While I have to admit that I still lovingly croon to my DC on occasion as I play games on it, I have never really invested much time in using it as a true thin workstation. I love having my MP3's on a disk with a sweet little self-booting player app., but without throwing $100-$150 to the wind in order to get a BBA, it's not a real solution for me. I have booted linux and NetBSD from my little white thinking cube of game-dom, but I can't access the world beyond the box without that 'rare-as-hens-teeth' 10bT module.
However, I will say that I view it as a 'Good Thing'{tm} that we're seeing a powerful console unit with a pretty good collection of games coming on the market at a bargain-basement price, which lets people play around with both an embeded system and a fairly powerfull architecture in a hobbyist environment. I do not however believe that anyone will be able to provide a killer-app (besides Soul caliber:) that will make people run out and snatch these up and/or dust them off and use them on a day-to-day basis. Without a cheap ethernet connection the entry-level threshold is too low to make it feisable.
I do hold out faith that the PS2 will fill this role however. Sony has already produced a Linux Dev-Kit (admittedly for the JPN market only) and with a much broader market penetration and a simple 10/100bT & hard-drive solution on the horizon for the US market, I'm very hopefull that by this time next year, I'll have a little black PS2 boxen in my TV center that gives me access to my other boxen, broadband connection, and an assortment of OSS solutions for myself and my less geek-ish friends to use. Does anyone else feel that this may well be what we discover over the next 12-months?
hmmn...
food for thought
Oh, I apparently forgot to mention, when you're feed the lines into the vaccuum, the whole process is much easier if the vaccuum is ON... the system sucks, use this to your advantage.
Having done this once, here are some tips when it comes to the actual installation. However, I provide the following caveats, so take heed:
A) check with your town/city building inspector - you mentioned that you're doing this to help increase the value of the place when you put it on the market. You do not want someone to buy the place, then sue you for doing non-code work in the place when they burn it to the ground. This is a must. I would personally check with the building inspector and make copies of everything he says is applicable. I believed someone mentioned checking out what kind of line you can leave in the ducts as a pull-guide, again, check with the town.
B) The system that I worked on had it's own integrated conductor system that used the flip-open facia plates to close(open?) a low-voltage circuit that triggered the main vaccuum in the basement. Once you've gotten all your guide-lines drawn, you should disconnect everything else electrical from the system. Label all the existing connectors, take it off, box it up, and stick it in the attic. When the Luddites move in in a few years, they may value the CVS more than a house-wide network.
When I helped wire my friends house this way, we took a few lengths of wide cotton sash, and connected them to kite spools. Using them as a primitive chimmney-sweep brushes, we went one port at a time, and fed the rags in, feeding in a few feet of line, and then pulling back in most of it. The doubled-over loose ends along with the plunger action seemed to release a lot of the dust in the narrow ductwork (~2.0" dia.). Check the info on the central vaccuum unit, our's was marked that you should not use it continuosly for more than 20 minutes. Needless to say we took advantage of this to self-medicate ourselves during the scheduled downtime.
We then repeated this for each branch of the system, cleaning out the collection bucket every couple times. Make sure that you get the entire length of the run, a person by the collection bucket will immediately notice the change in tone when the rag stops blocking he duct work, and starts trashing about in the collector.
Once this was all finished, we then repeated the process, only this time, we fed the rags and lines down again, this time, we didnt' pull the rags back out to their starting point, instead, we pulled through enough slack to allow us to anchor the lines from each room outside the can. Label these lines, remove the rag, cut off the line outside the top-side vent, label this end as well, then cut it off. repeat with the next vaccuum connector.
In the end, you'll have a spagetti-farm of labled strings coming out of the collection unit, and your house will be strung like a spider-web in a straw-factory.
(at this point, we confirmed that all the lines were not snagged, then proceeded to unmount the CVS collector, motor, and the transformer for signal lines.)
Now all your hard work has paid off, and you are ready to pull the wires. I would suggest starting top-side, no need to fight gravity on this one. Just connect your wire bundles up to the feed strings (along with a new 'safe-to-put-in-the-walls-sez-the-inspector' pull line) and have the guy downstairs start pulling down fresh coppera along with the new guide line.
