Let's see... there's Dean Kamen's bio-medicine revolutions, there's Steve, Steve and Mike in the garage working on the Apple I (which lead to the Apple II, and the boilerplate Rich&Famous deal for all involved), there's Larry Wahl, who just gave his wholly concieved invention away, and there's Cisco, and Fed Ex, and...
There are lots of great inventions spawned by only one or two people working in their spare time, and many of these grow into monolithic companies or worldwide phenomena on the back of that innovation. Many of these (Fed Ex comes to mind) were up against gigantic established players, and succeeded despite it.
So, the article is corporate self-congratulatory bullshit aimed at those who want to make a run at the establishment. Ignore it.
If the private sector cannot or will not provide a public utility at a reasonable rate and with a reasonable level of facility, then the public sector not only should, but must step in and rectify the situation.
The telco's and the cable companies have used deregulation to set themselves up as governing bodies over access to communications, trumping municipal, state or even national mandates with corporate mandates that serve to disenfranchise citizens from a reasonable level of service. No servers on broadband, no broadband to remote or "unprofitable" (read: low income, or worse, black) neigborhoods, long delays for install or repair, recurring technical problems that are deliberately ignored, no choice in providers, etc, etc, etc.
Screw 'em. They have been using the free market to wrangle quasi-monopolies and dictatorial cartels, obviating the entire purpose of a free market. The municipal government must step in, and provide services vital to the growth and prosperity to a community... this means municipal networks, even at the cost of breaking the priovate sector's back.
It's the private sector's own damn fault. They were given a fair chance, and they frittered it away. Now they get to shape up, or loose revenue.
So, the Amiga joins the ranks of Be, Geoworks, OS/2, GEM, and SCO.
They are all also-ran commercial competitors to not just Windows, which commands 99% of that market and comes bundled with 99% of the systems available, but three flavors of BSD, all free-as-in-beer-and-as-in-speach, and a few housand different Linux-based operating systems (distros). Top it off with a few clever, and completely free "other" OSes, like Atheos, and the situation looks grim.
I expect them to enjoy the same long-term success enjoyed by Be and OS/2... which is to say, an ignonimous death after the Nostalgia buffs tire of toying with it.
To be brutally blunt, the only way to introduced a closed platform in the current market is to work it as a total system. Sun and Apple desktops survive in a Windows world by offering a total package... you don't gotta be faster than Wintel, or cheaper than Wintel, but you have got to offer something Wintel doesn't. Comprehensively integrated systems is a damn good start, the insane system speed and responsiveness with limited resources that was a trademark of the Amiga of yore is another area to focus on. Move to Mips, ARM, PowerPC, MAJC, what have you... design a platform, not an OS but a whole platform, and you have a fighting chance.
Emulating a 10 year old architecture on an bone stock PC and then charging for the privelege is a fast track to irrelevancy.
"However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom."
Following this train of logic, the GPL should be studiously avoided, as it attempts to use the power of copyright law to dictate what other people can and cannot do with the code.
In short, RMS is openly advocating the use of BSD, Artistic and Public Domain licensing... as they don't try to strongarm the users into only using the code in a certain way.
This is a great thing for service providers. Without being able to track their spending while they're spending, customers are likely to spend more than they mean to. Metered access is a great way for companies to soak their clients, and the Utilities have been doing this since time immemoral.
Customers, who have to juggle a power bill, gas bill, electricity bill, cable bill, insurance bills, rent/mortgage, car payments and grocery tabs are sick to death of it.
Things like insurance premiums, loan payments and cable service is provided at a flat rate. Customers love this, because they can budget for it. Gas and Electrcicty are easy to "guesstimate"... usage will vary predictably by month, depending on climate. It's still irritating as hell to figure out, and most renters that =I= know make a point to look for "Utilities Included" apartments. Yes, they're paying more for a worse location even after you add in their yearly utility bills... but the savings in budgeting hassles are worth it to them.
Metered internet access, on the ISP side, has been a proven looser. Customers are simply not interested in paying less for uncertainty, and very interested in paying more for unused capacity, so long as the bill is easy to figure out.
Micropayments simply will =not= take off, because customers do not have the patience to budget for them. This is a market reality, and one you budding netrepreneurs had better take to heart: offering more complexity at a lower price is a sucker's game. Offering comprehensive service at a flat, fixed rate will make you more money in the margins, =and= attract customers.
> Wouldn't it be cheaper to do this with a bunch of PC's in stead?
> Not as pretty but it's someones tax dollars that pay for these...
Fact of life: hardware is cheap. A $3,000 Mac vs. a $2000 PC is peanuts, even if the total difference is 30-40k for the whole installation.
Re-tooling the development environment, retraining IT and programming personell, porting code to the new platform and the cost to set up and configure the new and cheaper hardware far outweighs the cost of the hardware itself. Then there's the time lost in accomplishing all of the above.
If your admins know Mac, and your coders and QA staff are used to building and testing Mac code with Mac tools (MPW, Codewarrior, Macsbug), you go with Mac. End of story.
SoupIsGood Food
Re:The first exploit.
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Cracking OSX
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· Score: 3
Solaris (on sparc, at least) requires the root password to boot into single user mode. You can boot from the Solaris install CD without it, and overwrite everything on the boot disk, but it won't let you mount filesystems. This is secure and reasonable, protecting your data from any yahoo who can hit the reset switch on the powerstrip.
HP-UX and AIX don't provide you with the same security. Neither does any of the Linux variant's I've dabbled in, or even the otherwise fort-knox-like OpenBSD.
I've heard the arguments, but I don't buy them. If you can't remember your root password and don't have your data and configuration backed up, give up on this unix stuff. It's too mentally challenging for you. End of story.
