practitioners typically talk about it.
FDM has been in use for a long time as a way of hugely expanding the capacity of existing fibre infrastructure and became possible once we'd got light sources which could be tuned for a specific frequency.
....any ISP that thinks Google isn't playing fair should just not allow connections to the Google Empire for their customers.
Then we'll see how long it takes for the free-market to self correct. I give it about 30 days, most of that time being required for the ISP to staff up their disconnections department.
The effect of the recent IPCC Glacier mis-statements and the University of East Anglia 'mistakes' is to give people who would 'like it to not be so' to have a grain of sand around which to crystallize.
I make no claim as to if climate change is upon us or not, but it is ESSENTIAL that the science is revisited and made rock solid (or completely disproven)....in the meantime we have to progress on a path of caution -- which effectively means continuing to reduce carbon emissions IN CASE they are causing the problem...putting our collective fingers in our ears and singing la-lala-la isn't going to solve anything.
Jeez, politicians have enough difficulty making sensible decisions already, we're not exactly helping by not giving them accurate information on which to make those decisions, are we???
I find all of this very frustrating. Not because I have anything in particular to protect (indeed, I can think of very little that is that important that I would object to a reasonable law enforcement official taking a look at it), but because of whats happened to us in just under seven years.
The agenda of the terrorist is -not- particularly to kill people, it's to get their agenda into the front of your mind and to encourage you to bend to their point of view in order to stop the pain. Now, it so happens that killing people does that quite well, but just how many times in the past seven years were -you- affected directly by a terrorist, and how many times were you affected by the window-shopping measures put in place to "protect us from terrorism"? Every time we lose another liberty, the terrorists get another point....not to mention the number of very dubious practices that we accept now in our day to day lives because they allegedly make us safer.
I'm tired of this. Security and protection of the populace is done in back rooms with a low profile, not by folks with machine guns stomping around in airports for PR purposes while punters shuffle, barefoot and half naked, through some electronic gizmo that is then monitored by a human being with a statistically proven error rate in the order of 5% while wondering if they're going to be allowed to keep their own property when they get to the other end.
I feel a dammed sight safer flying through a European aiport than any US one, that's for sure although europeans are starting to succumb to the 'visible security' mantra now....I saw a great case of this yesterday - one lane in three through security at the airport had an electronic explosives sniffer, the other two had conventional scanners....trouble is, you get to chose which queue you join!!!
We seem to have lost the understanding that you don't have to knacker peoples rights to have a good level of protection. We need to stop helping people with abhorrent agendas keeping them in the front of our minds, and the best way to do that is to stop eroding hard earned freedoms in the name of terrorism protection.
I installed myth when my kid was 3 and set it up to record shows that he would like to see. Now, when he wants to watch TV we sit down together, watch the specific program and then switch it off....seems a much healthier way to watch TV (and to get it's undoubted benefits of horizon expansion etc. etc.) than just sitting down and being fed something at the schedulers whim.
...when he was about 4 and a half we went to the cinema for the first time. Every time a new advert came on he thought it was the start of the film. Damn, we've not educated our kid to understand what adverts are...such a shame.
...since my current contract is now in overtime. As it worked out, the whole thing was a bit of a disappointment. The pricing, on a tied contract, is just _too_ high, and a locked platform will stifle innovation.
Let's compare that with what FIC, Nokia and Motorola are all doing....despite their long involvement in the phone business (well, certainly the last two anyway), which you might expect would lead them to know which side their bread is buttered on, we see them all moving to _more_ open platforms. No-one would argue for MIDP being feature complete, but the capabilities of linux, the S60 platform and any number of other 'semi-open' environment are leading to some serious innovation in the mobile terminal world.
Hell, Nokia have just started a whole pitch for their devices as 'Multimedia Computers'...checkout the new N95 for an example of what _can_ be done on a semi-open platform (Nokia have a certificate based system to determine what resources you can use from the underlying platform, depending on how much they like you)...the battle is moving on from having a phone that can play snake.
