What's your definition of use? You are assuming most mac users care about the BSD subsystem.
Most Mac users can't spell BSD subsystem, let alone know what it does and how to use it. The parent poster is right -- most Mac users don't know beyond what they can easily point and click.
I've worked in advertising now for 11 years and at an Mac-dominated university 5 years prior to that, and Mac users are often (NOT always) the least-technological people, which means they are focused on the job and not the technology. Unfortunately, it's a tool, like anything else, and you need to know how it *works* to get the most out of it. They aren't like that, so they're not interested in learning, which leaves many of them with $4k typewriters.
OS X is both a step forward for the clueless and a step back; it's possible to do a lot of things with it, but it's also possible to get far more lost than OS 9 would have let you.
I don't know what your IT rant is about, or how that follows -- we buy plenty of expensive Macs for a group of people that are predisposed to not understanding technology.
My experience with RAID1 doesn't usually show much speed advantage. I haven't seen a RAID controller from HP (Netraid 3si line to current HPaq server line) make concurrent reads any faster, or utilize both spindles to speed up single reads. I just get a lot of activity on one spindle.
I was a big RedHat/Linux user until about 5 or so years ago. I got sick of:
* The constantly changing startup environment and filesystem layout. I started typing "evolving", but that implies it was small changes for the better, not wholesale changes which weren't always for the worse.
* Kernel upgrades became a big nuisance, requiring me to track down a whole bunch of userland applications that needed updating for the kernel. to be usable (psutils, for one). Why the kernel and key kernel applications aren't packaged together is beyond me.
* The installer became more and more piggish, adding X11 elements even when I specifically told it not to. The portions were hard to remove, since they almost always were snared in RPM dependencies.
* RPM itself wasn't bad, but what DID drive me nuts about binary packages was the total absence of build documentation. So many UNIX applications have significant build-time options which are never documented in RPM. SRPM helped, but it was still an annoyance.
FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes. The entire system is rebuildable from source, applications are transparently and easily buildable from source thanks to ports.
FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.
My guess is that they'd make the outer armor thick enough to stop standard infantry calibers, up to.30 cal or so (light machine gun). 12.7mm/.50 cal might cause problems, but so can depleted uranium (valuable for its ultra dense mass, not the residual radioactivity, which is actually a crew/environmnetal liability) and some of the ultravelocity armor-piercing.30 cal sabots they put in.50 cal rounds.
But remember, they want to keep RPGs from immediately destroying or disabling _light_ armored vehicles; either protecting them enough that they can get out and fight back or keep traveling. RPGs don't cause much or any damage to our heavy battle tanks, and those have long carried reactive devices (usually explosives) for stopping missles and rockets.
Secure, _light_ armored vehicles are the real goal here. Light vehicles cost less (more vehicles and/or guns), use less fuel (less support drag, tactical advantage), are usually easier to drive (less training, better force utilization) and easier to maintain. With vehicles like these you can cover more territory with fewer troops. Bigger empire, smaller budget.
It's kind of what we have to look forward to for military conflicts -- long-lasting, low-grade, hostile civilian population, ugh.
Wasn't Washington, DC also the city where crime was so bad that the mayor wanted to request calling out the National Guard to patrol the streets?
DC is such a fucked up place from a governance perspective, anyway, that's it's hard to use as an example of much of anything. It's semi-autonomous, has a shitload of Federal property and no good elected representation in the Federal government. It's local government varies from ineffective to downright corrupt.
I also think it's handcuffed by its dependence on Federal money. The Feds see the corruption, waste, mismanagement and then refuse to give them more money. I'm sure there's more than a little crypto-racism involved, given DC's large minority population.
At least at the state level. Wasn't it Indiana that had offshored a computer system/call center associated with the unemployed?
Also, state governments often LIKE to outsource stuff to the private sector. The bureaucracy associated with a state run project is huge -- everything from labor rules to material acquisition, and with more states needing to do more work with less tax revenue, these projects often get pushed into the private sector.