Didn't Microsoft use Open Source code to bring networking tools like Ping and Telnet to windows? I seem to recall that they were developed by the FreeBSD project for FreeBSD... basically, recompiled and tweaked to run under NT by Microsoft, and with the FreeBSD project's blessing. This saved them millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours in wasted duplication of effort.
Hmm.
Even Microsoft, it seems, benefits from Open Source.
I just had a long conversation with my Mom on this very subject. She's been a nurse going on 30 years now, and is very, very good at what she does. She, and most of her co-workers, like information technology... just not how it's implemented.
1) Paying attention to workflow in a medical setting is =key.= Life and death decisions are made based on the accuracy of the data in the system. If the system is difficult or unweildy to use, the care providers won't be able to make proper use of it.
Have your developers follow around your nurses, therapists and physicians. Have them carefully note how things are done now, and why. There may be some pre-packaged software that will work fine... but there might not be. Or you may have to modify it heavily to meet your user's needs.
The little details count for a lot of productivity. For instance: when checking off lab tests to be run, the care provided may have to go through sixteen screens to pick what she wants to run, and might miss one, or include another by accident! If she could check off a "test suite," or bundle of the most common tests run in a certain situation, labor is saved and lifesaving accuracy is increased.
Ask your nurses what they want and need, and =listen= to them!
2) Accordingly, you should budget most of your money on software and development.
3) Go to a "thin client" model... wireless PDAs that talk to fault-tolerant, high-availability servers locked in a backroom only the Chief Geek has the key to. In an environment as hectic and fast paced as a medical establishment, you want the "hot water" data model. The servers are the "hot water heaters", and the PDAs are the "faucets." Whenever a nurse or doctor walks into a room with her PDA, she has data on-tap, hot water. When the battery begins to run down, she grabs another one from the recharging cradles, logs in, and has "hot water," or the same data she was just working with.
This will work with fixed systems at the bedside (like notebooks), but you'll have a problem with people forgetting to log out, etc. Look into a "key-card" access system instead of a traditional login if you go with fixed systems in every room.
The fewer things run on local PCs or workstations, the fewer things your administrators will have to configure and maintain. This translates to higher security and uptime.
Running a medical facility is a much more complex and critical undertaking than running a web site or ISP. Lives =are= on the line. Engineer your site for 1) practicality, 2) utility and 3) robustness.
Caveat: Some unkind words about Linux and Free Software are said therein to make a point... I do have some positive views on Linux and Free Software put to print here, if it makes you feel any better.
According to the mailing lists, OpenBSD's implementation of BIND4 is immune, the sprintf()s rersponsible for the overflows were changed to snprintf()s by the development team in 1997.
This is just a partially-complete list of proccessor vendors with products found in machines that will run Linux or NetBSD. There are many, many, many more that deal exclusively with embedded processors or processors for special applications like rad-hardened and DSP.
To be ruthlessly honest, compared to RISC architectures like ARM, MIPS and especially PowerPC, Transmeta's price/performance/efficiency is nothing to write home about. No big loss to the competitive market if they get swallowed up by AMD...and it would give AMD a bigger club to go after Intel on the low end with.
Mac users still get uncontrollable giggle fits when people talk about the "User friendly Windows interface". If you need a seemless, integrated UI for total control over the presentation and creation of complex data (Graphics, sound effects, bad screenplays, etc.) you need BeOS or a Mac.
Unix in all its many splendored flavors is good for when you need stability and performance. This is why it's usually paired with the =really= sexxxy hardware you need a government grant to buy. Unix boxes are at their finest as tools, accessories. Big, expensive shared peripherals that serve a specific, tailored purpose.
In my case, I've got a Sparcstation LX running OpenBSD for a purpose: I need to host a private web forum. It has to be robust, able to cope with large loads, and dirt cheap. Including the OpenBSD CD(with stickers!), the setup cost me $50. I don't need a windowing environment...I have my MacOS Powerbook on a network with it. After the initial install, I can administrate it better sitting on my couch than I can sitting on the terminal...the Mac's tools for editing bits of text from a usercentric standpoint are second to none. Perfect for tweaking configuration files.
And you will need to tweak configuration files. By hand. Might as well start off that way rather than continually correcting what the GUI administration applications assume is what you want. This is where BSD's shine. Their systems are simple and unsophisticated, well documented with clearly written manpages and FAQs, thus shallowing the learning curve if you need to get into the nitty-gritty of networking, soft-raid, security auditing, etc. You know...the stuff Unix is =good= at.
Linux is too chaotic, the distros vary too wildly from one to the other to make low level administration and automation easy. They cram everything but the kitchen sink into your system, none of it documented very well. This is fine if your hobby is computer science and you need a toy to play with, or you need a robust workstation environment, or you want to compete with Windows to be the hottest Mac rip-off arround. Not so good if you're trying to track BBS users by IP to filter out the trolls and bots.
There just isn't a GUI front end for that sort of stuff. Fancy windowing environments soak up valuable processor cycles and RAM. If you need a robust and fast server tailored to meet a specific utility, you need *BSD.
<em>Rubbish. You cannot "lock a Mac down harder than a UNIX box". They can both be locked down to any degree desired. </em>
The trick is to get it watertight out of the box. OpenBSD's probably the closest, but starts to wander away from the mark when you add functionality. There's a quicker return on investment with with Mac servers if you're security conscious. You know how much a Unux security guru costs?
<em>And sure you can run a Mac with no software and no extensions, but you can't do anything with it. </em>
In my extensions folder, there are 206 items. (Most of them shared libraries Lotus Notes barfed all over my system.) Do I need an audio CD driver on a server? No. Do I need ColorPicker or ColorSync on a server? No. Do I need MacInTalk? No. Do I need finderpop? No. Ditto for control strips, control panels, any font that didn't come with the OS, etc. Five minutes worth of work gets you one stable Mac server.
