I second this. My machine is a 500MHz G4 powerbook and OS X ran OK but slightly clunky when I only had 256Mb RAM, but after I added another 256Mb, it goes like a dream. Memory is cheap so why not?
Bash does not come with OS X. However, as bash is a Gnu product and my favourite shell, I thought, let's be brave and try to install it. We'll see what issues we come up against. Anyway, I did and I had one issue to do with changes to the linker between the 10 and 10.1 build of project builder which I fixed easily. That's when I truely fell in love with OS X. Since then I've installed BerkeleyDB, NEdit, Lesstif, sendmail, fetchmail, Open LDAP and Ghostscript all from source distros with virtually zero problems. I admit I did buy an X Server (Tenon XTools) because the NEdit distro said that was the only X Server it worked with.
In what way is being a computer for people that don't like computers a stigma? A friend of mine attended a Usenix conference in San Diego just before Christmas. He estimated that 30% of attendees had Apple laptops running OS X.
Personnally, I think it's the best PC / operating system combination I have ever used.
Most projects are late by much more than 25%. Somebody did a study on some big defense projects and came up with a figure closer to 135% or possibly even more.
If you want to build an application that the user wants/needs and will use, you need to involve them towards the beginning not the end. The cost of fixing a mistake (in terms of man-time) is dependent on when the mistake is made and when it is discovered i.e. if a mistake is made during requirements definition e.g. a feature left out, it is much cheaper if the problem is found out during review of requirements definition than if it is discovered during the final acceptance testing. Steve McConnell recommends building a user interface prototype which you get approved by the actual users and which then becomes part of the requirements definition.
Fred Brookes said "plan to throw one away." Meaning your first attempt at solving the problem may turn out to be a crock of s**t. Somebody else said "if you plan to throw one away, you'll end up throwing two away."
Re:We Brits aren't all like that.
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
In WW II if the Americans hadn't joined in in Europe, the whole of post war Germany would have been in the communist bloc.
It doesn't matter about the politics of WW1, withhout the US involvement the German 1918 spring offensive may have succeeded and eve if it hadn't, Britain and France would have had nothing left to counter attack with.
The Fw190 was superior to the version of the Spitfire (the Mark V) that was in service at the time it came out, but the "stop gap" version (Mark IX) that was introduced later was better than the Fw190.
I agree with your comments about the Battle of Britain. The British aircraft were the equal to or in the case of the Spitfire slightly superior to the German fighters (actually British bombers of the time were quite poor, but not relevant to the Battle except for the night raid on Berlin that caused the Germans to change tactics). What nearly did for the British was the shortage of experienced aircrew. Also, the British did have more aircraft than the Germans, but from the point of view of the actual Battle of Britain most of the British bombers were irrelevant.
I do apologise, I forgot about that, it would have been after the allies liberated Holland, but Antwerp is still a pretty large target, I would be surprised if they could have hit the docks with any degree of consistency.
As far as I know, neither of the World Wars took place in the US with the exception of Pearl Harbour of course which was more on the edge of the US.
None of the wars you list there can compete for scale against WW 1 and WW2. I think the point is that nuclear weapons have prevented a global conflict and taking the Pakistan / India situation, have they had a war since they became nuclear powers (I honestly don't know), but the current situation is not (yet) a war.
Oh and only the IRA defined their actions against Great Britain as a war, everybody else called them terrorist attrocities committed by murderers.
And don't forget that a fairly large hunk of European industry was not in the hands of Germany (i.e. Great Britain).
But also be aware that the strategic bombing of Germany had almost no effect on their industrial output. They didn't actually start experiencing shortages of material until after allied forces were already in Germany.
No, the German A4 / V2 rocket and V1 missile were far too inaccurate to hit industrial targets. A target the size of London was about as close as they could get. In fact London was the only thing they ever targetted with these weapons.
Everything you say is true at one point or another during the war, but false if you take into account the whole six years.
1. Radar. It is true that the German radar hardware was superior to allied hardware at first. However, the British early warning system was vastly superior to the German system due mainly to the way the information was collated and presented to the fighter controllers and the way the fighter control system was organised. Later on in the war, the allies took a technical lead (e.g. the Germans only got the cavity magnetron used for generating high power short wave radar "beams" from inspecting crashed allied bombers).