Once in the hands of the private sector, there's often multiple layers of subcontracting that can involve offshoring. Somtimes it just seems like a giant shell game -- local business (with figurehead female minority ownership for easy contract grabs), pitches for state contract and then just subcontracts all the work out, skimming profits off the top and not really doing any work.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if some consultancies have won business by equating offshoring with minority hiring, which should REALLY piss off the people the minority hiring laws were supposed to help.
I use the mouse wheel to change weapons in combat games like MOHAA and BF1942, and the wheel is starting to go south, resulting in unrequested weapons changes that almost always lead to my death.
Personally, I just wire VOIP to a cordless phone, then let the phone handle the wireless part.
I think what you're saying is: use a traditional cordless phone and terminate its POTS end into VoIP. This makes tons of sense, and I've always assumed that using VoIP over 802.11 in more than a home setting was too power-hungry and too many protocol layers to be efficient.
It's becoming clear that spam isn't just low-rent MLMers using disposable AOL accounts to sell their crap, spam is about organized crime and the tool we need to use against it are the RICO laws designed to fight organized crime.
First of all, start with the assumption that most spamvertized businesses are either outright frauds or otherwise participating in something illegal (ie, controlled substances without a legitimate prescription). I don't think that most people would challenge this hypothesis.
Since the primary economic activity and the secondary activity (spamming) is illegal, we can then presume that the entire enterprise represents racketeering, and anyone knowingly participating in it is also guilty of racketeering. It's viral, like the GPL.;-)
My guess is that the spamvertised businesses and the spammers have ties with legitimate businesses (banks or ISPs), some of whom are aware of their activity and go along with it either for personal or corporate profit.
If a big enough operation could be captured under a single RICO net, get sucessfully prosecuted and do hard time it could have excellent benefits in controlling spam. The negative PR that would affect otherwise legitimate businesses (banks, ISPs) might make them far more careful who they do business with, rejecting existing spammers and spamvertised businesses, and I have a hard time believing that spamming and running a spamvertised business is something you can do without ties to the real world. Spammers and spamvertised businesses may just decide that facing federal prosecution and working much harder for resources isn't worth the risk, especially if it means criminal penalties ending in a trip to a PMITA prison.
In at least as good a sonic quality as 128kbps MP3?
The one thing I'd really love with my iPod would be a bluetooth remote AND bluetooth headphones. The iPod could stay in whatever inside pocket I put it in, and I wouldn't have to worry about headphone cords or remote cords.
It can't be as good as a DVD. The encoding process for DVDs is very sophisticated and the codecs are tweaked for the movie in question and often for specific scenes within a movie to obtain the proximate 5Mb/s throughput. Think hand-tuned, multi-pass encoding.
I find many DVD titles viewed via component connectors to be of superior image quality to many of the high def channels I have on my 42" Sony Grand Wega.
I've also got a Panasonic DMR-E80 DVD recorder, and even the highest quality recording (XP, ~10Mbit/sec) can't hold a candle to what a studio DVD provides for image quality -- that's the limitation of single-pass general purpose encoding.
It's really hard to see even multi-pass transcodes through a general-purpose MPEG4 being better than DVD; close, maybe, but only if you start with DVD quality encodes to begin with.
I keep wondering how long it will be until we have the completely formed "perfect enemy" -- that combination of totalitarianism and corporatism all rolled together.
..from Windows XP. I need a new computer (5 year old dual PIII box finally showing its age), and I can't decide if I want the cheapness of a new motherboard/CPU combo, or the ease of use of OS X for video editing.
Pre-civil rights, the people you consider to be culutral conservatives (middle-to-lower class, predominantely Southern and Western religious whites) were predmoninately Democrats based on their economic and labor affiliiation.
The Democrats association with the civil rights movement and forced intgeration created the movement that Nixonites called the "silent majority" and enabled the Republican party to soften its image as the pro-business party and embrace a "traditional values" platform, and leaving us with the Republican party we have today.
I read someplace that the difference between libertarians and Republicans is that the libertarians are too poor and slovenly to get into the country club.
I'm sure there's an equivilent for Democrats and socialists.