I thank Apple for the iPhone - it will lead to improved UIs and some 'thinking outside of the box' for existing terminal manufacturers, but I doubt it'll sell the 12M units that they're asking for on this first rev(*), unless there are some pretty significant changes in the business model before rollout.
OK, can we please stop all the MS-building-reliable-s/w jokes? It's tedious and infantile.
The fact is that any company the size of MS is _perfectly_ capable of building a system to do this, provided they're starting with good domain knowledge and they _really_ understand the requirements - which I'm sure they they have due to their business alignments and aqqusitions etc...not to mention the fact that this was awarded to Microsoft _MES_ (Go Google) who have a little bit of experience in this area, I suspect.
Who says it has to be CE or XP or anything else based? This is a HARD REALTIME system folks. 15000 RPM, 8 cylinders - go do the math. Miss out on a couple of firing cycles and you've got a big expensive collection of exotic metals that were never intended to meet each other.
Given that I'm not aware of any current MS MCUs in F1 (someone please feel free to prove me wrong) what's more interesting to me is _how_ MS got this gig.....now that would make a discussion;-)
It's not very often I can be bothered to login to reply to something, but on this occasion I think we need a little perspective...
Let's start off with an admission - I use Apple products. There, I've said it. I find OS X to be the best OS for what I do, full stop. OK, my servers are all Linux and _occasionally_ I have to use 'doze, but OS X is my bread and butter OS. My Macbook is one very capable machine.
Now, I don't think you'll find many people who've used it who don't rate OS X. It's a _very_ capable and compelling system which has most of the advantages of a real OS with most of the advantages of a windowing interface - it wins. It ain't perfect, but it's pretty fine. OK OK..enough already. Let's not get into the relative merits of all that...suffice to say, for joe user, it's pretty good. Two of the primary reasons for it's stability are it's compartmentalization of legacy/back compatibility issues (Rosetta and prior to that the mechanisms for OS 9 and 68K compatibility) and the fact that it only has to work on a limited, well defined, set of hardware...these are both big bonuses.
Apple hardware, on the other hand, is slightly less slick, in my experience. QC and design quality are both slightly lacking, resulting in products that don't Quite Work Right. Now, Apple deliberately set themselves up as some kind of centre of design excellence so they are (and should be) judged against higher metrics than your bucket-pc-producer and, against those metrics, their hardware just ain't so good at the moment. Go google the issues on the MB and the MBP or pretty much any of the machines over the past few years and you'll see issues.
Now, my point is, we need to keep this in some sort of perspective - can you imagine Dell taking a machine back because it has a soft trackpad button, or the screen doesn't lie flat against the base of the machine? No, nor can I.
So, Apple isn't perfect, it needs to improve its hardware QC and QA (especially on rev 1 kit), but the only real reason they get such a lot of headlines on these issues is because they've set themselves up as Something Better.....live by the sword, you'll die by it too.
Please, take all these reports with a pinch of salt. Out of the set of compromises you always make when buying a new machine, don't let a few hardware imperfections skew your decision unnecessarily harshly, just 'cos some people are reporting them with the aid of a megaphone...perhaps OS X isn't the best choice for you, but there's a fairly good chance that it might be.
....and looking out of the window. No evidence of planes falling out of the sky or law enforcement officials walking into each other...hang on, let me start a big scp job.......there we go, a baggage handler just tripped up. Proves it, free WiFi must be banned.
This lady is doing the OSS industry a great service with some of the research and background she is producing. She might _not_ be a lawyer, but she's certainly clarifying some very important issues for the community.
Hit that contribution button when you've read the article.....
DAVE (No connection apart from being an appreciative reader)
Well, I went from Linux over to OS X for my 'daytime' OS just a month ago....and upgraded to Panther as it came out too. Just thought I'd add a couple of reflections;
I'm certainly not a linux newbie, started off with a slackware 0.99pl13 and been using various disties since, and it'll still run on my servers for the forseeable future, but I have to say that as a desktop OS OSX is hard to beat.