2. Aeroplanes - the Me262 was technically the best fighter of the war, but it didn't appear until 1944 by which time the war was almost over. Earlier on, plane for plane, the allies planes were usually at least equal to or marginally superior to the Germans planes.
3. Tanks - well no, you've got me there. Allied tanks with the exception of the Russian T72 were incredibly poor compared with the German tanks. We just had lots of then
In my experience, almost everybody runs NT/2000 as an admin user. I think this is because of its heritage as a signle user desktop system. There are too many simple things that users have always been able to do on Windows (e.g. change the system time) which you can't do without admin privilege, and it's also quite difficult to temporarily change your id to Administrator e.g. with Unix you just open a shell and su or just sudo if it's installed, with NT you have to log off and log on as admin and then log off and log on again as yourself.
Sendmail is *not* dead. Unlike some of your alternatives (that begin with q) , it is still a living project undergoing new releases every few months.
Anything that needs to open a privileged port i.e. one with a number 1024 needs to run as root. This includes your smtp server, your ftp server, your ssh server, your web server. Virtually all of the standard TCP services need to run as root at least to start with. Most of them (including sendmail) drop the root privilege as soon as they have grabbed the socket.
I would say that if you have to run as root now 100% of the time it's Unix's poor security model (i.e. root cannot assign ownership of TCP ports to specific trusted users).
Re:Not via email you dont you wascally wabbit
on
Linux Virus Alert
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· Score: 1
There are plenty of executable bits and pieces on a Linux box that are (or may be modifiabe by a normal user) e.g. shell scripts. A virus that looks for.profile in the user's home directory and then inserts the line "rm -rf ~/" could do a lot of damage.
And before you say "but only to the user's files" they are the important files that probably haven't been backed up since day one and cannot be restored by reinstalling the operating system.
Re:We Brits aren't all like that.
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
The other thing of course is that it is inaccurate to say we saved the Europeans from Hitler or Kaiser Wilhelm. In neither case would we have won if the Americans hadn't joined in on our side.
The other problem with those tests is that to properly test some of them needs quite a long time. e.g. the convergence test can only be done by observing two economic cycles in Britain and Europe. This could take 10 years bearing in mind we are definitely not converged at the moment.
You say the Euro is working flawlessly. Ha, ha! The Euro interest rate is too high for your country where you have pretty bad unemployment now (bad for Germany that is, only moderately bad by British historical standards) and it's far too low for Ireland where their inflation rate is too high.
How anybody thought they could link economies as different as Greece and Sweden with one currency is beyond me and the fact that it has been made to work (sort of) is a minor miracle. Now that it's here I think Britain will have to go in eventually, and it will benefit both Britain and the Eurozone, but I wish the whole thing had never been started.
PS the high prices have nothing to do with the Euro. With the pound so strong, foreign imports should be cheap, so why is Britain the most expensive place in Europe to buy a German car?
I'm British too, and I'd say I'm quite well informed. The problem is that both sides put out their vision of the consequences of being in the Euro, but most people (including me) do not know which consequences are the ones that will come true.
Re:Its recession if they don't join
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
The UK is a net importer because it's cheaper to buy stuff from abroad than to make it here. If the pound was weaker, it might be cheaper to make it here.
The manufacturing sector of our economy has been in recession for about the same amount of time that the pound has been strong against the Euro. That might be just a coincidence of course...
The real reason is that the British are distrustful of anything foreign. Most of our history involves beating the crap out of these very same people who we would be sharing our currency with.
There is a strong emotional attachment to the Pound Sterling, it's one of the things that makes a country feel like home. You know you're back from a trip abroad because you can read the signs in the airport and you can tell at a glance if the taxi driver gave you the right change.
As regards the monarchy, it doesn't need abolishing because it has no effect on political life in Great Britain. It's just there to help us fleece American tourists and provide our cheaper newspapers with something to write about.
