yes, it is still possible to "get ahead" without having e-anything. however, the converse, that with e-everything you're doomed to life at minimum wage is just plain fallacious.
pick up the want ads in your local paper and check through the trades and technical section (where you will ask yourself: "what the hell is a swamper? what are stwb's?") about 10% (in my paper at least) offer only email and fax as ways to apply. hm.
increasingly, email is an important vehicle for finding a job. if you can't afford the internet, maybe you need a job... if you haven't got a job, you can't afford the internet.
really, though, the ftaa is small potatoes compared to the wto and mai. anyone who cares about intellectual property issues and is in favour of the freedom of information should be equal parts scared and mad about the TRIPs (Trade Related Intelectual Property) provisions in the wto. more info here.
the whole issue of cross-border patents is probably going to be moot in 10 years anyway as the TRIPS council of the WTO (Trade Related Intellecutal Property council of the the World Trade Organization if you don't know your TLA's) is going to lead to a "harmonization" with US law on just about all aspects of intellecutal property anyway.
the official info is here
a good example of how TRIPs can be a Bad Thing is here
dense analysis in small font size is here
don't like how any of that sounds? fight it. come to kanaskis g8 2002. info here
battery life. an ibook gets about 5 hours per charge. my friggin' toshiba satellite 4200 lasts, oh, 2 hours... maybe.
price. it's snappy, it's got features and it's very cheap. disregard the "macs are expensive" dogma and do some comparison shopping.
size. damn they're small. if size counts (ahem) for you that is.
dual boot option: when everyone says "dual boot" they mean "windows plus something else". but you may want to have mac os as your second boot instead (for instance, if you are sick of the broken implementation of colour correction in photoshop under windows. ugh).
os x option: similar to dual boot. you can keep osx if you wish and have access to all the goodies there. (project builder/interface builder for instance)
coolness. don't totally discount esthetics. if you hang posters on your wall, like certain styles of music over others or have a favourite colour then you do put some priority on esthetics.
anything else that would matter to the real computing community
ah yes, real computing by definition excludes photoshop... of course.
let me explain something to you: the number of people who use photoshop so massively outweigh the number of people who use gcc that the notion of compilation benchmarks applying to the "real world" is almost laughable.
its applicability in distributed computing...
are awesome. you should really look into it if you are, indeed, "serious" about distributed computing. the project is called
appleseed... point, click, cluster....
No discussion of its Java compilation speeds,
now, if you'd been paying any attention at all to this board for the last, oh, four weeks, you might have noticed the wwdc banner ad touting mac as the Next Big Java Platform. did you go and check out any of their material on java? you should really give project builder and interface builder a whirl... with those tools i'll beat you to market even if you have a compile time of zero.
I'll stick with Solaris and NT.
i assume from this that you're running solaris on an x86. i don't even need to go there...
why would you ever want to build a beowulf cluster? they're difficult to assemble, tough to maintain and hog VAST amounts of power (x86 is, if nothing else, a power hog)... a much better solution is the appleseed cluster based entirely on mac hardware. it's fast and easy to set up, a breeze to maintain and cheap to run (oh, and much quieter too).
really, the problem here is that
a) bad software was written
b) it was closed source.
an open source solution would only address this problem if the purchasers (ie the school administration) actually sat down and audited the code. not very likely, imho. not that i'm dissing open source... far be it from me to do that, but oss is only as good as the people willing to audit it. being in the process of writing an online test generator i can tell you that teachers and admins look at oss the same way they do proprietary software... the only difference is that its good for their budget and doesn't come in a box...
well, i was going to ask if you were the art tatum... but then i remembered he was dead (although yer user number is low enough to put you in the right age bracket:) ). just to cover my bases if you are, though:
a) posting from beyond the grave is an awesome feat. kudos
b) reading sheet music written in Braille while playing the piano is another awesome feat. more kudos.
c) i don't think you sound like Earl Hines, no matter what Down Beat might say...
