Of course Mr Nobel is fully entitled to his opinion and codification in the rules for his prize. But if the Nobel Committee would consider -any changes-, this is the change they should make.
I have 6TB in RAID 5 shared out on my mini via FireWire 800 from a OWC Qx2. Love it... Originally tried a Drobo and had problems with stability of it under load.
Me too! I've been very happy with the Qx2 and FW800. But what I'm hoping for/waiting for is a Thunderbolt-equipped Mini server and a Thunderbolt-to-eSATA adapter. I've heard rumors these adapters are in the works. But even RAID10 is No Substitute for offsite backup!
At $1,000(not including labor and electricity) wouldn't it be cheaper to just host any external services with a hosting company? Chances are they have a better backup policy, guaranteed uptime, and a better internet connection. Just my 2 cents.
That's a Very Good Point, particularly if the only external service you provide is a website. Additionally, the hosting company is presumably investing the non-trivial effort to secure the webserver. If you're going to do e-commerce/online store, then a reputable hosting company is probably the only way to go. (In my case, there's additional value in having a little experience in configuring and operating a webserver.)
That's a good point, particularly if the only external service you provide is a website. Additionally, the hosting company is presumably investing the non-trivial effort to secure the webserver. If you're going to do e-commerce/online store, then a reputable hosting company is probably the only way to go.
I'm presuming this machine is for internal use only. If you need to host external services, such as a website, pay $1k for another Mini Server and use that exclusively for external facing services.
That being said, you could activate the Wiki function and produce a little company Intranet where people could post and update information. That's quite easy to do once you've enabled the WebServer (using Server Admin).
It's also easy to set up LDAP server, which will at a minimum simplify your account management. You could use Mobile accounts on each workstation, so that the workstation's data is local but is automatically both backed up to the server -and made available- if the user has to log onto or borrow another machine.
You could configure VPN for safe remote access (but that's a bit tricky.)
Right now the best book on OS X Server Admin is Daniel Eran Dilger's book. (http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Leopard-Server-Developer-Reference/dp/0470521317)
My experience as a SOHO user/administrator of Server going back to Tiger Server is that each version has gotten easier to use, but unless the out-of-the-box configuration is -exactly what you need-, it's worth paying a couple $100s to get an expert to fully configure the server initial setup, particularly the DNS. If the DNS isn't set up perfectly, a lot of stuff breaks in OS X Server. (I've used Mid Atlantic Consulting here in the DC area.)
Finally, you need to have an additional backup strategy that involves off-site/off-machine backups. Consider the recent tornadoes all over the US! I have a pair of USB drives and my plan is to monthly back up to one and swap it for the other stored at an offsite location (friend's house.) (Disclosure: I'm about 6 months behind doing that, one of the drives in an external exclosure died and I haven't gotten around to replacing it.)
Mod parent up (and I write this as a Mac & iPhone-carrying Apple Fanboy!) I'm looking forward to seeing real innovation from Android, which in the long run will be good for the industry as a whole and consumers. What disappoints me so much about Microsoft is their inability to bring their own research to market in -quality products-. Either it doesn't get out of the lab, or the MSFT implementation is half-assed. The Kinect is one of the few counter-examples of an innovative product that Microsoft kinda got right.
The senior leader switch to Macs started 3 years ago.
And my experience with other machines show that the component quality does make a difference. I had several HP machines die and the likely culprit according to the hardware guys was either a bad capacitor or a piece of silicon with low heat/stress tolerance. I have a lot of personal experience with quality in different brands/models of disk drives, including 50% failure rate (3 of 6) on Seagate 3.5" 1tb drives.
"in the beginning", I was the one corporate Mac user (by special agreement/dispensation/employment agreement with the CEO.) Then a couple of Macs were purchased for specific projects, plus a couple other 'favorite sons' got a Mac. Once the senior leadership (including the CIO and COO) actually -tried them-, they decided that the convenience/ease of use of the software platform, along with the reliability of the hardware, was A Good Thing. So the corporate policy was still "No Macs", but they became in some respects a status simple at the VP level. Then the CFO said "no Macs". But with a significant number of VPs advocating for the Mac (including the ability to connect to the corporate Exchange server, and the ability to run corporate Windows-only applications through virtualization), is likely to result a re-look in the "no Macs" policy. A big part of that is that the hardware's lasting a lot longer. If a Dell breaks in 2 years and a Mac lasts 4, and the price for SIMILARLY EQUIPPED machines is relatively close, then the Total Cost Of Ownership argument for Macs is a strong one.