Re:Macedonia & Kosovo are using the Euro too
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
Well it changes everything for the ones that prefer Deutschemarks. They'll have to change them all to Euros before the end of February.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this. My machine is a 500MHz G4 powerbook and OS X ran OK but slightly clunky when I only had 256Mb RAM, but after I added another 256Mb, it goes like a dream. Memory is cheap so why not?
look Ma, a bash prompt
Bash does not come with OS X. However, as bash is a Gnu product and my favourite shell, I thought, let's be brave and try to install it. We'll see what issues we come up against. Anyway, I did and I had one issue to do with changes to the linker between the 10 and 10.1 build of project builder which I fixed easily. That's when I truely fell in love with OS X. Since then I've installed BerkeleyDB, NEdit, Lesstif, sendmail, fetchmail, Open LDAP and Ghostscript all from source distros with virtually zero problems. I admit I did buy an X Server (Tenon XTools) because the NEdit distro said that was the only X Server it worked with.
I love this operating system.
I'm glad you wrote that response and made me go back and *read* the post before flaming the guy.
In what way is being a computer for people that don't like computers a stigma? A friend of mine attended a Usenix conference in San Diego just before Christmas. He estimated that 30% of attendees had Apple laptops running OS X.
Personnally, I think it's the best PC / operating system combination I have ever used.
Most projects are late by much more than 25%. Somebody did a study on some big defense projects and came up with a figure closer to 135% or possibly even more.
If you want to build an application that the user wants/needs and will use, you need to involve them towards the beginning not the end. The cost of fixing a mistake (in terms of man-time) is dependent on when the mistake is made and when it is discovered i.e. if a mistake is made during requirements definition e.g. a feature left out, it is much cheaper if the problem is found out during review of requirements definition than if it is discovered during the final acceptance testing. Steve McConnell recommends building a user interface prototype which you get approved by the actual users and which then becomes part of the requirements definition.
Fred Brookes said "plan to throw one away." Meaning your first attempt at solving the problem may turn out to be a crock of s**t. Somebody else said "if you plan to throw one away, you'll end up throwing two away."
In WW II if the Americans hadn't joined in in Europe, the whole of post war Germany would have been in the communist bloc.
It doesn't matter about the politics of WW1, withhout the US involvement the German 1918 spring offensive may have succeeded and eve if it hadn't, Britain and France would have had nothing left to counter attack with.
Even more complicated than that:
The Fw190 was superior to the version of the Spitfire (the Mark V) that was in service at the time it came out, but the "stop gap" version (Mark IX) that was introduced later was better than the Fw190.
I agree with your comments about the Battle of Britain. The British aircraft were the equal to or in the case of the Spitfire slightly superior to the German fighters (actually British bombers of the time were quite poor, but not relevant to the Battle except for the night raid on Berlin that caused the Germans to change tactics). What nearly did for the British was the shortage of experienced aircrew. Also, the British did have more aircraft than the Germans, but from the point of view of the actual Battle of Britain most of the British bombers were irrelevant.
I do apologise, I forgot about that, it would have been after the allies liberated Holland, but Antwerp is still a pretty large target, I would be surprised if they could have hit the docks with any degree of consistency.
As far as I know, neither of the World Wars took place in the US with the exception of Pearl Harbour of course which was more on the edge of the US.
None of the wars you list there can compete for scale against WW 1 and WW2. I think the point is that nuclear weapons have prevented a global conflict and taking the Pakistan / India situation, have they had a war since they became nuclear powers (I honestly don't know), but the current situation is not (yet) a war.
Oh and only the IRA defined their actions against Great Britain as a war, everybody else called them terrorist attrocities committed by murderers.
And don't forget that a fairly large hunk of European industry was not in the hands of Germany (i.e. Great Britain).
But also be aware that the strategic bombing of Germany had almost no effect on their industrial output. They didn't actually start experiencing shortages of material until after allied forces were already in Germany.
No, the German A4 / V2 rocket and V1 missile were far too inaccurate to hit industrial targets. A target the size of London was about as close as they could get. In fact London was the only thing they ever targetted with these weapons.
Everything you say is true at one point or another during the war, but false if you take into account the whole six years.
1. Radar. It is true that the German radar hardware was superior to allied hardware at first. However, the British early warning system was vastly superior to the German system due mainly to the way the information was collated and presented to the fighter controllers and the way the fighter control system was organised. Later on in the war, the allies took a technical lead (e.g. the Germans only got the cavity magnetron used for generating high power short wave radar "beams" from inspecting crashed allied bombers).