in all seriousness, I use both NeXT (well, OpenStep) and OS X at work (that's right, the lan with seven operating systems... the perils of organic growth!) and while i've always liked ostep for it's smoothness and obvious features i still think that os x has managed to take the good without making us suffer the bad of ostep (nameless icons, tear off menus that build up like empty pizza boxes in a dorm room &c.) os x has the feel of being built from the bottom up in a rational, well-thought-out way... especially refreshing in light of the cruft that has acrued in the arabic-numeraled mac oses over the last 17-ish years (I found a copy of font/da mover in my utilities folder last week). give
this a read. it's a convert-maker.
do not dismiss foobar so lightly young man. Metadata is important stuff when learning a new language and a commonly-understood set of meta data (foo, bar, baz, qux, and (for php users) needle and haystack) help you seperate the user-defined components of the language from the keywords. Very important!
If you doubt it, look at the foo-less world of DOS/Winders. Their idea of metadata is to prepend "my" to everything. Would you rather have:
myvariable = "mystring";
or
foo = "bar";
I must admit, however, that my favourite metadata usage is in the php manual:
Remember, us PC folk would love to come to the apple side of things except in my own case atleast...those damned mice piss me off
well, the mice that ship with macs are now are nice, oval-shaped, "no button" laser mice.... the only reason i upgraded to 2.4.0 on my laptop was to use the damn thing.... of course gnome heartily subscribes to the "keyboard on wheels" theory of mice, so it's useless... oh well...
here's the deal: the mouse is a pointing device, not a mini-keyboard. If people want "added functionality" with extra buttons and levers and foot-pedals etc that's fine, but we should remember that that's supposed to be added functionality... as in "extra." The fact that most operating systems now can't be operated unless you have a 3-button frankenmouse shows a screwed up sense of design. Take windows up until fairly recently: files would get their names truncated at 8 characters all the time, but the os could support a mouse with 9 buttons, 3 wheels a lever and a trigger. It's all about adding needless complexity and calling it innovation.
Its really sad to see such a sweet machine crippled by lack of proper mouse buttons.
holy cow, everytime the word apple is even breathed in passing someone (hundreds of someone's actually) bleat off about the mouse button count... honest to god, i am starting to get sick of it.
1. plug in a mouse in the usb port in the back. 2.4.0 supports usb quite nicely (osx does as well, wink wink)
2. start a group on sourceforge to "fix" gnome to actually be functional with one mouse button.
do you have a crack habit? back in, what, 94, apple changed the hardware architecture completely. the os programmers emulated every aspect of m68k in the ppc versions of the os up until 8.1... now they've got a completely re-engineered os with two new api sets plus a backwards compatibility solution for the old os...
the irony here is that i waded through the download-frenzy to get 2.4.0 so i could so i could use my apple-branded, no-button, all-optical clear mouse on my linux laptop.... only to find that gnome with one button is unusable (really, i could have figgured that out if i'd put some thought into it first...)
the point is: macOS is designed for one button mice. Winders is designed for 9buttons/3wheels/2levers/1footpedal mice. linux gui-makers fell into the the "more-is-better" mentality somewhere after that.
you can pay "big" bucks for a cert that the vast majority of employers won't grok, or, you can go get the online freebie at brainbench. i took the unix admin one and there were actually points where it was tough!
anyone that misspells "kernel" probably doesn't know the first thing about it.
i'v always been amazed at the number of guru-status *nix types who say and type "Xwindows"... i've always given these people the benefit of the doubt and assumed that they just happened to be mistaken on a point of spelling... boy am i glad to know that i can now just dismiss these people of of hand as incompetent poseurs
well, it depends on what you mean by "connect it to the internet". i've controlled macs across the internet using ana (the extension and app can be delivered via a simple AppleScript trojan).
i agree that the lack of command line make it more difficult to intuitively hack a mac than other os's, but remember:
a) AppleScript and other OSA implementations can be used as a fine substitute for a command line.
b) Very soon OS X will make even that illusion of security go away...