I've always wondered what the Nazis would have accomplished if Hitler and his henchmen had been slightly more practical minded and had:
(1) Let the generals run the combat. AFAIK there were several opportunities to either retreat and regroup or to give up ground to assist other units that could have actually won the Eastern Front.
(2) Made the Final Solution a post-war ambition. There were a lot of resources wasted on the Death Camps and other essentially political/sociological obsessions. Not only did this limit Nazi Germany's resources, but it limited their access to a large segment of educated people.
There's probably a mildly entertaining alt-history story about a Nazi government that decides to pursue its racial ambitions after it conquers Russia and England and so succeeds due to the reallocation of resources.
I thought it was a real-time thing, where the account creation bots passed the image that loaded during the signup process to a porn site and the images were decoded by a real person, and the result passed back to the bot who then signed up for the account.
To avoid the timing problems with porn signons needing to happen concurrent with account signups, the account generation process was actually initiated by a porn signon. It limits your account generation ability, but only to the extent that you have porn traffic.
Did I just imagine this, or does it work that way?
Yes, clients love it when you've been doing something for them(even if not in the contrat) and then take it away. Great customer service you got there. People who deal with clients do all kinds of thing that aren't in the contract to keep the client happy. If I was doing business with someone and they sudddenly stopped giving my the service I have come to expect, I would spend my money elsewhere.
"The client..." is typically a knee-jerk reaction by the marketing droids whenever they want something they can't otherwise get. In this case, they're too lazy^H^H^H^Hbusy to manage their business and they're afraid if they delete *anything* the client will ask for it and they'll have to do more work.
In reality, the client seldom asks for old email generally or some old email specifically -- since THEY typically have a more reasonable retention policy and assume that we do too.
Just burn them to glass, and warehouse them. [...]
.PST files (at least in Outlook 2K) aren't openable off of optical media, as Outlook wants R/W access to the file..PST files are also limited to sizes less than 2GB in our experience, and we've had users with as many as 3.PST archive files. Archiving also just moves the problem from the email server to a file server or to the help desk (who will lose it in a machine swap) if it sits on a hard disk.
Part of the issue is the damn format emails are kept in[...]
I'd say it's almost all of the problem. The problem is that in an organization and with any substantial quantity of email, you need to have it stored in a DB. Plain text is nice for a single, savvy user, but even IMAP and Pine can choke on huge mbox-format files. If MSFT put their SQL2000 engine in Exchange, it might solve a lot of problems for both archiving and for better long-term retention.
OMFG, we nearly had a lynch mob attack us when we began deleting mail older than *two years* -- it eventually took the intervention of the CFO and a faked mail system "crash" to make 2-year max retention work, and even then there are people still pissed about it, or who claim that "the client" requires them to retain all correspondence (nope, sorry, we checked the contract).
90 days seems both unrealistic to implement and way too much reliance on.PST files, which often max out at 2 gig and can get corrupted way too easily, not to mention being fdisked into eternity by clueless helpdesk people.
I've used a couple of the Netgear FVS318 firewall/vpn boxes; they're cheap, sturdily constructed, easy to configure and pretty reliable, but I'm always a little hinky about the unconfigurable software options as much as I am about the backdoors.
My FVS318 does NTP to a hard-coded destination, and there's no way to turn this off or change the NTP sync server that I've found. I've always kind of wondered what else it does or was capable of doing.
I'm not even sure it's a good self-serving decision, let alone a good business decision.
A good business decision makes you more money and it improves other aspects of your business, including your standing in the community.
I don't see ignoring the persisting problems of unpatched OS installations as reflecting a particularly community-oriented attitude on Microsoft's part.
Allowing pirated copies to take SP2 would say "We ackknowledge our products are widespread and problems with them create problems for the internet community as a whole. We don't thing that Microsoft is specifically responsible for pirated copies of our product, but in the spirit of cleaning up security problems as a top priority, we've made this patch universal."
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What's your definition of use? You are assuming most mac users care about the BSD subsystem.
Most Mac users can't spell BSD subsystem, let alone know what it does and how to use it. The parent poster is right -- most Mac users don't know beyond what they can easily point and click.