2. Aeroplanes - the Me262 was technically the best fighter of the war, but it didn't appear until 1944 by which time the war was almost over. Earlier on, plane for plane, the allies planes were usually at least equal to or marginally superior to the Germans planes.
3. Tanks - well no, you've got me there. Allied tanks with the exception of the Russian T72 were incredibly poor compared with the German tanks. We just had lots of then
In my experience, almost everybody runs NT/2000 as an admin user. I think this is because of its heritage as a signle user desktop system. There are too many simple things that users have always been able to do on Windows (e.g. change the system time) which you can't do without admin privilege, and it's also quite difficult to temporarily change your id to Administrator e.g. with Unix you just open a shell and su or just sudo if it's installed, with NT you have to log off and log on as admin and then log off and log on again as yourself.
Hey! even POT mangles < signs. Write out 1,000 times: I must remember to preview, I must remember....
Anyway that should read "with a number *less than* 1024"
Sendmail is *not* dead. Unlike some of your alternatives (that begin with q) , it is still a living project undergoing new releases every few months.
Anything that needs to open a privileged port i.e. one with a number 1024 needs to run as root. This includes your smtp server, your ftp server, your ssh server, your web server. Virtually all of the standard TCP services need to run as root at least to start with. Most of them (including sendmail) drop the root privilege as soon as they have grabbed the socket.
I would say that if you have to run as root now 100% of the time it's Unix's poor security model (i.e. root cannot assign ownership of TCP ports to specific trusted users).
There are plenty of executable bits and pieces on a Linux box that are (or may be modifiabe by a normal user) e.g. shell scripts. A virus that looks for .profile in the user's home directory and then inserts the line "rm -rf ~/" could do a lot of damage.
And before you say "but only to the user's files" they are the important files that probably haven't been backed up since day one and cannot be restored by reinstalling the operating system.
The other thing of course is that it is inaccurate to say we saved the Europeans from Hitler or Kaiser Wilhelm. In neither case would we have won if the Americans hadn't joined in on our side.
California is the richest state by far. I think the US (obviously), Germany and Japan are the only countries with bigger economies.
The other problem with those tests is that to properly test some of them needs quite a long time. e.g. the convergence test can only be done by observing two economic cycles in Britain and Europe. This could take 10 years bearing in mind we are definitely not converged at the moment.
You say the Euro is working flawlessly. Ha, ha! The Euro interest rate is too high for your country where you have pretty bad unemployment now (bad for Germany that is, only moderately bad by British historical standards) and it's far too low for Ireland where their inflation rate is too high.
How anybody thought they could link economies as different as Greece and Sweden with one currency is beyond me and the fact that it has been made to work (sort of) is a minor miracle. Now that it's here I think Britain will have to go in eventually, and it will benefit both Britain and the Eurozone, but I wish the whole thing had never been started.
PS the high prices have nothing to do with the Euro. With the pound so strong, foreign imports should be cheap, so why is Britain the most expensive place in Europe to buy a German car?
I'm British too, and I'd say I'm quite well informed. The problem is that both sides put out their vision of the consequences of being in the Euro, but most people (including me) do not know which consequences are the ones that will come true.
The UK is a net importer because it's cheaper to buy stuff from abroad than to make it here. If the pound was weaker, it might be cheaper to make it here.
The manufacturing sector of our economy has been in recession for about the same amount of time that the pound has been strong against the Euro. That might be just a coincidence of course...
The real reason is that the British are distrustful of anything foreign. Most of our history involves beating the crap out of these very same people who we would be sharing our currency with.
There is a strong emotional attachment to the Pound Sterling, it's one of the things that makes a country feel like home. You know you're back from a trip abroad because you can read the signs in the airport and you can tell at a glance if the taxi driver gave you the right change.
As regards the monarchy, it doesn't need abolishing because it has no effect on political life in Great Britain. It's just there to help us fleece American tourists and provide our cheaper newspapers with something to write about.
Well it changes everything for the ones that prefer Deutschemarks. They'll have to change them all to Euros before the end of February.