As always, go slowly, work with a partner on the other end, and be carefull. Once you've strung the CAT-5 up through the pipe, label and secure the new guide lines, mount you keystone jacks, punch down and test.
As an added benefit, you can now truly say that your home network used to suck, but not any more.
"We are very pleased with the settlement agreement and believe it reflects the validation of Experian's e-mail marketing standards and that we remain at the forefront of consumer privacy and protection,'' said Tom Detmer president and general manager of Experian eMarketing Services. ``This settlement confirms that the privacy practices we have in place are responsible, accountable and in the best interests of the public and the marketplace. We will continue to offer the double opt-in solution for those clients who determine it is the right permissioning practice for their business." well, since we will only be seeing more cases like this in the future as these spam-whores use the courts as a shield to protect themselves from MAPS and other public-service mail filtering tools, what are we going to do from here?
I for one would be quite interested in finding a listing of companies that have fought these charges in court and through miss-representing their datum and hiring bigger and better lawyer-weasels, have made themselves immune from public ban lists. Does anyone know of any existing services like this? I for one would be glad just to have a plain html listing of folks like Experian who have won in the courts to keep them selves off of RBLs and the like. I'd be even more keen on a nice XML page that I can parse with a quick script and have update my mail-server's ban lists. anyone want to make me a very happy admin? c'mon, please?
well, extend the analogy. macious self-replicating computer code is often refered to as a 'Virus' for good reason. I have always based my discussions with non-tech-savvy people on this premise. A virus comes in contact with your machine via e-mail, infected applicaitons, networking exploits (ingestion, tainted food, inhalation, etc...) and may or may not take root in the host (your boxen) based on several arbitary factors (patch-level, ignoring security warnings, timed/stateful infection criteria). If your machine is infected, it becomes a host for these unwanted processes that drain your resources and possible infect other people.
Anti-virus technolgy runs the same way. You can limit your risk of exposure to infections vectors (don't download anything from someone you don't know, "I are sending you for your input"), proper use of updated anti-virus tools, and using antibiotics when you are infected.
While I admit that this is a vast over simplification for adults (and I sure as hell wouldn't want in insult the intelligence of all those parents in Needham, the lawsuits would be ridiculous) you can use the parallels to reduce the distrust and sense of the 'unknown' that most normal (non-geek) folk endure when dealing with these sneaky little buggers.
good luck
I personally would click on enough X10 banners to drive them straight to #1 if I got to smack their booth-weasels with a 2x4(bearing the proper X10 logo) for each click. hey, maybe we can get a double-sided LART for this purpose!
hmmm, e-mail is older than I am (26yrs). and I measure myself through the things I've seen. I remember Ronald Regan as a very young child. I recall my parent's last throes of back-to-the-land/cold-war self-sufficency. I was astounded as the first Space Shuttle launch took us around the earth and flew us back home on wings. I was glued to the TVs when the Challenger exploded. I was there when faxes were pasted hourly on the walls of Boston's china-town as Tienamen square unfolded.
I lost friends in an act of terrorism that the world had never seen before, or even believed possible outside of cheap paperback fiction.
I have done all these things at a distance, I have made friends and effected change on continents that I may never visit.
I have dipped my toes in the greater waters of mankind.
All this in less than 30 years.
How will my children look back when they are my age?
Will they remember a world before the arrival of the meta-verse that allows them to interact around the world, regardless of language, race, time, or class?
Will they look back with sepia-toned memories of the good-old days before corporate structures replaced government?
Might they think of us with scorn, as those who poisoned the earth and water that they inherited?
Or will they think of us as the generation that first tasted this fruit of true communication, and were alternately torn and brought together by it.
pioneers in a digital age where the hot metal was still fluid and a maleable medium, filling gaps and voids in the mold of society.
what will someone say about us in 30 years.
what do we want to leave as our legacy for our children,
food for thought.
This should really be addresses as a wider issue in the Linux community. While we all place great importance on the 'open-source' movement, we also need to ensure that Linux polices it's own code-base and keeps itself in compliance with the GPL, and other license-of-the-week trends.