What makes the Mac unstable has nothing to do with the OS and eveything to do with the applications it runs. Protected memory systems (like Unix) are more forgiving of buggy code...if the Gimp dies a horrible death, it won't take the kernal with it. On the other hand, the Mac will reboot if the program/thread isn't coded to exit gracefully on error.
This means the Mac is only as stable as its applications. This is a problem when you are running enormous and complex applications, like popular web browsers, office productivity suites, or desktop publishing programs.
Running small RealBasic apps and garden variety networking software tied together with a few Applescripts will likely keep running forever without a reboot.
OTOH, cruising slashdot with Netscape while photoshopping Steve Jobs sodomizing Tux while "working" on sales pitch in Microsoft Word will probably have you cursing up a storm and rebooting once every couple days. (If you used iCab and Nisus and Canvas instead of NS and Word and Photoshop, you'd probably think those singing the "Macs are unstable" chorus are a bunch of idiots who don't know what they're talking about.)
So, ironically, where the Mac is supposed to shine the brightest, as a desktop workstation, it is at it's least stable. As a server, it does all right. Better than NT/2000, at any rate, and probably as good as the BSDs. (My personal favorite younickses. Got an OpenBSD box running an intensive PHP-heavy site on an antiquated Sun workstation. I'm impressed with how well it holds up.)
Macs, when used as stone stock simple servers, tend to be fairly reliable, with uptimes on the order of years for some older (Pre-PowerPC) systems I'm personally aware of.
Macs become unstable when you dump a crapload of extensions, control panels, fonts, third party software, plugins for third party software, plugins for plugins for third party software, and, well, you get the drift.
Clear the cruft out of the system folder, use only proven, reliable third party software and damn little of it, and the lowly and much maligned Mac can keep cranking the bits month after month with the younicks big boys. Figure in some scheduled downtime every so often for a pre-emptive reboot, and it will be spiffy for as long as they're up there.
Why bother putting up with three minutes downtime out of a week? Security. You can lock a mac down harder than a Unix or windows box. Simplicity. Configuring these bad boys will be a breeze. Plus, tools like RealBasic and Applescript make coding applications and scripts painless and powerful...without sacrificing reliability.
Put anything that says "Netscape" or "Quark" on there, and the mission is doooooooomed!
Just 'cuz the consensus has it that Macs are inherently unreliable, doesn't mean it's neccesarily true, or that the "unreliability" is a liability to steep to be surmounted. Question consensus, and do a little thinking and research for yourself.
I administrate a mixed shop of 70 or so systems: big HP-UX, Sun and AIX development machines with FreeBSD, Debian and a few stranger things running our infrastructure. Even tho the USAH only directly covers half the systems I have to handle, it lays down a solid groundwork =any= admin of =any= Unix system can benefit from.
The USAH saved my hash on more than one occasion, and it really bailed me out when I first wound up a professional Unix admin. You gotta realize, I'm a Mac guy...first computer was a Mac, I now write for an up-and-coming Mac webzine, and I carry my Powerbook around with me wherever I go.
So I was hired as the "IT Guy" by a small R&D company on the strength of my Mac skills. There were a dozen or so Macs in sales and marketing...and over 110 Sun workstations. From an old Sun 3 to a pretty monumental dual-UltraII clone, we had unix boxes running everything from our firewall and company web site to file servers and backup systems to circuit simulators and code compilers. As someone who's only experience to the comand line was a dial-in shell to get internet email, I was completely out of my league, and desparate to hold onto the job for reasons I won't get into here.
It was a =really= hairy situation, and I kept my head above water only because of this excellent book. Now I do the Unix thing as my main career, and use the Mac for fun and personal computing. I picked up O'Reily's Systems Administration Handbook, as well as Sun's own Solaris books, but they weren't anywhere near as concise or accurate as the USAH.
SoupIsGood Food
Every's Right: Unix not an OS by itself.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 2
The entire point of the article was misinterpreted, most importantly by the autor of the UnixReview piece.
Unix, asn an operating system, =can= be pared down to the kernal and a shell. At the core, this is the single unifying thread that runs between Ultrix, PyramidOS, FreeBSD, Slackware and MKLinux: a nugget of computer science concepts that can be universally recognized as "Unix". On top of that, daemons, shared libraries and programs ("services" in the article) are added to give any particular version of Unix its "flavor", making it useful for real work apart and aside from abstract programming.
Are Redhat and SUSE and Debian all linux? Yes. Are they all administered, operated, or tinkered with identical ways? No. Everything from RC script handling to default window managers can, and do, vary from one Linux to another. Even tho they are all considered "Unix" or "Unix Like", it takes more than Unix to make these distros usefull.
Unix is no longer enough to count as an operating system. It needs to be combined with other software to be made useable...like Linux distros or HP-UX.
This is the point DKE was trying to make. Most mac people regard an OS as integral to the user experience: the GUI is inseparable from the file system and networking services in the Mac world. Using this worldview, Mac OS X is its own operating system, and cannot be pigeonholed as "just another Unix" any more than AIX or NetBSD can. Does it have Unix at its core? Yes. Is it a Unix operating system? No. It is much, much more.
"Intangible advantages" are intangible, and therefore immaterial and probably imginary.
All of my extended family are swamp yankees (New England version of "White Trash"). My parents both worked (mom was a nurse, Dad worked for the Navy), so I grew up middle class in a Navy town.
The people who I first met online (local BBSes in Florida and RI) were =all= from lower or working class families, and got fired from one crap job to the next. The rich folks with computers all paid for a local BBS or AOL, and usually just to leech warez. The people actually forming the communities on the message boards were universally poor (with one exception I know of), and usually came from poor or middle class backgrounds. Some of them were even smart. (Not all of them, tho.)
There =are= intangible advantages to being smart and a geek. The problem is, It's very hard to grow up geek in Latino or African American cultures...there is less tolerance for intellectual eccentricity than in other social groups. Instead of changing this mindset, fingers usually point to those evil Whites/Asians/Arabs and their cultural elitism as the reason for the tech imbalance.
