Hm, $30 an infection? And, if you screw up your disinfect, you could get hit by the same virus a few times. At that rate, it wouldn't be too long before the price difference for a Macintosh is seriously diminished...now if corporate IT would only start doing the same thing!
I thought of a lot of ways to reply to this, but I think it's best just to say: you make an interesting philosophical distinction between "appears" and "is". Your example of the blue ball through a prism to appear red is interesting--but if the ball is always viewed by everyone through the same prism, it would "appear" to be red enough that I would say that it "is" red, not blue.
As you say, the definition of "sky" is "our atmosphere from earth", so the vantage point of our atmosphere from space isn't relevant to the color determination of the "sky." Furthermore, the presence of light is necessary to give color to anything, let alone the sky; so the determination of the color of the sky in the absence of light isn't relevant. Is grass not green, since it doesn't appear to be green by the light of the moon?
How is it possible that there are 250 comments in this story, which describes a measurement involving the use of elephants, and there are still no swallow jokes? Like, are those African or or Asian elephants? And what do coconuts have to do with it?
C'mon, Slashdot, get it together. Or has everyone else outgrown this place?
Define "sky". Note that "atmosphere" was not the word of choice. I might argue that our sky is blue, whereas our atmosphere has the properties you indicate.
If you think that the sky and the atmosphere are synonymous, talk to me after you've passed a couple of High School Lit classes.
A Mellanox developer was asking basic questions about OSX driver development on the Darwin device drivers mailing list as recently as a few weeks ago.
post to the Darwin Device list, if interested. That was from July 14, so I hope they worked fast. Plus it doesn't look like they got any responses, at least in list. Maybe those in the know might be inclined to help out this worthy project?
If the archives challenge for a pass, use "archives/archives" as the user name/pass pair.
There has been a major brand desktop computer without Windows, since 1984 even. There's lots of good reasons for Linux vs owning a Macintosh, but you've had choices before this.
There's not enough capacity on that generator for 1,100 more systems.
Well, I guess you had better find some capacity. C|Net just confirmed this story. If these machines aren't going where you thought they were, what other provisions have to be made? I'm curious to know, and it sounds like you have exposure to the facilities in question.
Frankly, I have to wonder why this order was given to Apple, instead of IBM. Unless you really want to run MacOS, what's the point in buying from Apple?
That's a pretty good point. Can you actually buy a 970-based blade from IBM, and have a cluster in place in time to make the list? Including the Altivec parts, which presumably are part of the attraction? If the answer to both of those is "yes", I can't see why either. The benefits of OS X would be totally lost in a cluster, which would probably be running Darwin (or a stripped for of OS X, at the least) anyways.
I hope that the SegWay provides the level of motility that you will enjoy. However, wouldn't the requirement that you stand for the entire journey cause the same kind of issues as walking?
Yeah, I'd be interested, esp if you help with the deployment. Like, what OS are they set up to run? How are they interconnected? What are the cooling/power arrangements? etc. Email above. Thx.
Which brings me to the one downside. Few medical informatics applications are written for Linux. Those that have been are open-source and are developed very slowly since very few programmers out there know anything about (or care to know anything about) healthcare informatics application requirements
The only way to correct this is to demand it from the vendors. They'll be sure to bitch and moan, and attempt to label those demanding it as irelevant hippie wackos. But their competitor that then does it, and secures the sale, gets the last laugh.
If you make the technical decisions, you must at least ask to have the features included that you want--ask enough, and the vendor will either begin to offer it as a defensive measure, or you'll purchase from the first competitor that hears your request. When there's only one vendor of a device or an application, sure, there's an issue--but if this feature is more important than other features, someone will eventually fill the void. Ask Quark about losing ground to InDesign, for an example from Mac-Land.
A corollary to this is to not accept bullshit. We have medical devices with attached PCs that we still can't put on the network, since they are unpatchable and therefore vulnerable to Blaster et al. Why we roll over and not demand a 4 hour fix is beyond me--instead, everyone just shrugs their shoulders and accepts the failings of the OS choice. If the vendors can't make their machines operate as advertised within 4 hours, they need to make other choices--and we should be demanding that they do so, or Get Our Money Back, no excuses.
Re:Thank you - If I had mod points, you == +1
on
Blaster Writer Caught
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
But being a criminal does not mean you deserve sexual assault.
I agree. I believe that this part of prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and I believe that were I to be a prisoner and subjected to rape with a complicit guarding authority, I would sue on those grounds. Maybe that's unrealistic.