The bundled applications in the iLife suite are really something - plugging in a video camera and spooling a tape onto disk, editing it and burning to an indexed DVD took about 2 hours. Of course, there's plenty of stuff you can't do, but the OS basically makes the easy things trivial. Most of the things iLife offer can be done via Linux, but the beauty of OS X, for me at least, is that it all works _well_enuf_ out of the box - Linux is always a few hours tinkering to get the configuration you need. It's a shame that OpenOffice isn't better integrated into the system, but that's down to all of us getting our collective fingers out and doing something about it!
With the benefit of 'fink' theres plenty of GPL software out there, so in theory at least there shouldn't be much that you can do with Linux that's not possible on OS X (OK, OK, let's not get started about Aqua), but OTOH, linux gives you a sharp set of tools for doing the more sophisticated things that are difficult to do anywhere else.
Apple PowerBook quality, in my experience, hasn't been so great - my first machine went back because it had a duff DVD drive, current one has colour deformations on the screen, but that'll get sorted over time.
In short - OS X is a great OS for those people who want to do straightforward computer things (including content manipulation) but not for the dyed-in-the-wool linux hacker. Personally, I can't see myself going back to Linux for my desktop OS...
How many Cellular networks do you suppose were designed to deal with phones 5 miles up in the air moving at 550 MPH? Folks - there are other technical problems with using cellphones on airplanes quite apart from the safety issues!
Hmm. Rebooting nowadays with 'traditional' OSes is to flush inappropriate state information out of the memory - an unusual sequence of events resulting in the system getting into a state it should never be in during regular operation....this might be either accidental (a crash) or semi-deliberate (an upgrade of a software component which needs a reboot to get it co-ordinated with the rest of the system). Having memory which maintains this state information will make the problem worse, not better!
What's needed here to achieve systems that don't need rebooting is operating systems which deal with all of these unusual events and states correctly..this means they'll catch errors and will be specifically designed to allow things like dynamic update to system compoents. I'm probably a bit biased but the best example a no-more-reboots kind of environment I see today is the OSGi.
OSS is just like any other aspect of business..there will be pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages to an OSS solution to a problem. These all need to be weighed to decide if OSS is the right way to go for a particular aspect of business operations.
A lot of the problems I see with the ManagerOSS business relationship come down to lack of information. Let's face it, if I were a decision maker with a clearly defined solution on my left hand with well understood capabilities and limitations and I was weighing that up against a (potentially much better) solution on my right hand but with poorly defined risks etc. then I'm going to go with the certainty.. Imagine the inquisition if a gamble failed on something where I hadn't characterised the risks!!! I like my job!
Contrary to popular opinion, a great many managers are smart people - they can weigh things up when they're given the information. If they don't get the information they're frequently too busy to go search it out for themselves, so instead they default to the safe option...even if it's sub-optimal.
So, explain the various OSS licences and their capabilities and limitations (especially the differences between GPL and BSD type licences). Explain the 'ethics' of the OSS community and *how* and *why* people build OSS code (often the most difficult thing for BusinessHeads to get their minds around). Then (the most difficult bit) explain _clearly_ and _without editorial_ the limitations of OSS and how these might be contained in the particular circumstances you face.. then you might find you get a pleasant surprise from some of those higher ups...
Much respect to this guy. He's taken something thats big, hairy and complex and looked at it from a different direction. Because he's got access to the source he's been able to do something novel with it in what appears to be an efficient and simple way...you couldn't do that with any of the closed source OSes out there today!
The beauty of this is that there's *one* kernel running so, apart from any overhead of selecting the environment, you pretty much get the same performance as running native. This has got to have 1001 applications.