But we're talking about 20 machines in a 500 person company, so Mac penetration here is not very strong. The level of interest at the VP and senior tech staff level remains high. And typically that's what I've seen in several other companies; the 'desire for Macs' is particularly strong in the senior technical ranks. In my case specifically, and in the case of others I've talked to, it's a combination of ease-of-use for everyday tasks, hardware reliability, and the lack of IT controls and interference (e.g. corporate-injected software updates that crash your machine in the middle of working or worrying about the latest crop of vulnerabilities.) Also for many of us, the Unix underpinnings provides a lot of capabilities for tools we grew up with (e.g. grep, chmod, EMACS, etc) that are often highly productive alternatives to the Windows way of doing things.
So their contracts with the publishers -and- the Apple cut didn't work. The Apple cut has been pretty well known. Seems to me that the contracts with the publishers are equally to blame here. After all, it costs a publisher NOTHING to release a digital version (there's no printing or physical distribution costs). The publisher should cut the digital distributor a substantial discount for that.
Hey, don't forget that many, if not most of Microsoft's most successful products started out as acquisitions. That includes Office and IE. So buying a product and Microsoftizing it is nothing new for Redmond.
With the Microsoft/Ford collaboration, what if Microsoft built Skype into the next version of their car software?
Could Microsoft be looking for a 'great convergence' of voice between cell phones, computers, cars, TVs/consoles (Xbox), etc? They have the smarts, but do they have the business vision to pull this off? And if they do, how open/closed would the resulting system be?
I characterized this as a choice between the "old evil" and the "new evil" (fully acknowledging my bias against both companies...) Would the/. community be more comfortable with Skype as a Facebook product?
This comment deserves better than the negative moderation points it's received. It's a valid point. The idea of adding Skype to Xbox 360 is interesting.
Now I plead guilty to the charge of disliking anything with the Microsoft brand on it, I'm not sure that makes me 'retarded', just prejudiced. This is why we ignored the Ford Fusion Hybrid when we were looking for a new car last year.
What I have not seen is a validation that the offered kit actually -works on a Mac- (or Linux) running Firefox. It's been asserted by the malware's marketing literature this works, but the Danish company does not state they've validated that claim.
Not only do we have no verification this works on Mac OS X/Firefox, but the "sales literature" also claims Safari and Chrome "real soon now". I'd be so shocked to see have a vendor's marketing literature end up being wrong....
Or could this be someone trying to scam the scammers?
Each year as the year goes on, I toss everything into a "inbasket". Then come tax time (usually around New Years), I dump out the box, sort through and organize the receipts. I'll put all the gas receipts together in order & staple them, electric receipts together and staple them, etc. Then I extract all the tax info into a single spreadsheet, making a note on the source (e.g. for a deductible item on a credit card, I note the card and the month of the statement with that item.) Finally, I dump everything into a bag and put that bag in a "banker's storage box;" I can usually fit 2 bags (2 years) into a single box. Then I stick that box in the closet, and hope I don't get audited. This usually takes about 10 hours over a 2-3 day period. The core principle here is "don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow, or whenever the item is really needed.":-)
The exceptions to this are receipts associated with home improvements, which go into a separate folder (so I can deduct them from the value of the house when I sell it), car repair receipts (each car has a separate folder so I have, at least in principle, full service records for that car), any permanent legal documents which go into their own "permanent save me" folder, and finally the taxes themselves. I print out the full set of tax reports/forms (from TurboTax) and also save the full set of tax forms as a PDF. That PDF goes into a folder that is part of what I back up in multiple copies (along with digital photographs, scanned family records/genealogical documents, etc).
There are sites that provide retention advice for various classes of receipts.
I think there's a 4th alternative: Understand and focus on their -core market-, which is corporations. One could be very profitable selling secure and manageable (from the IT/CIO sense) phones and pads to just the Fortune 500 and governments.
What surprised/disappointed me about the Playbook was the absence of the level of information assurance support for that device. It's the Blackberry's primary selling point to what I see as their core market. Better to have announced a delay associated with "getting the security right the first time" than to push out the incomplete stuff they did do.