But if you manage it, you get the same rewards from the cyber community white, rich people who grow up geek do.
My ex-boss grew up in the most squalid NYC barrio you can imagine. He's now a veep at a major financial firm with a corner office overlooking the Statue of Liberty. My coworker was black, never went to college, but made more money than I did because he could walk the walk.
He was arrested on a minor rap no white kid would have been busted on, and promptly fired by the suits in the corporate office. This is why we need cyber communities. The real world ones break the soul and spirit for utterly bullshit reasons.
(Happy end note: he beat the rap and found a new, better paying job with a contact he got from a...wait for it...friend online.)
I flunked out of art school. Twice. Having no skills and no ability to hold down "normal" jobs, I used to live off $400 a month in the early nineties. That's $4800 a year, so far below the poverty line, I couldn't even see daylight from where I was.
$150 of that went to pay my share of the rent and utilities every month. $20 of what was left went for a dial-up shell account at a local ISP. I used a 5 year old Macintosh (with a black and white screen!) to get email, read news, chat on IRC and log onto the local BBSs. Two years later, and I had saved up enough ($500) to buy another five year old Mac, this one with a color graphics card and a monitor, and whoah! Web browsing!
In this day and age, all the computer equipment you need to get you online can be had for less than $100 if you shop carefully. Operating systems (Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, Mac System 7) can be had for free. Net access is $15/month, or free if you can put up with the advertising.
So, tell me again how online access is open only to the "monied elite".
I'm now a Unix sys-admin and collumnist for online Macintosh trade journals. I make more money than my parents do. I would never, ever, ever have had the opportunity to make something of myself without net access, and without the support and advice of people I know only through the internet.
The "cyber community" is NOT the private reserve of the priveledged, and has done more to level class structure in the United states than anything short of the civli rights movement and the Emancipation Proclimation.
At one of my jobs, I was in the computer room of a Vast Fianancial Company That Shall Remain Nameless. They had an IBM RS/6000 SP-2 supercomputer that filled most of one wall, 32 POWER3 processors and untold terrabytes of storage.
I was left alone to work my mojo on a much smaller Sun server, but once I was good and certain i was alone, and that there were no cameras monitoring me, I wandered over to the supercomputer. I looked at the gray and blue tower that held the processors and RAM. It was worth $20, easy.
I touched it, caressed the cool metal of the mesh grid over the airvents with my fingertips, feeling the warm air and the low buzz. I'd pay $100 to do that again.
In "The Good Ol' Days", it wasn't a two horse race. There was the PC, usually a clone running some form of DOS, and the much cheaper and powerful (in terms of stuff you could do with them) 68000 machines. The first and foremost of these was the Macintosh, which solidified and progressed the UI behind the Lisa. There was also the Amiga and the Atari ST. This was the golden age of computing, IMO, where technology leapt forward at a breakneck pace, feuled by competition and a desire to break existing boundaries.
After both Commodore and Atari went belly up (because of bad management rather than a loss of popularity or an inability to compete with Apple or Wintel), the industry =stagnated=.
For most of the nineties, we've been running in place. The last technical revolutions we've had were the Web and PDAs, and that's pretty sad considering both really made it to the bigtime in '95 or so. With Apple on the ropes and unable to actually market its innovative ideas, and Microsoft simply "embracing and extending" and potential competition to an early grave, the computer scene in the past ten years has been dull as dishwater. Open Source sprung into being as a direct response the the homogonization of the the digital age.
Linux is neither innovative nor progressive. It's "user surly" at best, it incorporates not one technology that others haven't invented or implemented better elsewhere, and it encourages the same sort of keyboard cowboys that kept DOS in the top slot despite the incredibly capable competition.
Linux, however, serves a purpose, and a valuable one. It is the Omega. Once Linux has a capability, there is no real point in charging for it. This means that software comapnies will have to keep pushing their technology forward...or they will be swallowed and destroyed by Linux and Open Source. This is a Good Thing, IMO, and something the industry has sorely, sorely needed for a long time. Linux is the predator,it thins the weak and the sick from the herd.
The Mac is a different sort of platform, used for different sorts of things. Linux is a server OS that's popular with hobbyists, and likely to remain that way because of the culture around it. However, as "competition to Redmond", Linux wins hands down. Apple, with its history of breaking new ground, really has nothing to fear from Linux, but Microsoft, the previous "Nifty Idea, let's steal it!" champs are facing more than their match with Linux.
IBM's G5 processor is not a PowerPC microprocessor. It is the silicon used to drive the S/390 mainframes: a serious hunk of electronics to complex for a single chip. It's more along the lines of a super-CISC design, optimized for speed and throughput above portability.
IBM -does- have some sexy successors to the 750 processor (the "G3" in Apple marketing speak) and these will probably make it into future iMacs and Powerbooks. I'm more interested in their upcoming "7500+" line, which is a G4 that can be produced with a clock of 750mhz and 1ghz...we'll still have to wait until MacWorld San Francisco to see them tho.
I can't believe I wasted all that mental horsepower arguing with a crank the other day...you're pretty good at pulling meaningless equations out of your ass, huh?
OK., here's the laymans' explanation, broken down into small words so you can understand it. You are not "pushing aside" water. You are moving inside a layer of water that is moving inside another layer of water, etc, etc. The principal behind this method of reducing drag in a fluid environment is called "laminar flow". Do a little basic research before tossing out the equations, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see... there's Dean Kamen's bio-medicine revolutions, there's Steve, Steve and Mike in the garage working on the Apple I (which lead to the Apple II, and the boilerplate Rich&Famous deal for all involved), there's Larry Wahl, who just gave his wholly concieved invention away, and there's Cisco, and Fed Ex, and...