We must try and validate our work in in the eyes of the corporate (and IP-trigger-happy) environment that we are trying to penetrate if we want to get accepted as a viable option.
hmmm, where will we find this kind of un-attributed code violations next? I sure as hell don't want to have Microsoft breathing down my neck because someone recycled propriatry code and invited the bull into the china shop.
just kidding... I'd suggest doing some hunting online and see what you can dig up with a little work on Google. While I'm sure that those of us here on/. have our technical chops, you really should be looking for a solid educational structure for your course. Good luck, let us know how it turns out
Hey, anyone else remember the DIY hacks that people rigged to attach them to 386's and play 3D-ish PONG, or maybe even do cool UI or Virtual Modeling stuff? I got a wild piece of hardware from that era that no one else seems to have ever heard of, the TransInfinte (a short-lived MIT spin-off that played with these things for a while, long defunct..) "Gold-Brick" attached a Nintendo PowerGlove to the ADB port (Mac-standard I/O interface) and whammo. Getto JPL DataGloves! wOOT!!!. Needless to say I was psyched at the chance to play with it, but through all me digging on the net, I could only find one sorry-ass freeware tool that did the damn ghetto 3-D PONG thing, damnit! Not having any idea how to RE the tech, I gave up and gave the glove back to the person I'd borrowed it from. Anyone want mine? If you want the damn thing, lemme know.
OK, someone just said something that I just have to flame back against... but bear with me.
A lot of PC users snicker at the Mac as a toy and say that it can't do any real work. Well, get off your high horse and face reality... I am a tech-consultant / system technician, and my area of expertise is the Mac, over a decade of use and 6 years of the techical side.
I've worked with just about everything out there, SGI, Alpha, Data General, *nix, Linux, BeOS, Amigia... you name it, I've been called on to fix it, and by far, I prefer the Mac. Admittedly, the PC market has the larger footprint in the business world, but look at the markets where Macintosh is the de-facto standard. Graphic Design and Print Production are where the Mac's rule, and they rule with an iron fist.
I'm presently working at Putnam Financial Investments, and we have an enclave here of 140 Mac users... the only ones in the entire company, and they are here to stay. Periodically, someone in management makes some noise about standardizing on the PC's for the entire company and switching out the Macs here. They talk about standardizing, repurposing assets and other PHB-speak, but they get squashed like a bug when word gets out to the people who manage and work the design department.
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users. I previously worked at a company where the vunderkin new-hire in the design department was a PC guy, and he needed a new fully loaded PC instead of the standard Design Mac that everyone else with his role had. $16,000 later, his machine was ready, and he went to work.... I know for a fact, that he kept having to hand projects back to the Mac people, because his machine couldn't match the work that they produced, and in many cases, tools existed on the Mac that had no counterparts on the PC platform. All that work, and non-recoverably investment, was hampered by the fact that he was trying to mimic the Mac's capabilities, a sobering thought when you consider that when he leaves, his machine will be given to the CFO's assistant because none of the other designers want to touch the damn thing.
Admitedly, I'm ranting about a specialized segement of the computer-using population, but understand this. The Macintosh has not survived this long, and kept it's integrity as a cutting edge machine for creative and design work, by being second best. The Mac you see on the market today is the product of selective breeding, the machine that has evolved to fill the needs of people in high-production environments and creative positons.
The Mac was not built as and Enterprise server. It was not made as a thin-client. It was not made to be a gaming platform (yet!)
And people still insist on pushing it into those roles and judging it's performance against systems that are built for those tasks. I have used Macs as firewalls, servers, kiosks, data-aquisition clients, and remote access terminals. I have found the most efficient ways to use the Mac in these roles, and dealt with the issues that arise. The Macinosh isn't perfect. But don't compare Apples to Oranges and then ridicule the Mac when it isn't all things to all people... Compare the Apple to the competitors that want to take it's market share. Show me a PC that can fill the shoes of a Design Mac in a high-flow Advertising Agency. Show me a PC that can handle 3 different size monitors of different resolutions and refresh rates for an illustration who uses a mouse, tablet, and trackball. Show me a PC that matches my Mac, and I'll be impressed. but untill I see designers with Intel Inside on their desks, I'm going to keep my Mac...