I've worked in advertising now for 11 years and at an Mac-dominated university 5 years prior to that, and Mac users are often (NOT always) the least-technological people, which means they are focused on the job and not the technology. Unfortunately, it's a tool, like anything else, and you need to know how it *works* to get the most out of it. They aren't like that, so they're not interested in learning, which leaves many of them with $4k typewriters.
OS X is both a step forward for the clueless and a step back; it's possible to do a lot of things with it, but it's also possible to get far more lost than OS 9 would have let you.
I don't know what your IT rant is about, or how that follows -- we buy plenty of expensive Macs for a group of people that are predisposed to not understanding technology.
My experience with RAID1 doesn't usually show much speed advantage. I haven't seen a RAID controller from HP (Netraid 3si line to current HPaq server line) make concurrent reads any faster, or utilize both spindles to speed up single reads. I just get a lot of activity on one spindle.
I was a big RedHat/Linux user until about 5 or so years ago. I got sick of:
* The constantly changing startup environment and filesystem layout. I started typing "evolving", but that implies it was small changes for the better, not wholesale changes which weren't always for the worse.
* Kernel upgrades became a big nuisance, requiring me to track down a whole bunch of userland applications that needed updating for the kernel. to be usable (psutils, for one). Why the kernel and key kernel applications aren't packaged together is beyond me.
* The installer became more and more piggish, adding X11 elements even when I specifically told it not to. The portions were hard to remove, since they almost always were snared in RPM dependencies.
* RPM itself wasn't bad, but what DID drive me nuts about binary packages was the total absence of build documentation. So many UNIX applications have significant build-time options which are never documented in RPM. SRPM helped, but it was still an annoyance.
FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes. The entire system is rebuildable from source, applications are transparently and easily buildable from source thanks to ports.
FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.
My guess is that they'd make the outer armor thick enough to stop standard infantry calibers, up to .30 cal or so (light machine gun). 12.7mm/.50 cal might cause problems, but so can depleted uranium (valuable for its ultra dense mass, not the residual radioactivity, which is actually a crew/environmnetal liability) and some of the ultravelocity armor-piercing .30 cal sabots they put in .50 cal rounds.
But remember, they want to keep RPGs from immediately destroying or disabling _light_ armored vehicles; either protecting them enough that they can get out and fight back or keep traveling. RPGs don't cause much or any damage to our heavy battle tanks, and those have long carried reactive devices (usually explosives) for stopping missles and rockets.
Secure, _light_ armored vehicles are the real goal here. Light vehicles cost less (more vehicles and/or guns), use less fuel (less support drag, tactical advantage), are usually easier to drive (less training, better force utilization) and easier to maintain. With vehicles like these you can cover more territory with fewer troops. Bigger empire, smaller budget.
It's kind of what we have to look forward to for military conflicts -- long-lasting, low-grade, hostile civilian population, ugh.
Wasn't Washington, DC also the city where crime was so bad that the mayor wanted to request calling out the National Guard to patrol the streets?
DC is such a fucked up place from a governance perspective, anyway, that's it's hard to use as an example of much of anything. It's semi-autonomous, has a shitload of Federal property and no good elected representation in the Federal government. It's local government varies from ineffective to downright corrupt.
I also think it's handcuffed by its dependence on Federal money. The Feds see the corruption, waste, mismanagement and then refuse to give them more money. I'm sure there's more than a little crypto-racism involved, given DC's large minority population.
At least at the state level. Wasn't it Indiana that had offshored a computer system/call center associated with the unemployed?
Also, state governments often LIKE to outsource stuff to the private sector. The bureaucracy associated with a state run project is huge -- everything from labor rules to material acquisition, and with more states needing to do more work with less tax revenue, these projects often get pushed into the private sector.
Once in the hands of the private sector, there's often multiple layers of subcontracting that can involve offshoring. Somtimes it just seems like a giant shell game -- local business (with figurehead female minority ownership for easy contract grabs), pitches for state contract and then just subcontracts all the work out, skimming profits off the top and not really doing any work.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if some consultancies have won business by equating offshoring with minority hiring, which should REALLY piss off the people the minority hiring laws were supposed to help.
a couple of interesting blogs
You mean there are a couple of interesting blogs?