One of the things I'd personally like to see is some kind of overlaid filesystem so each image by default gets/bin/lib etc. from a generic set but users can modify them if they need to - this would allow a sysadmin to keep the default system current while not preventing 'owners' of an individual image from being able to change things if they need to....I vaguely remember something like this for CDs - anyone got the details? Time for a bit of experimentation;-)
Sorry, but I'm forced to agree with this. As far as I can tell this is totally unfounded speculation and very very inappropriate. I'd like to see a retraction of this comment, but I don't expect to...
But isn't the genome actually comprised of about five individuals? If so, it's going to be jolly difficult to spot inter-gene relationships etc...
Garbage In, Garbage Out...
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic that an agency that owes its very existence largely due to the reaction of a certain Mr Strowger to the lack of Net Neutrality should now revoke the rules that have made the Internet such an egalitarian adventure.
...where 295 human beings walked ahead of me not ten hours ago, who are no longer on this earth.
Geek or not, your heart has to break for them and their families. I only hope there is some small way some good can come out of all this, but I have no idea how that could be.
I've been in situations where I've been on the other side of the table to this, and lost developers 'cos they got a better offer. I've been as mad as hell about it, not because they've walked, but because I took my eye off the ball for long enough for the problem to develop...the irritation was with myself, not the guy walking. As it happens, the one guy I lost that I _really_ didn't want to was back 12 months later - when he and I finally worked out the issues that he'd been suffering in the first place.
The first thing I would do is wander into your boss' office, shut the door and have an off-the-record conversation with him/her. Explain the issues and tell them why you're considering moving and what needs to change. Be careful to phrase this as a "We have a problem, how can we work to solve it?" conversation rather than a "I'm leaving unless you fix these problems" conversation otherwise it sounds like blackmail. The fact is, you do feel some loyalty and obligation to your company and/or co-workers....so give that some rope and see what happens.
If the company you're working for has any sense and if you're any cop (and your boss is worth his salt), then they'll find a way to work with you to make you comfortable to stay. If not, or if you don't feel you even have the kind of relationship where you can have that closed door chat, then walk, you're losing nothing.
Note that opinions and attitudes to work vary widely across the world; you'll hear the mercenary "Do what's best for your money" at one extreme and the "Stay, it can't be that bad" at the other. The fact is that you have to do what's right for you, but you should always be able to look your ex-colleagues and bosses in the eye when you meet them in the pub later...
Quite happy to chat further on this if its useful, but /. open forum isn't the right place.
I second the DS1052E. It's a great little scope and it's got nice measuring facilities, fft (not so interesting if you're doing digital, I guess) and a fair bit of USB connectivity which I haven't explored in enough depth. That includes the ability to dump screens to a memory stick or print them via PictBridge. It also seems to have decent support communities around it. Having grown up on TEK I don't find it at all constraining - hell, if you don't like it, sell it on eBay for more or less what you paid for it.
DAVE
The article is unclear, probably 'cos the journalist was. By 'colour coding' I'm pretty sure they mean Frequency Division Multiplexing which allows multiple wavelengths to be used on the same fibre. Obviously, since these are optical systems, this effectively means different colours (although often outside the range of human sight, and I don't advise you looking down one!) which is the way practitioners typically talk about it.
FDM has been in use for a long time as a way of hugely expanding the capacity of existing fibre infrastructure and became possible once we'd got light sources which could be tuned for a specific frequency.
....any ISP that thinks Google isn't playing fair should just not allow connections to the Google Empire for their customers.
Then we'll see how long it takes for the free-market to self correct. I give it about 30 days, most of that time being required for the ISP to staff up their disconnections department.
....for carrying out questionable science.
The effect of the recent IPCC Glacier mis-statements and the University of East Anglia 'mistakes' is to give people who would 'like it to not be so' to have a grain of sand around which to crystallize.
I make no claim as to if climate change is upon us or not, but it is ESSENTIAL that the science is revisited and made rock solid (or completely disproven)....in the meantime we have to progress on a path of caution -- which effectively means continuing to reduce carbon emissions IN CASE they are causing the problem...putting our collective fingers in our ears and singing la-lala-la isn't going to solve anything.