And for the record, I turned down a Blackberry as a govt/DARPA contractor back in '02, and have NEVER regretted that decision since. I don't find much utility in devices (Blackberries or iPhones) for email that don't have a full-size keyboard and something that can display more than a Twitter's worth of text at a time.
We all benefit from these kinds of disclosures, I remember Google posting post-mortem analyses of some of their failures. Even Microsoft provided information on their Sidekick meltdown. This does seem to be the 'typical' melange of a human error and cascading consequences.
Someone first said, "You learn much more from failure than you do from success." If nothing else, it's the thesis of the classic Petrosky book, "To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Human-Failure-Successful-Design/dp/0679734163 (If you haven't read this, you should!!)
And I'm also reminded of a core principle from safety critical system design, that you cannot provide 100% safety. The best you can do is a combination of probabilistic analysis against known hazards. As a Boeing 777 safety engineer told me, "9 9's of safety, i.e. chance of failure 1/10 ^-9, applied over the expected flying hours of the 777 fleet, still means a 50-50 chance of an aircraft falling out of the sky." That kind of reasoning also applies to the current Japanese nuke plant failure...
Well, Macs also work quite well for my mother and my brother, neither of whom have any prior computing experience. My mother is definitely of the "turn it on, check her email, check a few websites, turn it off" variety. My brother (carpenter by trade) has become more interested in the technology and is doing a lot more with system configuration including WiFI set up, etc.
I wonder how YOU justify the "when it clearly isn't" remark.
Short answer, yes. When I'm working on software/systems architecture standards, etc, there is a disproportionate number of Macs around the room. The value of the Mac as a platform is that it can be simple, but that it also has the full power of Unix underneath. That makes the platform appealing to both those who don't want to have to mess with their computers (like my mother) and to those of us who routinely use "su" and other such facilities. A lot of what I know about working on Unix machines fully transfers over to the Mac.
Making a machine easy to use is not necessarily correlated with ignorant users. A strong platform should support users at all levels.
Find out what jurisdiction awarded/oversees the Mediacom franchise and start with them. For what it's worth, Virginia's State Corporations Commission has been very responsive to my complaint about Verizon service.
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Of course Mr Nobel is fully entitled to his opinion and codification in the rules for his prize. But if the Nobel Committee would consider -any changes-, this is the change they should make.
I have 6TB in RAID 5 shared out on my mini via FireWire 800 from a OWC Qx2. Love it... Originally tried a Drobo and had problems with stability of it under load.
Me too! I've been very happy with the Qx2 and FW800. But what I'm hoping for/waiting for is a Thunderbolt-equipped Mini server and a Thunderbolt-to-eSATA adapter. I've heard rumors these adapters are in the works. But even RAID10 is No Substitute for offsite backup!
At $1,000(not including labor and electricity) wouldn't it be cheaper to just host any external services with a hosting company? Chances are they have a better backup policy, guaranteed uptime, and a better internet connection. Just my 2 cents.
That's a Very Good Point, particularly if the only external service you provide is a website. Additionally, the hosting company is presumably investing the non-trivial effort to secure the webserver. If you're going to do e-commerce/online store, then a reputable hosting company is probably the only way to go. (In my case, there's additional value in having a little experience in configuring and operating a webserver.)
That's a good point, particularly if the only external service you provide is a website. Additionally, the hosting company is presumably investing the non-trivial effort to secure the webserver. If you're going to do e-commerce/online store, then a reputable hosting company is probably the only way to go.
I'm presuming this machine is for internal use only. If you need to host external services, such as a website, pay $1k for another Mini Server and use that exclusively for external facing services.
That being said, you could activate the Wiki function and produce a little company Intranet where people could post and update information. That's quite easy to do once you've enabled the WebServer (using Server Admin).
It's also easy to set up LDAP server, which will at a minimum simplify your account management. You could use Mobile accounts on each workstation, so that the workstation's data is local but is automatically both backed up to the server -and made available- if the user has to log onto or borrow another machine.
You could configure VPN for safe remote access (but that's a bit tricky.)
Right now the best book on OS X Server Admin is Daniel Eran Dilger's book. (http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Leopard-Server-Developer-Reference/dp/0470521317)
My experience as a SOHO user/administrator of Server going back to Tiger Server is that each version has gotten easier to use, but unless the out-of-the-box configuration is -exactly what you need-, it's worth paying a couple $100s to get an expert to fully configure the server initial setup, particularly the DNS. If the DNS isn't set up perfectly, a lot of stuff breaks in OS X Server. (I've used Mid Atlantic Consulting here in the DC area.)