Penicillin (1929) was, in my opinion, more important than today's ability to display patient data "in three
dimensions"
That's a total strawman argument... i could easily skew it the other way by saying "instantaneous access to life-saving information is, in my opinion, more important than moldy bread."
i honestly don't even know where to start responding to that. I've been using osx as my primary os since late-ish September and i hate to break it to you, but it's 100% bsd.
Yes, there is a layer burried deep under Aqua
What do you mean by "deep under"? on my linux box i have to go through a desktop manager, a window manager and Xwindow to get "to the bottom". That's "deeper" than bsd is under Aqua.
Why don't you give osx a try ( you obviously haven't). you might like it...
Slashdot Mirror
tell application Finder
set creator type of file foo to "8BIM"
set file type of file foo to "EPSF"
end tell
run that in smile and your problems are solved... or, you can just use snitch.
pick up the want ads in your local paper and check through the trades and technical section (where you will ask yourself: "what the hell is a swamper? what are stwb's?") about 10% (in my paper at least) offer only email and fax as ways to apply. hm.
hey, i crammed openbsd onto a quadra610!
now the firestation comes to the rescue.
put democracy back in the street where it belongs. come to the g8 kananaskis, ab, ca 2002
the official info is here
a good example of how TRIPs can be a Bad Thing is here
dense analysis in small font size is here
don't like how any of that sounds? fight it. come to kanaskis g8 2002. info here
price. it's snappy, it's got features and it's very cheap. disregard the "macs are expensive" dogma and do some comparison shopping.
size. damn they're small. if size counts (ahem) for you that is.
dual boot option: when everyone says "dual boot" they mean "windows plus something else". but you may want to have mac os as your second boot instead (for instance, if you are sick of the broken implementation of colour correction in photoshop under windows. ugh).
os x option: similar to dual boot. you can keep osx if you wish and have access to all the goodies there. (project builder/interface builder for instance)
coolness. don't totally discount esthetics. if you hang posters on your wall, like certain styles of music over others or have a favourite colour then you do put some priority on esthetics.
ah yes, real computing by definition excludes photoshop... of course.
let me explain something to you: the number of people who use photoshop so massively outweigh the number of people who use gcc that the notion of compilation benchmarks applying to the "real world" is almost laughable.
its applicability in distributed computing...
are awesome. you should really look into it if you are, indeed, "serious" about distributed computing. the project is called appleseed... point, click, cluster....
No discussion of its Java compilation speeds,
now, if you'd been paying any attention at all to this board for the last, oh, four weeks, you might have noticed the wwdc banner ad touting mac as the Next Big Java Platform. did you go and check out any of their material on java? you should really give project builder and interface builder a whirl... with those tools i'll beat you to market even if you have a compile time of zero.
I'll stick with Solaris and NT.
i assume from this that you're running solaris on an x86. i don't even need to go there...
beowulf? pah!
a) bad software was written
b) it was closed source.
an open source solution would only address this problem if the purchasers (ie the school administration) actually sat down and audited the code. not very likely, imho. not that i'm dissing open source... far be it from me to do that, but oss is only as good as the people willing to audit it. being in the process of writing an online test generator i can tell you that teachers and admins look at oss the same way they do proprietary software... the only difference is that its good for their budget and doesn't come in a box...
nuff said.
i count that as a pretty awesome series of upgrades.
you should go to www.versiontracker.com and nab the mysql there. all will be explained in the docs.
a) posting from beyond the grave is an awesome feat. kudos
b) reading sheet music written in Braille while playing the piano is another awesome feat. more kudos.
c) i don't think you sound like Earl Hines, no matter what Down Beat might say...