There are lots of great inventions spawned by only one or two people working in their spare time, and many of these grow into monolithic companies or worldwide phenomena on the back of that innovation. Many of these (Fed Ex comes to mind) were up against gigantic established players, and succeeded despite it.
So, the article is corporate self-congratulatory bullshit aimed at those who want to make a run at the establishment. Ignore it.
SoupIsGood Food
If the private sector cannot or will not provide a public utility at a reasonable rate and with a reasonable level of facility, then the public sector not only should, but must step in and rectify the situation.
The telco's and the cable companies have used deregulation to set themselves up as governing bodies over access to communications, trumping municipal, state or even national mandates with corporate mandates that serve to disenfranchise citizens from a reasonable level of service. No servers on broadband, no broadband to remote or "unprofitable" (read: low income, or worse, black) neigborhoods, long delays for install or repair, recurring technical problems that are deliberately ignored, no choice in providers, etc, etc, etc.
Screw 'em. They have been using the free market to wrangle quasi-monopolies and dictatorial cartels, obviating the entire purpose of a free market. The municipal government must step in, and provide services vital to the growth and prosperity to a community... this means municipal networks, even at the cost of breaking the priovate sector's back.
It's the private sector's own damn fault. They were given a fair chance, and they frittered it away. Now they get to shape up, or loose revenue.
SoupIsGood Food
So, the Amiga joins the ranks of Be, Geoworks, OS/2, GEM, and SCO.
They are all also-ran commercial competitors to not just Windows, which commands 99% of that market and comes bundled with 99% of the systems available, but three flavors of BSD, all free-as-in-beer-and-as-in-speach, and a few housand different Linux-based operating systems (distros). Top it off with a few clever, and completely free "other" OSes, like Atheos, and the situation looks grim.
I expect them to enjoy the same long-term success enjoyed by Be and OS/2... which is to say, an ignonimous death after the Nostalgia buffs tire of toying with it.
To be brutally blunt, the only way to introduced a closed platform in the current market is to work it as a total system. Sun and Apple desktops survive in a Windows world by offering a total package... you don't gotta be faster than Wintel, or cheaper than Wintel, but you have got to offer something Wintel doesn't. Comprehensively integrated systems is a damn good start, the insane system speed and responsiveness with limited resources that was a trademark of the Amiga of yore is another area to focus on. Move to Mips, ARM, PowerPC, MAJC, what have you... design a platform, not an OS but a whole platform, and you have a fighting chance.
Emulating a 10 year old architecture on an bone stock PC and then charging for the privelege is a fast track to irrelevancy.
SoupIsGood Food
"However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom."
Following this train of logic, the GPL should be studiously avoided, as it attempts to use the power of copyright law to dictate what other people can and cannot do with the code.
In short, RMS is openly advocating the use of BSD, Artistic and Public Domain licensing... as they don't try to strongarm the users into only using the code in a certain way.
Gun. Foot. Trigger. Pull.
SoupIsGood Food
Micropayments cannot be budgeted by the consumer.
This is a great thing for service providers. Without being able to track their spending while they're spending, customers are likely to spend more than they mean to. Metered access is a great way for companies to soak their clients, and the Utilities have been doing this since time immemoral.
Customers, who have to juggle a power bill, gas bill, electricity bill, cable bill, insurance bills, rent/mortgage, car payments and grocery tabs are sick to death of it.
Things like insurance premiums, loan payments and cable service is provided at a flat rate. Customers love this, because they can budget for it. Gas and Electrcicty are easy to "guesstimate"... usage will vary predictably by month, depending on climate. It's still irritating as hell to figure out, and most renters that =I= know make a point to look for "Utilities Included" apartments. Yes, they're paying more for a worse location even after you add in their yearly utility bills... but the savings in budgeting hassles are worth it to them.
Metered internet access, on the ISP side, has been a proven looser. Customers are simply not interested in paying less for uncertainty, and very interested in paying more for unused capacity, so long as the bill is easy to figure out.
Micropayments simply will =not= take off, because customers do not have the patience to budget for them. This is a market reality, and one you budding netrepreneurs had better take to heart: offering more complexity at a lower price is a sucker's game. Offering comprehensive service at a flat, fixed rate will make you more money in the margins, =and= attract customers.
SoupIsGood Food
> Wouldn't it be cheaper to do this with a bunch of PC's in stead?
> Not as pretty but it's someones tax dollars that pay for these...
Fact of life: hardware is cheap. A $3,000 Mac vs. a $2000 PC is peanuts, even if the total difference is 30-40k for the whole installation.
Re-tooling the development environment, retraining IT and programming personell, porting code to the new platform and the cost to set up and configure the new and cheaper hardware far outweighs the cost of the hardware itself. Then there's the time lost in accomplishing all of the above.
If your admins know Mac, and your coders and QA staff are used to building and testing Mac code with Mac tools (MPW, Codewarrior, Macsbug), you go with Mac. End of story.
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Solaris (on sparc, at least) requires the root password to boot into single user mode. You can boot from the Solaris install CD without it, and overwrite everything on the boot disk, but it won't let you mount filesystems. This is secure and reasonable, protecting your data from any yahoo who can hit the reset switch on the powerstrip.
HP-UX and AIX don't provide you with the same security. Neither does any of the Linux variant's I've dabbled in, or even the otherwise fort-knox-like OpenBSD.
I've heard the arguments, but I don't buy them. If you can't remember your root password and don't have your data and configuration backed up, give up on this unix stuff. It's too mentally challenging for you. End of story.
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Didn't Microsoft use Open Source code to bring networking tools like Ping and Telnet to windows? I seem to recall that they were developed by the FreeBSD project for FreeBSD... basically, recompiled and tweaked to run under NT by Microsoft, and with the FreeBSD project's blessing. This saved them millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours in wasted duplication of effort.
Hmm.
Even Microsoft, it seems, benefits from Open Source.