I use the mouse wheel to change weapons in combat games like MOHAA and BF1942, and the wheel is starting to go south, resulting in unrequested weapons changes that almost always lead to my death.
Personally, I just wire VOIP to a cordless phone, then let the phone handle the wireless part.
I think what you're saying is: use a traditional cordless phone and terminate its POTS end into VoIP. This makes tons of sense, and I've always assumed that using VoIP over 802.11 in more than a home setting was too power-hungry and too many protocol layers to be efficient.
It's becoming clear that spam isn't just low-rent MLMers using disposable AOL accounts to sell their crap, spam is about organized crime and the tool we need to use against it are the RICO laws designed to fight organized crime.
;-)
First of all, start with the assumption that most spamvertized businesses are either outright frauds or otherwise participating in something illegal (ie, controlled substances without a legitimate prescription). I don't think that most people would challenge this hypothesis.
Since the primary economic activity and the secondary activity (spamming) is illegal, we can then presume that the entire enterprise represents racketeering, and anyone knowingly participating in it is also guilty of racketeering. It's viral, like the GPL.
My guess is that the spamvertised businesses and the spammers have ties with legitimate businesses (banks or ISPs), some of whom are aware of their activity and go along with it either for personal or corporate profit.
If a big enough operation could be captured under a single RICO net, get sucessfully prosecuted and do hard time it could have excellent benefits in controlling spam. The negative PR that would affect otherwise legitimate businesses (banks, ISPs) might make them far more careful who they do business with, rejecting existing spammers and spamvertised businesses, and I have a hard time believing that spamming and running a spamvertised business is something you can do without ties to the real world. Spammers and spamvertised businesses may just decide that facing federal prosecution and working much harder for resources isn't worth the risk, especially if it means criminal penalties ending in a trip to a PMITA prison.
In at least as good a sonic quality as 128kbps MP3?
The one thing I'd really love with my iPod would be a bluetooth remote AND bluetooth headphones. The iPod could stay in whatever inside pocket I put it in, and I wouldn't have to worry about headphone cords or remote cords.
Trucks need torque for pulling loads, racecars need horsepower for going fast.
Once the truck gets up to speed, it takes a lot less horsepower than you might think to keep it at 65.
It can't be as good as a DVD. The encoding process for DVDs is very sophisticated and the codecs are tweaked for the movie in question and often for specific scenes within a movie to obtain the proximate 5Mb/s throughput. Think hand-tuned, multi-pass encoding.
I find many DVD titles viewed via component connectors to be of superior image quality to many of the high def channels I have on my 42" Sony Grand Wega.
I've also got a Panasonic DMR-E80 DVD recorder, and even the highest quality recording (XP, ~10Mbit/sec) can't hold a candle to what a studio DVD provides for image quality -- that's the limitation of single-pass general purpose encoding.
It's really hard to see even multi-pass transcodes through a general-purpose MPEG4 being better than DVD; close, maybe, but only if you start with DVD quality encodes to begin with.
I keep wondering how long it will be until we have the completely formed "perfect enemy" -- that combination of totalitarianism and corporatism all rolled together.
..from Windows XP. I need a new computer (5 year old dual PIII box finally showing its age), and I can't decide if I want the cheapness of a new motherboard/CPU combo, or the ease of use of OS X for video editing.
But on a Mac, I'd miss DVDshrink.
Pre-civil rights, the people you consider to be culutral conservatives (middle-to-lower class, predominantely Southern and Western religious whites) were predmoninately Democrats based on their economic and labor affiliiation.
The Democrats association with the civil rights movement and forced intgeration created the movement that Nixonites called the "silent majority" and enabled the Republican party to soften its image as the pro-business party and embrace a "traditional values" platform, and leaving us with the Republican party we have today.
I read someplace that the difference between libertarians and Republicans is that the libertarians are too poor and slovenly to get into the country club.
I'm sure there's an equivilent for Democrats and socialists.