Jeez, politicians have enough difficulty making sensible decisions already, we're not exactly helping by not giving them accurate information on which to make those decisions, are we???
I find all of this very frustrating. Not because I have anything in particular to protect (indeed, I can think of very little that is that important that I would object to a reasonable law enforcement official taking a look at it), but because of whats happened to us in just under seven years.
The agenda of the terrorist is -not- particularly to kill people, it's to get their agenda into the front of your mind and to encourage you to bend to their point of view in order to stop the pain. Now, it so happens that killing people does that quite well, but just how many times in the past seven years were -you- affected directly by a terrorist, and how many times were you affected by the window-shopping measures put in place to "protect us from terrorism"? Every time we lose another liberty, the terrorists get another point....not to mention the number of very dubious practices that we accept now in our day to day lives because they allegedly make us safer.
I'm tired of this. Security and protection of the populace is done in back rooms with a low profile, not by folks with machine guns stomping around in airports for PR purposes while punters shuffle, barefoot and half naked, through some electronic gizmo that is then monitored by a human being with a statistically proven error rate in the order of 5% while wondering if they're going to be allowed to keep their own property when they get to the other end.
I feel a dammed sight safer flying through a European aiport than any US one, that's for sure although europeans are starting to succumb to the 'visible security' mantra now....I saw a great case of this yesterday - one lane in three through security at the airport had an electronic explosives sniffer, the other two had conventional scanners....trouble is, you get to chose which queue you join!!!
We seem to have lost the understanding that you don't have to knacker peoples rights to have a good level of protection. We need to stop helping people with abhorrent agendas keeping them in the front of our minds, and the best way to do that is to stop eroding hard earned freedoms in the name of terrorism protection.
I installed myth when my kid was 3 and set it up to record shows that he would like to see. Now, when he wants to watch TV we sit down together, watch the specific program and then switch it off....seems a much healthier way to watch TV (and to get it's undoubted benefits of horizon expansion etc. etc.) than just sitting down and being fed something at the schedulers whim.
...when he was about 4 and a half we went to the cinema for the first time. Every time a new advert came on he thought it was the start of the film. Damn, we've not educated our kid to understand what adverts are...such a shame.
...since my current contract is now in overtime. As it worked out, the whole thing was a bit of a disappointment. The pricing, on a tied contract, is just _too_ high, and a locked platform will stifle innovation.
Let's compare that with what FIC, Nokia and Motorola are all doing....despite their long involvement in the phone business (well, certainly the last two anyway), which you might expect would lead them to know which side their bread is buttered on, we see them all moving to _more_ open platforms. No-one would argue for MIDP being feature complete, but the capabilities of linux, the S60 platform and any number of other 'semi-open' environment are leading to some serious innovation in the mobile terminal world.
Hell, Nokia have just started a whole pitch for their devices as 'Multimedia Computers'...checkout the new N95 for an example of what _can_ be done on a semi-open platform (Nokia have a certificate based system to determine what resources you can use from the underlying platform, depending on how much they like you)...the battle is moving on from having a phone that can play snake.
I thank Apple for the iPhone - it will lead to improved UIs and some 'thinking outside of the box' for existing terminal manufacturers, but I doubt it'll sell the 12M units that they're asking for on this first rev(*), unless there are some pretty significant changes in the business model before rollout.
There again, I've been wrong before...
DAVE
(*) Apple Rev A hardware, anyone?
With the exception of nuclear power we already have a 100% solar earth to all intents and purposes. It's just the conversion techniques that vary.
OK, can we please stop all the MS-building-reliable-s/w jokes? It's tedious and infantile.
.....now that would make a discussion ;-)
The fact is that any company the size of MS is _perfectly_ capable of building a system to do this, provided they're starting with good domain knowledge and they _really_ understand the requirements - which I'm sure they they have due to their business alignments and aqqusitions etc...not to mention the fact that this was awarded to Microsoft _MES_ (Go Google) who have a little bit of experience in this area, I suspect.