"If I can't take my Mac with me to heaven when I die, I'm not going." - Anonymous Mac-Marine
G'Damn!!!! I'm creaming my jeans at just the thought of this one. I was all hot'n'bothered years ago when Apple finally licensed 3rd Parties to make Macintosh-compatible hardware. (My home machine is a PowerComputing PowerCenter 132 upped to 233mHz) Back then, the fastest machines were all 3rd party. Power Computing had the speed-demon boxes with Adaptec SCSI controlers and gorgeous ATI video cards. I was trumpeting the coming rise of the Mac, pointing out that with Apple freed from having to constantly push the envelope with new hardware, they could get back to developing their UI and server products.
And oh, how I cried when Apple let things tank, and pulled the PowerComputing licenses. It may have been an early part of the master-plan for the surge in Apple sales and ownership, but it still put a stake in my gut.
But I really hope that Apple is considering this, and it's not just a wet-dream/media-jerk from the guys at MOSR. If Apple does commit itself to developing for the Crusoe processor, I'm going to be the first on my block to get my little mits on it one and boot up my favorite OS on something besides a piece of Motorola silicon. Oh, happy days...
While it's all well and good to argue that the masses have access to all the opt-out lists, and software tools that invalidate GUID's and double-click cookies, you have to acknowledge that the people who understand these methods and who regulaly use them are the minority. I refuse to give out my Social Security number when asked, or participate in the Census long-form, both 'meat-space' tools for collecting information and correlating it. However, how many thousands of AOLusers and internet newbies have been silently adding to the mountains of data that Double-Click and their ilk have been collecting?
Most of these users have little or no idea that they are constantly being tracked and audited for their usage patterns and choices. In my office, one user mentioned that they'd heard about some company called 'Double-sumthin' that was collecting user information through web-ads. When I gave this person a layman's explanation of what was happening, they were utterly indignant and several people in surrounding cubicles stuck their noses. All of them were upset, and immediatly asked me to turn off these 'cookies' on their machines, and I've already heard from another department's MIS staff that there have been complaints from users. However, these people are not about to reduce their ease-of-use online to deny marketing weasels their statistics. If we really want to limit the ability to track usage and patterns on a user-by-user level, we need to eliminate the ability to do so at a network wide level. Intel's GUID implementation is a dangerous tool, if not a downright immoral one. Double-Click's recent admission that they have been stockpiling user data just underscores the need for an accepted 'minimal level of anonymity'.
Not just for those of us who know enough of what goes on 'under-the-hood' but for anyone who mistakenly believes that they are free to use the internet without undue invasion of their privacy.
Hire the biggest lawyer you can afford and get everything in writing, especially if you have VC / outside investors. My associates and I lost the farm because someone had a slimey-er lawyer than we did. Lost 9 months and everything we had invested in the venture.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have to admit that I still lovingly croon to my DC on occasion as I play games on it, I have never really invested much time in using it as a true thin workstation. I love having my MP3's on a disk with a sweet little self-booting player app., but without throwing $100-$150 to the wind in order to get a BBA, it's not a real solution for me. I have booted linux and NetBSD from my little white thinking cube of game-dom, but I can't access the world beyond the box without that 'rare-as-hens-teeth' 10bT module. :) that will make people run out and snatch these up and/or dust them off and use them on a day-to-day basis. Without a cheap ethernet connection the entry-level threshold is too low to make it feisable.
However, I will say that I view it as a 'Good Thing'{tm} that we're seeing a powerful console unit with a pretty good collection of games coming on the market at a bargain-basement price, which lets people play around with both an embeded system and a fairly powerfull architecture in a hobbyist environment. I do not however believe that anyone will be able to provide a killer-app (besides Soul caliber
I do hold out faith that the PS2 will fill this role however. Sony has already produced a Linux Dev-Kit (admittedly for the JPN market only) and with a much broader market penetration and a simple 10/100bT & hard-drive solution on the horizon for the US market, I'm very hopefull that by this time next year, I'll have a little black PS2 boxen in my TV center that gives me access to my other boxen, broadband connection, and an assortment of OSS solutions for myself and my less geek-ish friends to use. Does anyone else feel that this may well be what we discover over the next 12-months?
hmmn...
food for thought
Oh, I apparently forgot to mention, when you're feed the lines into the vaccuum, the whole process is much easier if the vaccuum is ON... the system sucks, use this to your advantage.