However, please have a modicum of respect for those of us who have been there does not help your argument. It is precisely this lack of respect that allows rapes such as you describe, and I think that arguing for respect for convicted criminals will not sway the minds of your audience. Better, I think, to pursue lines of prison rape as being extra-ordinary punishment, not bounded by our system of law.
/me waits for Mac zealots to moderate this as a troll
I wouldn't moderate it as a troll, but I would moderate it as "-1 uninformed".
[jmibook:~] jm% whereis python /usr/bin/python
[jmibook:~] jm% whereis perl /usr/bin/perl
Maybe it requires the developer tools; a large download, but still free. Apple has simply left Applescript in place for those who prefer it. You can even call shellscripts from AppleScript Studio, so don't even have to use AppleScript to take advantage of AppleScript Studio's GUI hooks. Good enough?
I'm inclined to agree. It seems like a lot of effort to go to, including the use of a stolen credit card. However, why simply download a pron-link in the second stage, and not something more harmful? Why only 20 computers, and not 1000? This seems more like a proof-of-concept--I think SoBig.G is going to be that much worse. Maybe it'll be released the day after this one expires--9/11.
We are currently using about 60% Mac 20% Win 20% Sun/Linux for our desktops. Naturally, the only problem children we had with the last round of viruses was with the Windows machines. The desktops we could find and patch fast enough. However, the portables coming in from home were more of a problem: we caught what we could at the door, but had to disconnect traveling users until they could get updated, a major inconvenience.
The end result of this fiasco: we are considering the use of only Mac laptops, since, again, they didn't get infected, and probably aren't likely too until they get much more marketshare. It would prevent that serious infection vector that is simply out of our control. And, say what you will about Apple's prices, they compete moreso on laptops.
Too bad, too, because MSFT sold that stock a long time ago (for a profit, I hear). So there is no longer any MSFT stake in Apple; and what with Safari, Keynote, Quicktime vs WM, and the iTunes music store, they are gearing up to be bitter rivals.
But I have no idea what a "business application" needs. I don't know business. I have a general idea of what accounting is, but I just don't know all the myriad details of what such software has to be able to do.
That expertise is no small part of what you pay for when you purchase commercial software. Coding is certainly an important part of making the product, but that needs-based analysis, testing, QA, etc, is all important too--or commercial companies wouldn't do it. And that needs to be realized by you and other aspiring OSS developers--but I don't think it is necessarily a brickwall. Rather, you need to figure out how you can motivate an entire team to join your project, and work together cohesively, if you aren't going to motivate them with money.
How do you get a CPA turned on to the benefits of OSS such that he'll lend his knowledge of the subject to the project? Do you develop for Linux, but charge for the applications? Do you maintain open applications, but then charge for the support/customization? Maybe a developer pays his team until the product is ready for prime, then you release it and maintain just developers to work on customization? I dunno. But I'm willing to be that almost as much effort goes into the design of the dash as the design of an engine in a car, and OSS developers need to realize that without a dash, wheels, and a tasty look, the cool engine will stay parked.
That's all very true. I bought my PS2 instead of an Xbox precisely because a DVD player came with the PS2, free; I didn't want to give $40 to Microsoft just to enable the technology that was already there. (Joke's on me; I bought the Sony remote because I got tired of using the controller.)
So what's next? Let's see--Microsoft already ships a HD with their machine, and presumably the graphics can handle mpeg encoding. If I didn't already have a Tivo--and if the Xbox started coming with a service-alike, for free--that would certainly make my next decision. And microsoft gets it's subscription model that it has been looking for.
Nothing caused the problems. MacSlash has been running on it for years--since 10.0, if not the first beta. Color me unimpressed. Pudge should've known this too.
When AAPL breaks the 50% market share (hypothetically speaking that is), you'd see far worse anti-user practices than that of Microsoft.
I am also a huge Apple fan--ex-employee, as a matter of fact; now full time Apple IT guy--but I agree 100%. Apple's feeling is that there are two ways of doing something--their way, and the wrong way. I do feel that they are right much more often than not, but they're wrong often enough that I wouldn't want them to make all of my decisions, either.
And actually, I think that Jobs knows this. I think the "Mercurial Prince" would rather have the ability to make sudden, radical changes than have to conform to the tyranny of the majority; if that freedom requires maintenance of a boutique market share, so be it. His problem is that there is a critical mass that developers need to maintain, and Apple is pretty close to falling below that now, so he would like to get some distance on it--say, 10-15% of the market. But much more than that, and the pressures of the market place would be too demanding of Jobs, and he would break some useability out of spite.
Good point. But both Netscape and IE were free, and yet how many browser choices are there now?