Who says it has to be CE or XP or anything else based? This is a HARD REALTIME system folks. 15000 RPM, 8 cylinders - go do the math. Miss out on a couple of firing cycles and you've got a big expensive collection of exotic metals that were never intended to meet each other.
Given that I'm not aware of any current MS MCUs in F1 (someone please feel free to prove me wrong) what's more interesting to me is _how_ MS got this gig
It's not very often I can be bothered to login to reply to something, but on this occasion I think we need a little perspective...
Let's start off with an admission - I use Apple products. There, I've said it. I find OS X to be the best OS for what I do, full stop. OK, my servers are all Linux and _occasionally_ I have to use 'doze, but OS X is my bread and butter OS. My Macbook is one very capable machine.
Now, I don't think you'll find many people who've used it who don't rate OS X. It's a _very_ capable and compelling system which has most of the advantages of a real OS with most of the advantages of a windowing interface - it wins. It ain't perfect, but it's pretty fine. OK OK..enough already. Let's not get into the relative merits of all that...suffice to say, for joe user, it's pretty good. Two of the primary reasons for it's stability are it's compartmentalization of legacy/back compatibility issues (Rosetta and prior to that the mechanisms for OS 9 and 68K compatibility) and the fact that it only has to work on a limited, well defined, set of hardware...these are both big bonuses.
Apple hardware, on the other hand, is slightly less slick, in my experience. QC and design quality are both slightly lacking, resulting in products that don't Quite Work Right. Now, Apple deliberately set themselves up as some kind of centre of design excellence so they are (and should be) judged against higher metrics than your bucket-pc-producer and, against those metrics, their hardware just ain't so good at the moment. Go google the issues on the MB and the MBP or pretty much any of the machines over the past few years and you'll see issues.
Now, my point is, we need to keep this in some sort of perspective - can you imagine Dell taking a machine back because it has a soft trackpad button, or the screen doesn't lie flat against the base of the machine? No, nor can I.
So, Apple isn't perfect, it needs to improve its hardware QC and QA (especially on rev 1 kit), but the only real reason they get such a lot of headlines on these issues is because they've set themselves up as Something Better.....live by the sword, you'll die by it too.
Please, take all these reports with a pinch of salt. Out of the set of compromises you always make when buying a new machine, don't let a few hardware imperfections skew your decision unnecessarily harshly, just 'cos some people are reporting them with the aid of a megaphone...perhaps OS X isn't the best choice for you, but there's a fairly good chance that it might be.
DAVE
....and looking out of the window. No evidence of planes falling out of the sky or law enforcement officials walking into each other...hang on, let me start a big scp job.... ...there we go, a baggage handler just tripped up. Proves it, free WiFi must be banned.
This lady is doing the OSS industry a great service with some of the research and background she is producing. She might _not_ be a lawyer, but she's certainly clarifying some very important issues for the community.
Hit that contribution button when you've read the article.....
DAVE (No connection apart from being an appreciative reader)
Well, I went from Linux over to OS X for my 'daytime' OS just a month ago....and upgraded to Panther as it came out too. Just thought I'd add a couple of reflections;
I'm certainly not a linux newbie, started off with a slackware 0.99pl13 and been using various disties since, and it'll still run on my servers for the forseeable future, but I have to say that as a desktop OS OSX is hard to beat.
The bundled applications in the iLife suite are really something - plugging in a video camera and spooling a tape onto disk, editing it and burning to an indexed DVD took about 2 hours. Of course, there's plenty of stuff you can't do, but the OS basically makes the easy things trivial. Most of the things iLife offer can be done via Linux, but the beauty of OS X, for me at least, is that it all works _well_enuf_ out of the box - Linux is always a few hours tinkering to get the configuration you need. It's a shame that OpenOffice isn't better integrated into the system, but that's down to all of us getting our collective fingers out and doing something about it!