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I just had a long conversation with my Mom on this very subject. She's been a nurse going on 30 years now, and is very, very good at what she does. She, and most of her co-workers, like information technology... just not how it's implemented.
1) Paying attention to workflow in a medical setting is =key.= Life and death decisions are made based on the accuracy of the data in the system. If the system is difficult or unweildy to use, the care providers won't be able to make proper use of it.
Have your developers follow around your nurses, therapists and physicians. Have them carefully note how things are done now, and why. There may be some pre-packaged software that will work fine... but there might not be. Or you may have to modify it heavily to meet your user's needs.
The little details count for a lot of productivity. For instance: when checking off lab tests to be run, the care provided may have to go through sixteen screens to pick what she wants to run, and might miss one, or include another by accident! If she could check off a "test suite," or bundle of the most common tests run in a certain situation, labor is saved and lifesaving accuracy is increased.
Ask your nurses what they want and need, and =listen= to them!
2) Accordingly, you should budget most of your money on software and development.
3) Go to a "thin client" model... wireless PDAs that talk to fault-tolerant, high-availability servers locked in a backroom only the Chief Geek has the key to. In an environment as hectic and fast paced as a medical establishment, you want the "hot water" data model. The servers are the "hot water heaters", and the PDAs are the "faucets." Whenever a nurse or doctor walks into a room with her PDA, she has data on-tap, hot water. When the battery begins to run down, she grabs another one from the recharging cradles, logs in, and has "hot water," or the same data she was just working with.
This will work with fixed systems at the bedside (like notebooks), but you'll have a problem with people forgetting to log out, etc. Look into a "key-card" access system instead of a traditional login if you go with fixed systems in every room.
The fewer things run on local PCs or workstations, the fewer things your administrators will have to configure and maintain. This translates to higher security and uptime.
Running a medical facility is a much more complex and critical undertaking than running a web site or ISP. Lives =are= on the line. Engineer your site for 1) practicality, 2) utility and 3) robustness.
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# swinstall -s /tmp/XSWGR1100_11.00.depot -x auto_reboot=true -x patch_match_targets=true
swinstall: no DEPOT found in hpsystem:/temp/XSWGR1100_11.00.depot
#fireaxe -x hit_really_hard=true -x roar_with_frustration=true feel_remorse=false -s hpsystem
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Tossing X Into the Seething Sharkpit of x86
Caveat: Some unkind words about Linux and Free Software are said therein to make a point... I do have some positive views on Linux and Free Software put to print here, if it makes you feel any better.
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According to the mailing lists, OpenBSD's implementation of BIND4 is immune, the sprintf()s rersponsible for the overflows were changed to snprintf()s by the development team in 1997.
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This is just a partially-complete list of proccessor vendors with products found in machines that will run Linux or NetBSD. There are many, many, many more that deal exclusively with embedded processors or processors for special applications like rad-hardened and DSP.
To be ruthlessly honest, compared to RISC architectures like ARM, MIPS and especially PowerPC, Transmeta's price/performance/efficiency is nothing to write home about. No big loss to the competitive market if they get swallowed up by AMD...and it would give AMD a bigger club to go after Intel on the low end with.
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Well, the Quicktime Streaming Server is, at anyrate. It's part of the Darwin project: get the skinny here. Runs just spiffy on Linux, or so I'm told.
The QT client has a freebie version that runs on MacOS and Windows, but, alack, no younicks client yet.
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Mac users still get uncontrollable giggle fits when people talk about the "User friendly Windows interface". If you need a seemless, integrated UI for total control over the presentation and creation of complex data (Graphics, sound effects, bad screenplays, etc.) you need BeOS or a Mac.
Unix in all its many splendored flavors is good for when you need stability and performance. This is why it's usually paired with the =really= sexxxy hardware you need a government grant to buy. Unix boxes are at their finest as tools, accessories. Big, expensive shared peripherals that serve a specific, tailored purpose.
In my case, I've got a Sparcstation LX running OpenBSD for a purpose: I need to host a private web forum. It has to be robust, able to cope with large loads, and dirt cheap. Including the OpenBSD CD(with stickers!), the setup cost me $50. I don't need a windowing environment...I have my MacOS Powerbook on a network with it. After the initial install, I can administrate it better sitting on my couch than I can sitting on the terminal...the Mac's tools for editing bits of text from a usercentric standpoint are second to none. Perfect for tweaking configuration files.
And you will need to tweak configuration files. By hand. Might as well start off that way rather than continually correcting what the GUI administration applications assume is what you want. This is where BSD's shine. Their systems are simple and unsophisticated, well documented with clearly written manpages and FAQs, thus shallowing the learning curve if you need to get into the nitty-gritty of networking, soft-raid, security auditing, etc. You know...the stuff Unix is =good= at.
Linux is too chaotic, the distros vary too wildly from one to the other to make low level administration and automation easy. They cram everything but the kitchen sink into your system, none of it documented very well. This is fine if your hobby is computer science and you need a toy to play with, or you need a robust workstation environment, or you want to compete with Windows to be the hottest Mac rip-off arround. Not so good if you're trying to track BBS users by IP to filter out the trolls and bots.
There just isn't a GUI front end for that sort of stuff. Fancy windowing environments soak up valuable processor cycles and RAM. If you need a robust and fast server tailored to meet a specific utility, you need *BSD.
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<em>Rubbish. You cannot "lock a Mac down harder than a UNIX box". They can both be locked down to any degree desired. </em>
The trick is to get it watertight out of the box. OpenBSD's probably the closest, but starts to wander away from the mark when you add functionality. There's a quicker return on investment with with Mac servers if you're security conscious. You know how much a Unux security guru costs?