Finally, you need to have an additional backup strategy that involves off-site/off-machine backups. Consider the recent tornadoes all over the US! I have a pair of USB drives and my plan is to monthly back up to one and swap it for the other stored at an offsite location (friend's house.) (Disclosure: I'm about 6 months behind doing that, one of the drives in an external exclosure died and I haven't gotten around to replacing it.)
Mod parent up (and I write this as a Mac & iPhone-carrying Apple Fanboy!) I'm looking forward to seeing real innovation from Android, which in the long run will be good for the industry as a whole and consumers. What disappoints me so much about Microsoft is their inability to bring their own research to market in -quality products-. Either it doesn't get out of the lab, or the MSFT implementation is half-assed. The Kinect is one of the few counter-examples of an innovative product that Microsoft kinda got right.
The senior leader switch to Macs started 3 years ago.
And my experience with other machines show that the component quality does make a difference. I had several HP machines die and the likely culprit according to the hardware guys was either a bad capacitor or a piece of silicon with low heat/stress tolerance. I have a lot of personal experience with quality in different brands/models of disk drives, including 50% failure rate (3 of 6) on Seagate 3.5" 1tb drives.
"in the beginning", I was the one corporate Mac user (by special agreement/dispensation/employment agreement with the CEO.) Then a couple of Macs were purchased for specific projects, plus a couple other 'favorite sons' got a Mac. Once the senior leadership (including the CIO and COO) actually -tried them-, they decided that the convenience/ease of use of the software platform, along with the reliability of the hardware, was A Good Thing. So the corporate policy was still "No Macs", but they became in some respects a status simple at the VP level. Then the CFO said "no Macs". But with a significant number of VPs advocating for the Mac (including the ability to connect to the corporate Exchange server, and the ability to run corporate Windows-only applications through virtualization), is likely to result a re-look in the "no Macs" policy. A big part of that is that the hardware's lasting a lot longer. If a Dell breaks in 2 years and a Mac lasts 4, and the price for SIMILARLY EQUIPPED machines is relatively close, then the Total Cost Of Ownership argument for Macs is a strong one.
But we're talking about 20 machines in a 500 person company, so Mac penetration here is not very strong. The level of interest at the VP and senior tech staff level remains high. And typically that's what I've seen in several other companies; the 'desire for Macs' is particularly strong in the senior technical ranks. In my case specifically, and in the case of others I've talked to, it's a combination of ease-of-use for everyday tasks, hardware reliability, and the lack of IT controls and interference (e.g. corporate-injected software updates that crash your machine in the middle of working or worrying about the latest crop of vulnerabilities.) Also for many of us, the Unix underpinnings provides a lot of capabilities for tools we grew up with (e.g. grep, chmod, EMACS, etc) that are often highly productive alternatives to the Windows way of doing things.
So their contracts with the publishers -and- the Apple cut didn't work. The Apple cut has been pretty well known. Seems to me that the contracts with the publishers are equally to blame here. After all, it costs a publisher NOTHING to release a digital version (there's no printing or physical distribution costs). The publisher should cut the digital distributor a substantial discount for that.
Hey, don't forget that many, if not most of Microsoft's most successful products started out as acquisitions. That includes Office and IE. So buying a product and Microsoftizing it is nothing new for Redmond.
With the Microsoft/Ford collaboration, what if Microsoft built Skype into the next version of their car software?
Could Microsoft be looking for a 'great convergence' of voice between cell phones, computers, cars, TVs/consoles (Xbox), etc? They have the smarts, but do they have the business vision to pull this off? And if they do, how open/closed would the resulting system be?
I characterized this as a choice between the "old evil" and the "new evil" (fully acknowledging my bias against both companies...) Would the /. community be more comfortable with Skype as a Facebook product?
This comment deserves better than the negative moderation points it's received. It's a valid point. The idea of adding Skype to Xbox 360 is interesting.
Now I plead guilty to the charge of disliking anything with the Microsoft brand on it, I'm not sure that makes me 'retarded', just prejudiced. This is why we ignored the Ford Fusion Hybrid when we were looking for a new car last year.
Why does anyone care about Assange any more?
What I have not seen is a validation that the offered kit actually -works on a Mac- (or Linux) running Firefox. It's been asserted by the malware's marketing literature this works, but the Danish company does not state they've validated that claim.