With the benefit of 'fink' theres plenty of GPL software out there, so in theory at least there shouldn't be much that you can do with Linux that's not possible on OS X (OK, OK, let's not get started about Aqua), but OTOH, linux gives you a sharp set of tools for doing the more sophisticated things that are difficult to do anywhere else.
Apple PowerBook quality, in my experience, hasn't been so great - my first machine went back because it had a duff DVD drive, current one has colour deformations on the screen, but that'll get sorted over time.
In short - OS X is a great OS for those people who want to do straightforward computer things (including content manipulation) but not for the dyed-in-the-wool linux hacker. Personally, I can't see myself going back to Linux for my desktop OS...
How many Cellular networks do you suppose were designed to deal with phones 5 miles up in the air moving at 550 MPH? Folks - there are other technical problems with using cellphones on airplanes quite apart from the safety issues!
Hmm. Rebooting nowadays with 'traditional' OSes is to flush inappropriate state information out of the memory - an unusual sequence of events resulting in the system getting into a state it should never be in during regular operation....this might be either accidental (a crash) or semi-deliberate (an upgrade of a software component which needs a reboot to get it co-ordinated with the rest of the system). Having memory which maintains this state information will make the problem worse, not better!
What's needed here to achieve systems that don't need rebooting is operating systems which deal with all of these unusual events and states correctly..this means they'll catch errors and will be specifically designed to allow things like dynamic update to system compoents. I'm probably a bit biased but the best example a no-more-reboots kind of environment I see today is the OSGi.
OSS is just like any other aspect of business..there will be pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages to an OSS solution to a problem. These all need to be weighed to decide if OSS is the right way to go for a particular aspect of business operations.
A lot of the problems I see with the ManagerOSS business relationship come down to lack of information. Let's face it, if I were a decision maker with a clearly defined solution on my left hand with well understood capabilities and limitations and I was weighing that up against a (potentially much better) solution on my right hand but with poorly defined risks etc. then I'm going to go with the certainty.. Imagine the inquisition if a gamble failed on something where I hadn't characterised the risks!!! I like my job!
Contrary to popular opinion, a great many managers are smart people - they can weigh things up when they're given the information. If they don't get the information they're frequently too busy to go search it out for themselves, so instead they default to the safe option...even if it's sub-optimal.
So, explain the various OSS licences and their capabilities and limitations (especially the differences between GPL and BSD type licences). Explain the 'ethics' of the OSS community and *how* and *why* people build OSS code (often the most difficult thing for BusinessHeads to get their minds around). Then (the most difficult bit) explain _clearly_ and _without editorial_ the limitations of OSS and how these might be contained in the particular circumstances you face.. then you might find you get a pleasant surprise from some of those higher ups...
Much respect to this guy. He's taken something thats big, hairy and complex and looked at it from a different direction. Because he's got access to the source he's been able to do something novel with it in what appears to be an efficient and simple way...you couldn't do that with any of the closed source OSes out there today!
/bin /lib etc. from a generic set but users can modify them if they need to - this would allow a sysadmin to keep the default system current while not preventing 'owners' of an individual image from being able to change things if they need to....I vaguely remember something like this for CDs - anyone got the details? Time for a bit of experimentation ;-)
The beauty of this is that there's *one* kernel running so, apart from any overhead of selecting the environment, you pretty much get the same performance as running native. This has got to have 1001 applications.
One of the things I'd personally like to see is some kind of overlaid filesystem so each image by default gets
Sorry, but I'm forced to agree with this. As far as I can tell this is totally unfounded speculation and very very inappropriate. I'd like to see a retraction of this comment, but I don't expect to...
My e-mails been sat on mailq for the past four hours with the egghead.com inbox being full - don't waste your time replying yet awhile....
But isn't the genome actually comprised of about five individuals? If so, it's going to be jolly difficult to spot inter-gene relationships etc... Garbage In, Garbage Out...
http://www.forces.org.uk/activ/ws9911.html
Scroll down to the work by Peter Martin.