<em>And sure you can run a Mac with no software and no extensions, but you can't do anything with it. </em>
In my extensions folder, there are 206 items. (Most of them shared libraries Lotus Notes barfed all over my system.) Do I need an audio CD driver on a server? No. Do I need ColorPicker or ColorSync on a server? No. Do I need MacInTalk? No. Do I need finderpop? No. Ditto for control strips, control panels, any font that didn't come with the OS, etc. Five minutes worth of work gets you one stable Mac server.
What makes the Mac unstable has nothing to do with the OS and eveything to do with the applications it runs. Protected memory systems (like Unix) are more forgiving of buggy code...if the Gimp dies a horrible death, it won't take the kernal with it. On the other hand, the Mac will reboot if the program/thread isn't coded to exit gracefully on error.
This means the Mac is only as stable as its applications. This is a problem when you are running enormous and complex applications, like popular web browsers, office productivity suites, or desktop publishing programs.
Running small RealBasic apps and garden variety networking software tied together with a few Applescripts will likely keep running forever without a reboot.
OTOH, cruising slashdot with Netscape while photoshopping Steve Jobs sodomizing Tux while "working" on sales pitch in Microsoft Word will probably have you cursing up a storm and rebooting once every couple days. (If you used iCab and Nisus and Canvas instead of NS and Word and Photoshop, you'd probably think those singing the "Macs are unstable" chorus are a bunch of idiots who don't know what they're talking about.)
So, ironically, where the Mac is supposed to shine the brightest, as a desktop workstation, it is at it's least stable. As a server, it does all right. Better than NT/2000, at any rate, and probably as good as the BSDs. (My personal favorite younickses. Got an OpenBSD box running an intensive PHP-heavy site on an antiquated Sun workstation. I'm impressed with how well it holds up.)
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Macs, when used as stone stock simple servers, tend to be fairly reliable, with uptimes on the order of years for some older (Pre-PowerPC) systems I'm personally aware of.
Macs become unstable when you dump a crapload of extensions, control panels, fonts, third party software, plugins for third party software, plugins for plugins for third party software, and, well, you get the drift.
Clear the cruft out of the system folder, use only proven, reliable third party software and damn little of it, and the lowly and much maligned Mac can keep cranking the bits month after month with the younicks big boys. Figure in some scheduled downtime every so often for a pre-emptive reboot, and it will be spiffy for as long as they're up there.
Why bother putting up with three minutes downtime out of a week? Security. You can lock a mac down harder than a Unix or windows box. Simplicity. Configuring these bad boys will be a breeze. Plus, tools like RealBasic and Applescript make coding applications and scripts painless and powerful...without sacrificing reliability.
Put anything that says "Netscape" or "Quark" on there, and the mission is doooooooomed!
Just 'cuz the consensus has it that Macs are inherently unreliable, doesn't mean it's neccesarily true, or that the "unreliability" is a liability to steep to be surmounted. Question consensus, and do a little thinking and research for yourself.
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I administrate a mixed shop of 70 or so systems: big HP-UX, Sun and AIX development machines with FreeBSD, Debian and a few stranger things running our infrastructure. Even tho the USAH only directly covers half the systems I have to handle, it lays down a solid groundwork =any= admin of =any= Unix system can benefit from.
The USAH saved my hash on more than one occasion, and it really bailed me out when I first wound up a professional Unix admin. You gotta realize, I'm a Mac guy...first computer was a Mac, I now write for an up-and-coming Mac webzine, and I carry my Powerbook around with me wherever I go.
So I was hired as the "IT Guy" by a small R&D company on the strength of my Mac skills. There were a dozen or so Macs in sales and marketing...and over 110 Sun workstations. From an old Sun 3 to a pretty monumental dual-UltraII clone, we had unix boxes running everything from our firewall and company web site to file servers and backup systems to circuit simulators and code compilers. As someone who's only experience to the comand line was a dial-in shell to get internet email, I was completely out of my league, and desparate to hold onto the job for reasons I won't get into here.
It was a =really= hairy situation, and I kept my head above water only because of this excellent book. Now I do the Unix thing as my main career, and use the Mac for fun and personal computing. I picked up O'Reily's Systems Administration Handbook, as well as Sun's own Solaris books, but they weren't anywhere near as concise or accurate as the USAH.
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The entire point of the article was misinterpreted, most importantly by the autor of the UnixReview piece.
Unix, asn an operating system, =can= be pared down to the kernal and a shell. At the core, this is the single unifying thread that runs between Ultrix, PyramidOS, FreeBSD, Slackware and MKLinux: a nugget of computer science concepts that can be universally recognized as "Unix". On top of that, daemons, shared libraries and programs ("services" in the article) are added to give any particular version of Unix its "flavor", making it useful for real work apart and aside from abstract programming.
Are Redhat and SUSE and Debian all linux? Yes. Are they all administered, operated, or tinkered with identical ways? No. Everything from RC script handling to default window managers can, and do, vary from one Linux to another. Even tho they are all considered "Unix" or "Unix Like", it takes more than Unix to make these distros usefull.
Unix is no longer enough to count as an operating system. It needs to be combined with other software to be made useable...like Linux distros or HP-UX.
This is the point DKE was trying to make. Most mac people regard an OS as integral to the user experience: the GUI is inseparable from the file system and networking services in the Mac world. Using this worldview, Mac OS X is its own operating system, and cannot be pigeonholed as "just another Unix" any more than AIX or NetBSD can. Does it have Unix at its core? Yes. Is it a Unix operating system? No. It is much, much more.
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"Intangible advantages" are intangible, and therefore immaterial and probably imginary.
All of my extended family are swamp yankees (New England version of "White Trash"). My parents both worked (mom was a nurse, Dad worked for the Navy), so I grew up middle class in a Navy town.
The people who I first met online (local BBSes in Florida and RI) were =all= from lower or working class families, and got fired from one crap job to the next. The rich folks with computers all paid for a local BBS or AOL, and usually just to leech warez. The people actually forming the communities on the message boards were universally poor (with one exception I know of), and usually came from poor or middle class backgrounds. Some of them were even smart. (Not all of them, tho.)