That's gross over-simplification, to be sure. But I think that a large part of the sentiment that underscores these "wars" is the question: have we sold our collective soul to MSFT again? Or have we managed to resist this time?
Just because the console is $179 this year doesn't mean that it won't be $799 for an X-Box when MSFT has a monopoly on consoles. That might seem ridiculous, but MSFT's economics of the X-Box dictates such an outcome--why else would they be willing to lose money on the X-Box now, if not to make obscene amounts later?
Linux is surely available for Macintosh hardware. Yellow Dog Linux, from Terrasoft, is a port of Red Hat specifically designed for the Apple line of hardware.
In fact, you can purchase Apple gear directly from TerraSoft with a dual boot of OS X and YDL at no extra charge, and maintain the original Apple warranty.
I haven't used YDL myself, since I'm happy with the terminal in OS X--but my understanding is that, since, like Apple, they only have to support a specific line of computer hardware, that everything that comes with an Apple machine works out of the box, ie the modem, FireWire, etc.
Another reason appears to be security--and I don't mean the virus kind, I mean the "NSAKEY" kind. This was also mentioned in the article.
The USA's aggrandizement of late has made a lot of our allies nervous, and a lot of our future enemies paranoid. If I was the Chief of IT in another superpower, I would indeed be very paranoid about the use of a product with which a) I ran all of my intelligence and administration tools, b) I couldn't see the internal workings of, c) had the capability of communication with a foreign power.
Imagine if Mercedes was the only source for radio devices during WWII; the technology wasn't open enough for the US to build it themselves. Do you think the US would have happily accepted radio shipments from Germany, and depended upon them for their secure communications? Or would the US do their all to put in place a replacement that they could control themselves?
The only way to make security guarantees that would satisfy me would to give me the code such that I can compile the app myself, which MSFT hasn't been willing to do, even with their Open program. There's nothing that Ballmer could say to me that would convince me otherwise--nothing that would let me sleep at night with my children in the Armed Service.
I think the war in Iraq will prove to be very good for Linux.
Please show me a link where I posted such a sentiment. My posting record is available for viewing.
That's facetious, yes; then please post links to 10 comments rated above 3 that anyone on/. has made that expresses those sentiments.
I don't believe this community is composed as you represent. That damages your argument, and rather makes you look like a radical wacko who believes he's persecuted when there's none to be had.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, $30 an infection? And, if you screw up your disinfect, you could get hit by the same virus a few times. At that rate, it wouldn't be too long before the price difference for a Macintosh is seriously diminished...now if corporate IT would only start doing the same thing!
I thought of a lot of ways to reply to this, but I think it's best just to say: you make an interesting philosophical distinction between "appears" and "is". Your example of the blue ball through a prism to appear red is interesting--but if the ball is always viewed by everyone through the same prism, it would "appear" to be red enough that I would say that it "is" red, not blue.
As you say, the definition of "sky" is "our atmosphere from earth", so the vantage point of our atmosphere from space isn't relevant to the color determination of the "sky." Furthermore, the presence of light is necessary to give color to anything, let alone the sky; so the determination of the color of the sky in the absence of light isn't relevant. Is grass not green, since it doesn't appear to be green by the light of the moon?
How is it possible that there are 250 comments in this story, which describes a measurement involving the use of elephants, and there are still no swallow jokes? Like, are those African or or Asian elephants? And what do coconuts have to do with it?
C'mon, Slashdot, get it together. Or has everyone else outgrown this place?
Define "sky". Note that "atmosphere" was not the word of choice. I might argue that our sky is blue, whereas our atmosphere has the properties you indicate.
If you think that the sky and the atmosphere are synonymous, talk to me after you've passed a couple of High School Lit classes.
A Mellanox developer was asking basic questions about OSX driver development on the Darwin device drivers mailing list as recently as a few weeks ago.
post to the Darwin Device list, if interested. That was from July 14, so I hope they worked fast. Plus it doesn't look like they got any responses, at least in list. Maybe those in the know might be inclined to help out this worthy project?
If the archives challenge for a pass, use "archives/archives" as the user name/pass pair.
There has been a major brand desktop computer without Windows, since 1984 even. There's lots of good reasons for Linux vs owning a Macintosh, but you've had choices before this.
There's not enough capacity on that generator for 1,100 more systems.
Well, I guess you had better find some capacity. C|Net just confirmed this story. If these machines aren't going where you thought they were, what other provisions have to be made? I'm curious to know, and it sounds like you have exposure to the facilities in question.
Frankly, I have to wonder why this order was given to Apple, instead of IBM. Unless you really want to run MacOS, what's the point in buying from Apple?