Not only do we have no verification this works on Mac OS X/Firefox, but the "sales literature" also claims Safari and Chrome "real soon now". I'd be so shocked to see have a vendor's marketing literature end up being wrong....
Or could this be someone trying to scam the scammers?
Each year as the year goes on, I toss everything into a "inbasket". Then come tax time (usually around New Years), I dump out the box, sort through and organize the receipts. I'll put all the gas receipts together in order & staple them, electric receipts together and staple them, etc. Then I extract all the tax info into a single spreadsheet, making a note on the source (e.g. for a deductible item on a credit card, I note the card and the month of the statement with that item.) Finally, I dump everything into a bag and put that bag in a "banker's storage box;" I can usually fit 2 bags (2 years) into a single box. Then I stick that box in the closet, and hope I don't get audited. This usually takes about 10 hours over a 2-3 day period. The core principle here is "don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow, or whenever the item is really needed." :-)
The exceptions to this are receipts associated with home improvements, which go into a separate folder (so I can deduct them from the value of the house when I sell it), car repair receipts (each car has a separate folder so I have, at least in principle, full service records for that car), any permanent legal documents which go into their own "permanent save me" folder, and finally the taxes themselves. I print out the full set of tax reports/forms (from TurboTax) and also save the full set of tax forms as a PDF. That PDF goes into a folder that is part of what I back up in multiple copies (along with digital photographs, scanned family records/genealogical documents, etc).
There are sites that provide retention advice for various classes of receipts.
I think there's a 4th alternative: Understand and focus on their -core market-, which is corporations. One could be very profitable selling secure and manageable (from the IT/CIO sense) phones and pads to just the Fortune 500 and governments.
What surprised/disappointed me about the Playbook was the absence of the level of information assurance support for that device. It's the Blackberry's primary selling point to what I see as their core market. Better to have announced a delay associated with "getting the security right the first time" than to push out the incomplete stuff they did do.
And for the record, I turned down a Blackberry as a govt/DARPA contractor back in '02, and have NEVER regretted that decision since. I don't find much utility in devices (Blackberries or iPhones) for email that don't have a full-size keyboard and something that can display more than a Twitter's worth of text at a time.
p.s. Wikipedia says there are 923 B777's out there, about 2x the number of nuke plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777
So how intense an earthquake, at what distance from the plant, and how high a tsunami should we plan for next time???
We all benefit from these kinds of disclosures, I remember Google posting post-mortem analyses of some of their failures. Even Microsoft provided information on their Sidekick meltdown. This does seem to be the 'typical' melange of a human error and cascading consequences.
Someone first said, "You learn much more from failure than you do from success." If nothing else, it's the thesis of the classic Petrosky book, "To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Human-Failure-Successful-Design/dp/0679734163 (If you haven't read this, you should!!)
And I'm also reminded of a core principle from safety critical system design, that you cannot provide 100% safety. The best you can do is a combination of probabilistic analysis against known hazards. As a Boeing 777 safety engineer told me, "9 9's of safety, i.e. chance of failure 1/10 ^-9, applied over the expected flying hours of the 777 fleet, still means a 50-50 chance of an aircraft falling out of the sky." That kind of reasoning also applies to the current Japanese nuke plant failure...
Well, Macs also work quite well for my mother and my brother, neither of whom have any prior computing experience. My mother is definitely of the "turn it on, check her email, check a few websites, turn it off" variety. My brother (carpenter by trade) has become more interested in the technology and is doing a lot more with system configuration including WiFI set up, etc.
I wonder how YOU justify the "when it clearly isn't" remark.
I started using Macs in '84 or '85 and bought an SE in '86, with continuous ownership since then.
Short answer, yes. When I'm working on software/systems architecture standards, etc, there is a disproportionate number of Macs around the room. The value of the Mac as a platform is that it can be simple, but that it also has the full power of Unix underneath. That makes the platform appealing to both those who don't want to have to mess with their computers (like my mother) and to those of us who routinely use "su" and other such facilities. A lot of what I know about working on Unix machines fully transfers over to the Mac.
Making a machine easy to use is not necessarily correlated with ignorant users. A strong platform should support users at all levels.
Find out what jurisdiction awarded/oversees the Mediacom franchise and start with them. For what it's worth, Virginia's State Corporations Commission has been very responsive to my complaint about Verizon service.
Someone please mod as troll.