Having done this once, here are some tips when it comes to the actual installation. However, I provide the following caveats, so take heed:
A) check with your town/city building inspector - you mentioned that you're doing this to help increase the value of the place when you put it on the market. You do not want someone to buy the place, then sue you for doing non-code work in the place when they burn it to the ground. This is a must. I would personally check with the building inspector and make copies of everything he says is applicable. I believed someone mentioned checking out what kind of line you can leave in the ducts as a pull-guide, again, check with the town.
B) The system that I worked on had it's own integrated conductor system that used the flip-open facia plates to close(open?) a low-voltage circuit that triggered the main vaccuum in the basement. Once you've gotten all your guide-lines drawn, you should disconnect everything else electrical from the system. Label all the existing connectors, take it off, box it up, and stick it in the attic. When the Luddites move in in a few years, they may value the CVS more than a house-wide network.
When I helped wire my friends house this way, we took a few lengths of wide cotton sash, and connected them to kite spools. Using them as a primitive chimmney-sweep brushes, we went one port at a time, and fed the rags in, feeding in a few feet of line, and then pulling back in most of it. The doubled-over loose ends along with the plunger action seemed to release a lot of the dust in the narrow ductwork (~2.0" dia.). Check the info on the central vaccuum unit, our's was marked that you should not use it continuosly for more than 20 minutes. Needless to say we took advantage of this to self-medicate ourselves during the scheduled downtime.
We then repeated this for each branch of the system, cleaning out the collection bucket every couple times. Make sure that you get the entire length of the run, a person by the collection bucket will immediately notice the change in tone when the rag stops blocking he duct work, and starts trashing about in the collector.
Once this was all finished, we then repeated the process, only this time, we fed the rags and lines down again, this time, we didnt' pull the rags back out to their starting point, instead, we pulled through enough slack to allow us to anchor the lines from each room outside the can. Label these lines, remove the rag, cut off the line outside the top-side vent, label this end as well, then cut it off. repeat with the next vaccuum connector.
In the end, you'll have a spagetti-farm of labled strings coming out of the collection unit, and your house will be strung like a spider-web in a straw-factory.
(at this point, we confirmed that all the lines were not snagged, then proceeded to unmount the CVS collector, motor, and the transformer for signal lines.)
Now all your hard work has paid off, and you are ready to pull the wires. I would suggest starting top-side, no need to fight gravity on this one. Just connect your wire bundles up to the feed strings (along with a new 'safe-to-put-in-the-walls-sez-the-inspector' pull line) and have the guy downstairs start pulling down fresh coppera along with the new guide line.
As always, go slowly, work with a partner on the other end, and be carefull. Once you've strung the CAT-5 up through the pipe, label and secure the new guide lines, mount you keystone jacks, punch down and test.
As an added benefit, you can now truly say that your home network used to suck, but not any more.
Good luck.
"We are very pleased with the settlement agreement and believe it reflects the validation of Experian's e-mail marketing standards and that we remain at the forefront of consumer privacy and protection,'' said Tom Detmer president and general manager of Experian eMarketing Services. ``This settlement confirms that the privacy practices we have in place are responsible, accountable and in the best interests of the public and the marketplace. We will continue to offer the double opt-in solution for those clients who determine it is the right permissioning practice for their business."
well, since we will only be seeing more cases like this in the future as these spam-whores use the courts as a shield to protect themselves from MAPS and other public-service mail filtering tools, what are we going to do from here?
I for one would be quite interested in finding a listing of companies that have fought these charges in court and through miss-representing their datum and hiring bigger and better lawyer-weasels, have made themselves immune from public ban lists. Does anyone know of any existing services like this? I for one would be glad just to have a plain html listing of folks like Experian who have won in the courts to keep them selves off of RBLs and the like. I'd be even more keen on a nice XML page that I can parse with a quick script and have update my mail-server's ban lists. anyone want to make me a very happy admin? c'mon, please?
well, extend the analogy. macious self-replicating computer code is often refered to as a 'Virus' for good reason. I have always based my discussions with non-tech-savvy people on this premise. A virus comes in contact with your machine via e-mail, infected applicaitons, networking exploits (ingestion, tainted food, inhalation, etc...) and may or may not take root in the host (your boxen) based on several arbitary factors (patch-level, ignoring security warnings, timed/stateful infection criteria). If your machine is infected, it becomes a host for these unwanted processes that drain your resources and possible infect other people.