That's a pretty good point. Can you actually buy a 970-based blade from IBM, and have a cluster in place in time to make the list? Including the Altivec parts, which presumably are part of the attraction? If the answer to both of those is "yes", I can't see why either. The benefits of OS X would be totally lost in a cluster, which would probably be running Darwin (or a stripped for of OS X, at the least) anyways.
I hope that the SegWay provides the level of motility that you will enjoy. However, wouldn't the requirement that you stand for the entire journey cause the same kind of issues as walking?
Yeah, I'd be interested, esp if you help with the deployment. Like, what OS are they set up to run? How are they interconnected? What are the cooling/power arrangements? etc. Email above. Thx.
I don't believe so. At least Yellow Dog Linux hasn't released a distro for the G5 yet, and promise to when they are able.
Which brings me to the one downside. Few medical informatics applications are written for Linux. Those that have been are open-source and are developed very slowly since very few programmers out there know anything about (or care to know anything about) healthcare informatics application requirements
The only way to correct this is to demand it from the vendors. They'll be sure to bitch and moan, and attempt to label those demanding it as irelevant hippie wackos. But their competitor that then does it, and secures the sale, gets the last laugh.
If you make the technical decisions, you must at least ask to have the features included that you want--ask enough, and the vendor will either begin to offer it as a defensive measure, or you'll purchase from the first competitor that hears your request. When there's only one vendor of a device or an application, sure, there's an issue--but if this feature is more important than other features, someone will eventually fill the void. Ask Quark about losing ground to InDesign, for an example from Mac-Land.
A corollary to this is to not accept bullshit. We have medical devices with attached PCs that we still can't put on the network, since they are unpatchable and therefore vulnerable to Blaster et al. Why we roll over and not demand a 4 hour fix is beyond me--instead, everyone just shrugs their shoulders and accepts the failings of the OS choice. If the vendors can't make their machines operate as advertised within 4 hours, they need to make other choices--and we should be demanding that they do so, or Get Our Money Back, no excuses.
But being a criminal does not mean you deserve sexual assault.
I agree. I believe that this part of prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and I believe that were I to be a prisoner and subjected to rape with a complicit guarding authority, I would sue on those grounds. Maybe that's unrealistic.
However, please have a modicum of respect for those of us who have been there does not help your argument. It is precisely this lack of respect that allows rapes such as you describe, and I think that arguing for respect for convicted criminals will not sway the minds of your audience. Better, I think, to pursue lines of prison rape as being extra-ordinary punishment, not bounded by our system of law.
I wouldn't moderate it as a troll, but I would moderate it as "-1 uninformed".
[jmibook:~] jm% whereis python
/usr/bin/python
[jmibook:~] jm% whereis perl
/usr/bin/perl
Maybe it requires the developer tools; a large download, but still free. Apple has simply left Applescript in place for those who prefer it. You can even call shellscripts from AppleScript Studio, so don't even have to use AppleScript to take advantage of AppleScript Studio's GUI hooks. Good enough?
This was not written by a script kiddie.
I'm inclined to agree. It seems like a lot of effort to go to, including the use of a stolen credit card. However, why simply download a pron-link in the second stage, and not something more harmful? Why only 20 computers, and not 1000? This seems more like a proof-of-concept--I think SoBig.G is going to be that much worse. Maybe it'll be released the day after this one expires--9/11.
We are currently using about 60% Mac 20% Win 20% Sun/Linux for our desktops. Naturally, the only problem children we had with the last round of viruses was with the Windows machines. The desktops we could find and patch fast enough. However, the portables coming in from home were more of a problem: we caught what we could at the door, but had to disconnect traveling users until they could get updated, a major inconvenience.
The end result of this fiasco: we are considering the use of only Mac laptops, since, again, they didn't get infected, and probably aren't likely too until they get much more marketshare. It would prevent that serious infection vector that is simply out of our control. And, say what you will about Apple's prices, they compete moreso on laptops.
Too bad, too, because MSFT sold that stock a long time ago (for a profit, I hear). So there is no longer any MSFT stake in Apple; and what with Safari, Keynote, Quicktime vs WM, and the iTunes music store, they are gearing up to be bitter rivals.
But I have no idea what a "business application" needs. I don't know business. I have a general idea of what accounting is, but I just don't know all the myriad details of what such software has to be able to do.
That expertise is no small part of what you pay for when you purchase commercial software. Coding is certainly an important part of making the product, but that needs-based analysis, testing, QA, etc, is all important too--or commercial companies wouldn't do it. And that needs to be realized by you and other aspiring OSS developers--but I don't think it is necessarily a brickwall. Rather, you need to figure out how you can motivate an entire team to join your project, and work together cohesively, if you aren't going to motivate them with money.