I've always wondered what the Nazis would have accomplished if Hitler and his henchmen had been slightly more practical minded and had:
(1) Let the generals run the combat. AFAIK there were several opportunities to either retreat and regroup or to give up ground to assist other units that could have actually won the Eastern Front.
(2) Made the Final Solution a post-war ambition. There were a lot of resources wasted on the Death Camps and other essentially political/sociological obsessions. Not only did this limit Nazi Germany's resources, but it limited their access to a large segment of educated people.
There's probably a mildly entertaining alt-history story about a Nazi government that decides to pursue its racial ambitions after it conquers Russia and England and so succeeds due to the reallocation of resources.
I thought it was a real-time thing, where the account creation bots passed the image that loaded during the signup process to a porn site and the images were decoded by a real person, and the result passed back to the bot who then signed up for the account.
To avoid the timing problems with porn signons needing to happen concurrent with account signups, the account generation process was actually initiated by a porn signon. It limits your account generation ability, but only to the extent that you have porn traffic.
Did I just imagine this, or does it work that way?
Does that mean you're trained not to play "Wild Thing" or "Mony Mony" more than once per wedding?
Yes, clients love it when you've been doing something for them(even if not in the contrat) and then take it away. Great customer service you got there. People who deal with clients do all kinds of thing that aren't in the contract to keep the client happy. If I was doing business with someone and they sudddenly stopped giving my the service I have come to expect, I would spend my money elsewhere.
.PST files (at least in Outlook 2K) aren't openable off of optical media, as Outlook wants R/W access to the file. .PST files are also limited to sizes less than 2GB in our experience, and we've had users with as many as 3 .PST archive files. Archiving also just moves the problem from the email server to a file server or to the help desk (who will lose it in a machine swap) if it sits on a hard disk.
"The client..." is typically a knee-jerk reaction by the marketing droids whenever they want something they can't otherwise get. In this case, they're too lazy^H^H^H^Hbusy to manage their business and they're afraid if they delete *anything* the client will ask for it and they'll have to do more work.
In reality, the client seldom asks for old email generally or some old email specifically -- since THEY typically have a more reasonable retention policy and assume that we do too.
Just burn them to glass, and warehouse them. [...]
Part of the issue is the damn format emails are kept in[...]
I'd say it's almost all of the problem. The problem is that in an organization and with any substantial quantity of email, you need to have it stored in a DB. Plain text is nice for a single, savvy user, but even IMAP and Pine can choke on huge mbox-format files. If MSFT put their SQL2000 engine in Exchange, it might solve a lot of problems for both archiving and for better long-term retention.
OMFG, we nearly had a lynch mob attack us when we began deleting mail older than *two years* -- it eventually took the intervention of the CFO and a faked mail system "crash" to make 2-year max retention work, and even then there are people still pissed about it, or who claim that "the client" requires them to retain all correspondence (nope, sorry, we checked the contract).
.PST files, which often max out at 2 gig and can get corrupted way too easily, not to mention being fdisked into eternity by clueless helpdesk people.
90 days seems both unrealistic to implement and way too much reliance on
It's ridiculous what it costs, especially when you consider the demands on the network relative to a voice call are near zero.
I've used a couple of the Netgear FVS318 firewall/vpn boxes; they're cheap, sturdily constructed, easy to configure and pretty reliable, but I'm always a little hinky about the unconfigurable software options as much as I am about the backdoors.
My FVS318 does NTP to a hard-coded destination, and there's no way to turn this off or change the NTP sync server that I've found. I've always kind of wondered what else it does or was capable of doing.
I'm not even sure it's a good self-serving decision, let alone a good business decision.
A good business decision makes you more money and it improves other aspects of your business, including your standing in the community.
I don't see ignoring the persisting problems of unpatched OS installations as reflecting a particularly community-oriented attitude on Microsoft's part.
Allowing pirated copies to take SP2 would say "We ackknowledge our products are widespread and problems with them create problems for the internet community as a whole. We don't thing that Microsoft is specifically responsible for pirated copies of our product, but in the spirit of cleaning up security problems as a top priority, we've made this patch universal."