Anti-virus technolgy runs the same way. You can limit your risk of exposure to infections vectors (don't download anything from someone you don't know, "I are sending you for your input"), proper use of updated anti-virus tools, and using antibiotics when you are infected.
While I admit that this is a vast over simplification for adults (and I sure as hell wouldn't want in insult the intelligence of all those parents in Needham, the lawsuits would be ridiculous) you can use the parallels to reduce the distrust and sense of the 'unknown' that most normal (non-geek) folk endure when dealing with these sneaky little buggers.
good luck
I personally would click on enough X10 banners to drive them straight to #1 if I got to smack their booth-weasels with a 2x4(bearing the proper X10 logo) for each click. hey, maybe we can get a double-sided LART for this purpose!
hmmm, e-mail is older than I am (26yrs). and I measure myself through the things I've seen. I remember Ronald Regan as a very young child. I recall my parent's last throes of back-to-the-land/cold-war self-sufficency. I was astounded as the first Space Shuttle launch took us around the earth and flew us back home on wings. I was glued to the TVs when the Challenger exploded. I was there when faxes were pasted hourly on the walls of Boston's china-town as Tienamen square unfolded.
I lost friends in an act of terrorism that the world had never seen before, or even believed possible outside of cheap paperback fiction.
I have done all these things at a distance, I have made friends and effected change on continents that I may never visit.
I have dipped my toes in the greater waters of mankind.
All this in less than 30 years.
How will my children look back when they are my age?
Will they remember a world before the arrival of the meta-verse that allows them to interact around the world, regardless of language, race, time, or class?
Will they look back with sepia-toned memories of the good-old days before corporate structures replaced government?
Might they think of us with scorn, as those who poisoned the earth and water that they inherited?
Or will they think of us as the generation that first tasted this fruit of true communication, and were alternately torn and brought together by it.
pioneers in a digital age where the hot metal was still fluid and a maleable medium, filling gaps and voids in the mold of society.
what will someone say about us in 30 years.
what do we want to leave as our legacy for our children,
food for thought.
This should really be addresses as a wider issue in the Linux community. While we all place great importance on the 'open-source' movement, we also need to ensure that Linux polices it's own code-base and keeps itself in compliance with the GPL, and other license-of-the-week trends.
We must try and validate our work in in the eyes of the corporate (and IP-trigger-happy) environment that we are trying to penetrate if we want to get accepted as a viable option.
hmmm, where will we find this kind of un-attributed code violations next? I sure as hell don't want to have Microsoft breathing down my neck because someone recycled propriatry code and invited the bull into the china shop.
food for thought
(caffine for action)
just kidding... I'd suggest doing some hunting online and see what you can dig up with a little work on Google. While I'm sure that those of us here on /. have our technical chops, you really should be looking for a solid educational structure for your course. Good luck, let us know how it turns out
Hey, anyone else remember the DIY hacks that people rigged to attach them to 386's and play 3D-ish PONG, or maybe even do cool UI or Virtual Modeling stuff? I got a wild piece of hardware from that era that no one else seems to have ever heard of, the TransInfinte (a short-lived MIT spin-off that played with these things for a while, long defunct..) "Gold-Brick" attached a Nintendo PowerGlove to the ADB port (Mac-standard I/O interface) and whammo. Getto JPL DataGloves! wOOT!!!. Needless to say I was psyched at the chance to play with it, but through all me digging on the net, I could only find one sorry-ass freeware tool that did the damn ghetto 3-D PONG thing, damnit! Not having any idea how to RE the tech, I gave up and gave the glove back to the person I'd borrowed it from. Anyone want mine? If you want the damn thing, lemme know.
A lot of PC users snicker at the Mac as a toy and say that it can't do any real work. Well, get off your high horse and face reality... I am a tech-consultant / system technician, and my area of expertise is the Mac, over a decade of use and 6 years of the techical side.