How do you get a CPA turned on to the benefits of OSS such that he'll lend his knowledge of the subject to the project? Do you develop for Linux, but charge for the applications? Do you maintain open applications, but then charge for the support/customization? Maybe a developer pays his team until the product is ready for prime, then you release it and maintain just developers to work on customization? I dunno. But I'm willing to be that almost as much effort goes into the design of the dash as the design of an engine in a car, and OSS developers need to realize that without a dash, wheels, and a tasty look, the cool engine will stay parked.
That's all very true. I bought my PS2 instead of an Xbox precisely because a DVD player came with the PS2, free; I didn't want to give $40 to Microsoft just to enable the technology that was already there. (Joke's on me; I bought the Sony remote because I got tired of using the controller.)
So what's next? Let's see--Microsoft already ships a HD with their machine, and presumably the graphics can handle mpeg encoding. If I didn't already have a Tivo--and if the Xbox started coming with a service-alike, for free--that would certainly make my next decision. And microsoft gets it's subscription model that it has been looking for.
Nothing caused the problems. MacSlash has been running on it for years--since 10.0, if not the first beta. Color me unimpressed. Pudge should've known this too.
When AAPL breaks the 50% market share (hypothetically speaking that is), you'd see far worse anti-user practices than that of Microsoft.
I am also a huge Apple fan--ex-employee, as a matter of fact; now full time Apple IT guy--but I agree 100%. Apple's feeling is that there are two ways of doing something--their way, and the wrong way. I do feel that they are right much more often than not, but they're wrong often enough that I wouldn't want them to make all of my decisions, either.
And actually, I think that Jobs knows this. I think the "Mercurial Prince" would rather have the ability to make sudden, radical changes than have to conform to the tyranny of the majority; if that freedom requires maintenance of a boutique market share, so be it. His problem is that there is a critical mass that developers need to maintain, and Apple is pretty close to falling below that now, so he would like to get some distance on it--say, 10-15% of the market. But much more than that, and the pressures of the market place would be too demanding of Jobs, and he would break some useability out of spite.
Good point. But both Netscape and IE were free, and yet how many browser choices are there now?
That's gross over-simplification, to be sure. But I think that a large part of the sentiment that underscores these "wars" is the question: have we sold our collective soul to MSFT again? Or have we managed to resist this time?
Just because the console is $179 this year doesn't mean that it won't be $799 for an X-Box when MSFT has a monopoly on consoles. That might seem ridiculous, but MSFT's economics of the X-Box dictates such an outcome--why else would they be willing to lose money on the X-Box now, if not to make obscene amounts later?
Linux is surely available for Macintosh hardware. Yellow Dog Linux, from Terrasoft, is a port of Red Hat specifically designed for the Apple line of hardware.
In fact, you can purchase Apple gear directly from TerraSoft with a dual boot of OS X and YDL at no extra charge, and maintain the original Apple warranty.
I haven't used YDL myself, since I'm happy with the terminal in OS X--but my understanding is that, since, like Apple, they only have to support a specific line of computer hardware, that everything that comes with an Apple machine works out of the box, ie the modem, FireWire, etc.
Another reason appears to be security--and I don't mean the virus kind, I mean the "NSAKEY" kind. This was also mentioned in the article.
The USA's aggrandizement of late has made a lot of our allies nervous, and a lot of our future enemies paranoid. If I was the Chief of IT in another superpower, I would indeed be very paranoid about the use of a product with which a) I ran all of my intelligence and administration tools, b) I couldn't see the internal workings of, c) had the capability of communication with a foreign power.
Imagine if Mercedes was the only source for radio devices during WWII; the technology wasn't open enough for the US to build it themselves. Do you think the US would have happily accepted radio shipments from Germany, and depended upon them for their secure communications? Or would the US do their all to put in place a replacement that they could control themselves?
The only way to make security guarantees that would satisfy me would to give me the code such that I can compile the app myself, which MSFT hasn't been willing to do, even with their Open program. There's nothing that Ballmer could say to me that would convince me otherwise--nothing that would let me sleep at night with my children in the Armed Service.
I think the war in Iraq will prove to be very good for Linux.
You people...You...you want
Please show me a link where I posted such a sentiment. My posting record is available for viewing.
That's facetious, yes; then please post links to 10 comments rated above 3 that anyone on
I don't believe this community is composed as you represent. That damages your argument, and rather makes you look like a radical wacko who believes he's persecuted when there's none to be had.