There =are= intangible advantages to being smart and a geek. The problem is, It's very hard to grow up geek in Latino or African American cultures...there is less tolerance for intellectual eccentricity than in other social groups. Instead of changing this mindset, fingers usually point to those evil Whites/Asians/Arabs and their cultural elitism as the reason for the tech imbalance.
But if you manage it, you get the same rewards from the cyber community white, rich people who grow up geek do.
My ex-boss grew up in the most squalid NYC barrio you can imagine. He's now a veep at a major financial firm with a corner office overlooking the Statue of Liberty. My coworker was black, never went to college, but made more money than I did because he could walk the walk.
He was arrested on a minor rap no white kid would have been busted on, and promptly fired by the suits in the corporate office. This is why we need cyber communities. The real world ones break the soul and spirit for utterly bullshit reasons.
(Happy end note: he beat the rap and found a new, better paying job with a contact he got from a...wait for it...friend online.)
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I flunked out of art school. Twice. Having no skills and no ability to hold down "normal" jobs, I used to live off $400 a month in the early nineties. That's $4800 a year, so far below the poverty line, I couldn't even see daylight from where I was.
$150 of that went to pay my share of the rent and utilities every month. $20 of what was left went for a dial-up shell account at a local ISP. I used a 5 year old Macintosh (with a black and white screen!) to get email, read news, chat on IRC and log onto the local BBSs. Two years later, and I had saved up enough ($500) to buy another five year old Mac, this one with a color graphics card and a monitor, and whoah! Web browsing!
In this day and age, all the computer equipment you need to get you online can be had for less than $100 if you shop carefully. Operating systems (Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, Mac System 7) can be had for free. Net access is $15/month, or free if you can put up with the advertising.
So, tell me again how online access is open only to the "monied elite".
I'm now a Unix sys-admin and collumnist for online Macintosh trade journals. I make more money than my parents do. I would never, ever, ever have had the opportunity to make something of myself without net access, and without the support and advice of people I know only through the internet.
The "cyber community" is NOT the private reserve of the priveledged, and has done more to level class structure in the United states than anything short of the civli rights movement and the Emancipation Proclimation.
Think on that.
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At one of my jobs, I was in the computer room of a Vast Fianancial Company That Shall Remain Nameless. They had an IBM RS/6000 SP-2 supercomputer that filled most of one wall, 32 POWER3 processors and untold terrabytes of storage.
I was left alone to work my mojo on a much smaller Sun server, but once I was good and certain i was alone, and that there were no cameras monitoring me, I wandered over to the supercomputer. I looked at the gray and blue tower that held the processors and RAM. It was worth $20, easy.
I touched it, caressed the cool metal of the mesh grid over the airvents with my fingertips, feeling the warm air and the low buzz. I'd pay $100 to do that again.
Then I licked it.
Priceless.
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In "The Good Ol' Days", it wasn't a two horse race. There was the PC, usually a clone running some form of DOS, and the much cheaper and powerful (in terms of stuff you could do with them) 68000 machines. The first and foremost of these was the Macintosh, which solidified and progressed the UI behind the Lisa. There was also the Amiga and the Atari ST. This was the golden age of computing, IMO, where technology leapt forward at a breakneck pace, feuled by competition and a desire to break existing boundaries.
After both Commodore and Atari went belly up (because of bad management rather than a loss of popularity or an inability to compete with Apple or Wintel), the industry =stagnated=.
For most of the nineties, we've been running in place. The last technical revolutions we've had were the Web and PDAs, and that's pretty sad considering both really made it to the bigtime in '95 or so. With Apple on the ropes and unable to actually market its innovative ideas, and Microsoft simply "embracing and extending" and potential competition to an early grave, the computer scene in the past ten years has been dull as dishwater. Open Source sprung into being as a direct response the the homogonization of the the digital age.
Linux is neither innovative nor progressive. It's "user surly" at best, it incorporates not one technology that others haven't invented or implemented better elsewhere, and it encourages the same sort of keyboard cowboys that kept DOS in the top slot despite the incredibly capable competition.
Linux, however, serves a purpose, and a valuable one. It is the Omega. Once Linux has a capability, there is no real point in charging for it. This means that software comapnies will have to keep pushing their technology forward...or they will be swallowed and destroyed by Linux and Open Source. This is a Good Thing, IMO, and something the industry has sorely, sorely needed for a long time. Linux is the predator,it thins the weak and the sick from the herd.
The Mac is a different sort of platform, used for different sorts of things. Linux is a server OS that's popular with hobbyists, and likely to remain that way because of the culture around it. However, as "competition to Redmond", Linux wins hands down. Apple, with its history of breaking new ground, really has nothing to fear from Linux, but Microsoft, the previous "Nifty Idea, let's steal it!" champs are facing more than their match with Linux.
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IBM's G5 processor is not a PowerPC microprocessor. It is the silicon used to drive the S/390 mainframes: a serious hunk of electronics to complex for a single chip. It's more along the lines of a super-CISC design, optimized for speed and throughput above portability.
IBM -does- have some sexy successors to the 750 processor (the "G3" in Apple marketing speak) and these will probably make it into future iMacs and Powerbooks. I'm more interested in their upcoming "7500+" line, which is a G4 that can be produced with a clock of 750mhz and 1ghz...we'll still have to wait until MacWorld San Francisco to see them tho.
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I can't believe I wasted all that mental horsepower arguing with a crank the other day...you're pretty good at pulling meaningless equations out of your ass, huh?
OK., here's the laymans' explanation, broken down into small words so you can understand it. You are not "pushing aside" water. You are moving inside a layer of water that is moving inside another layer of water, etc, etc. The principal behind this method of reducing drag in a fluid environment is called "laminar flow". Do a little basic research before tossing out the equations, huh?
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