in all seriousness, I use both NeXT (well, OpenStep) and OS X at work (that's right, the lan with seven operating systems... the perils of organic growth!) and while i've always liked ostep for it's smoothness and obvious features i still think that os x has managed to take the good without making us suffer the bad of ostep (nameless icons, tear off menus that build up like empty pizza boxes in a dorm room &c.) os x has the feel of being built from the bottom up in a rational, well-thought-out way... especially refreshing in light of the cruft that has acrued in the arabic-numeraled mac oses over the last 17-ish years (I found a copy of font/da mover in my utilities folder last week). give this a read. it's a convert-maker.
uh, AfterStep is a knock of NeXTstep, a UI designed by Mr. Steve Jobs himself which was later revamped and rolled out as OS X.
near-useless monstrosity known as Aqua.
You've never used OS X have you?
If you doubt it, look at the foo-less world of DOS/Winders. Their idea of metadata is to prepend "my" to everything. Would you rather have:
myvariable = "mystring";
or
foo = "bar";
I must admit, however, that my favourite metadata usage is in the php manual:
strstr(haystack, needle);
very clever and much better than:
strstr(mystring, myotherstring);
well, the mice that ship with macs are now are nice, oval-shaped, "no button" laser mice.... the only reason i upgraded to 2.4.0 on my laptop was to use the damn thing.... of course gnome heartily subscribes to the "keyboard on wheels" theory of mice, so it's useless... oh well...
here's the deal: the mouse is a pointing device, not a mini-keyboard. If people want "added functionality" with extra buttons and levers and foot-pedals etc that's fine, but we should remember that that's supposed to be added functionality... as in "extra." The fact that most operating systems now can't be operated unless you have a 3-button frankenmouse shows a screwed up sense of design. Take windows up until fairly recently: files would get their names truncated at 8 characters all the time, but the os could support a mouse with 9 buttons, 3 wheels a lever and a trigger. It's all about adding needless complexity and calling it innovation.
holy cow, everytime the word apple is even breathed in passing someone (hundreds of someone's actually) bleat off about the mouse button count... honest to god, i am starting to get sick of it.
1. plug in a mouse in the usb port in the back. 2.4.0 supports usb quite nicely (osx does as well, wink wink)
2. start a group on sourceforge to "fix" gnome to actually be functional with one mouse button.
sheesh
flame if you must
do you have a crack habit? back in, what, 94, apple changed the hardware architecture completely. the os programmers emulated every aspect of m68k in the ppc versions of the os up until 8.1... now they've got a completely re-engineered os with two new api sets plus a backwards compatibility solution for the old os...
the point is: macOS is designed for one button mice. Winders is designed for 9buttons/3wheels/2levers/1footpedal mice. linux gui-makers fell into the the "more-is-better" mentality somewhere after that.
you can pay "big" bucks for a cert that the vast majority of employers won't grok, or, you can go get the online freebie at brainbench. i took the unix admin one and there were actually points where it was tough!
i'v always been amazed at the number of guru-status *nix types who say and type "Xwindows"... i've always given these people the benefit of the doubt and assumed that they just happened to be mistaken on a point of spelling... boy am i glad to know that i can now just dismiss these people of of hand as incompetent poseurs
i agree that the lack of command line make it more difficult to intuitively hack a mac than other os's, but remember:
a) AppleScript and other OSA implementations can be used as a fine substitute for a command line.
b) Very soon OS X will make even that illusion of security go away...
That's a total strawman argument... i could easily skew it the other way by saying "instantaneous access to life-saving information is, in my opinion, more important than moldy bread."
this is true... but osx is still in beta and it does have all that singing and dancing to support...
i honestly don't even know where to start responding to that. I've been using osx as my primary os since late-ish September and i hate to break it to you, but it's 100% bsd.
Yes, there is a layer burried deep under Aqua
What do you mean by "deep under"? on my linux box i have to go through a desktop manager, a window manager and Xwindow to get "to the bottom". That's "deeper" than bsd is under Aqua.
Why don't you give osx a try ( you obviously haven't). you might like it...