I've worked with just about everything out there, SGI, Alpha, Data General, *nix, Linux, BeOS, Amigia... you name it, I've been called on to fix it, and by far, I prefer the Mac. Admittedly, the PC market has the larger footprint in the business world, but look at the markets where Macintosh is the de-facto standard. Graphic Design and Print Production are where the Mac's rule, and they rule with an iron fist.
I'm presently working at Putnam Financial Investments, and we have an enclave here of 140 Mac users... the only ones in the entire company, and they are here to stay. Periodically, someone in management makes some noise about standardizing on the PC's for the entire company and switching out the Macs here.
They talk about standardizing, repurposing assets and other PHB-speak, but they get squashed like a bug when word gets out to the people who manage and work the design department.
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users. I previously worked at a company where the vunderkin new-hire in the design department was a PC guy, and he needed a new fully loaded PC instead of the standard Design Mac that everyone else with his role had. $16,000 later, his machine was ready, and he went to work....
I know for a fact, that he kept having to hand projects back to the Mac people, because his machine couldn't match the work that they produced, and in many cases, tools existed on the Mac that had no counterparts on the PC platform. All that work, and non-recoverably investment, was hampered by the fact that he was trying to mimic the Mac's capabilities, a sobering thought when you consider that when he leaves, his machine will be given to the CFO's assistant because none of the other designers want to touch the damn thing.
Admitedly, I'm ranting about a specialized segement of the computer-using population, but understand this. The Macintosh has not survived this long, and kept it's integrity as a cutting edge machine for creative and design work, by being second best. The Mac you see on the market today is the product of selective breeding, the machine that has evolved to fill the needs of people in high-production environments and creative positons.
The Mac was not built as and Enterprise server.
It was not made as a thin-client.
It was not made to be a gaming platform (yet!)
And people still insist on pushing it into those roles and judging it's performance against systems that are built for those tasks. I have used Macs as firewalls, servers, kiosks, data-aquisition clients, and remote access terminals. I have found the most efficient ways to use the Mac in these roles, and dealt with the issues that arise. The Macinosh isn't perfect. But don't compare Apples to Oranges and then ridicule the Mac when it isn't all things to all people... Compare the Apple to the competitors that want to take it's market share. Show me a PC that can fill the shoes of a Design Mac in a high-flow Advertising Agency. Show me a PC that can handle 3 different size monitors of different resolutions and refresh rates for an illustration who uses a mouse, tablet, and trackball. Show me a PC that matches my Mac, and I'll be impressed. but untill I see designers with Intel Inside on their desks, I'm going to keep my Mac...
"If I can't take my Mac with me to heaven when I die, I'm not going."
- Anonymous Mac-Marine
And oh, how I cried when Apple let things tank, and pulled the PowerComputing licenses. It may have been an early part of the master-plan for the surge in Apple sales and ownership, but it still put a stake in my gut.
But I really hope that Apple is considering this, and it's not just a wet-dream/media-jerk from the guys at MOSR. If Apple does commit itself to developing for the Crusoe processor, I'm going to be the first on my block to get my little mits on it one and boot up my favorite OS on something besides a piece of Motorola silicon.
Oh, happy days...
Most of these users have little or no idea that they are constantly being tracked and audited for their usage patterns and choices. In my office, one user mentioned that they'd heard about some company called 'Double-sumthin' that was collecting user information through web-ads. When I gave this person a layman's explanation of what was happening, they were utterly indignant and several people in surrounding cubicles stuck their noses. All of them were upset, and immediatly asked me to turn off these 'cookies' on their machines, and I've already heard from another department's MIS staff that there have been complaints from users. However, these people are not about to reduce their ease-of-use online to deny marketing weasels their statistics. If we really want to limit the ability to track usage and patterns on a user-by-user level, we need to eliminate the ability to do so at a network wide level. Intel's GUID implementation is a dangerous tool, if not a downright immoral one. Double-Click's recent admission that they have been stockpiling user data just underscores the need for an accepted 'minimal level of anonymity'.
Not just for those of us who know enough of what goes on 'under-the-hood' but for anyone who mistakenly believes that they are free to use the internet without undue invasion of their privacy.
Well, that's a rant...
Hire the biggest lawyer you can afford and get everything in writing, especially if you have VC / outside investors. My associates and I lost the farm because someone had a slimey-er lawyer than we did. Lost 9 months and everything we had invested in the venture.