I'm sure the relevance of your credo is that any company that expects you to consult for free isn't "treating you right". Therefore if the company wants to do anything other than maximize your benefits, you should act to minimize theirs.
Your assumption is false.
I was speaking specifically of companies that try to screw you. (For example, companies that demand lots of on-call time with no compensation.)
If a company I work for and like asks for my advice, of course I give it freely.
My point was that if I am quitting a company because they pissed me off, they are not getting anything from me for free.
Also, anybody who seriously uses computers does not rely on help desks for anything other than reporting hardware defects.
Most of my "tech support" for software comes in the form of books with black&white drawings of animals on the front covers.:)
The louder somebody complains about poor tech support, the more likely it is that they are a clueless luser, mad that they had to wait 2 days to get an answer to a spreadsheet question that they could have found in the on-line documentation if they spend 15 minutes looking.
My only caveat is the use of the hack rather then crack - but that's a semantics thing.
Should we bother listening to somebody complain about semantics when they don't even use the word "caveat" correctly?
By the way, I completely accept your definitions for "hacker" and "cracker", pallex. So do most Americans (those who do not treat the Jargon File like thier Bible, anyway).
I don't think you understand. It's not who elects them, it's who funds them.
People really need to get past this myth.
The only reason why politicians accept funding is so they can spend it persuading people to vote for them.
According to a recent column I saw in Newsweek, the typical Congressional candidate spends about $3.00 per vote. For some sentators, it has been as high as $7.00 per vote.
So, if you make me a donation of $30,000 (actually, you can't make a donation that large to me under current campaign finance law... but you can donate that to my party or spend it on ads bashing my opponent), there is no way I am going to return the favor by doing something that costs me 15,000 votes, no matter how corrupt I am.
Unfortunately, people with your attitude never bother to let your elected leaders know what it is that you want. When that Big Donor tells them that Bill x is a Good Thing, and they are not hearing otherwise from their constituents, they are more likely to listen to the guy who is helping their next campaign.
But hey, you just go ahead and keep telling yourself how 1337 you are for knowing better than to bother. You might as well stay home on Election Day too, since you are so powerless.
Meanwhile, pardon the rest of us while we continue to tilt at windmills, blissfully unaware of the hopelessness of our situation.
All land-line connections, even to France, probably pass over (or under) British land. A backhoe could make short work of them. Signal jamming would also be easy enough for the satelite signal.
Worst case, the UK or US navy takes out the whole structure (after giving them time to evacuate).
I think concepts like FreeNet offer a lot more promise.
William Gibson's "Walled City" concept could also be adapted to vpn technology, if the file-sharing crowd were so inclined.
HavenCo's problem is the have a physical presence (a.k.a. "a target")... in international waters no less. The Chinese recently reminded us all about how much you can get away with in international waters. If a submarine were to "accidentally" bomb the shit out of that oil platform, what could anybody do about it?
Is it not obvious to nearly everybody that cutting HavenCo off from the rest of the net would be a very easy thing to accomplish, if the US and/or UK cared enough to do so?
That has little to do with ticket quatas, and a lot to do with traffic patterns.
I'm betting that you were cruising along on I-94 the whole way.... wide-open rolling hills of Wisconsin prairie and relatively straight road on the first pleasant spring weekend of the year. Traffic on that road was probably heavier than usual, and a lot of drivers probably gave in to the temptaion to speed the 400+ mile road trip by flooring the ol' gas pedal.
I would probably drive about 95 MPH on that highway too, if I didn't already know there were lots of speed traps there.:)
I have a simple rule for dealing with companies that don't treat me right: Never consult for free.
Sure, you could talk to a labor lawyer, find out how your state's laws apply to your situation, then go back to the company and say "this is what my lawyer told me, and here's what you should do to avoid legal problems"...
You could do that, but then you would be giving them free legal advice! Finding out if they are exposing themselves to legal hassles is their problem. Let them find out that kind of crap on their own time and with their own money
If you are unhappy being on-call and not being paid for it (and you should be), then here is what you should do: Utter not a single word of complaint, and start interviewing with other companies for your next job.
During your "exit interview", they will surely want to know why you quit. You might be tempted to use this opportunity to vent about all they have done wrong and why they are so unfair... Don't. If they want your advise about what they should change, they should pay you for it. Just smile and say you like your new opportunities at your new position better, shake hands, and walk away. Otherwise, you are breaking the One Rule for dealing with bad companies: Never consult for free!
That sounds good, but there are a lot of RSI injuries that the Dvorak keyboard can't prevent:
1) 10-key number entry (done by accountants, office secretaries, etc. All day, every day.)
2) Mouse control. An astounding number of mouse and trackball set-ups are horridly un-ergonomic, including most varieties of the beloved 3-button mouse. Many of the gadgets sold to help with this problem (like wrist rests) actually make it worse.
3) Games. No matter what your keyboard layout, serious shooter masters know that you need some form of forward-back under your middle finger, and strafe left & right under your index and ring fingers.
Personally, I don't think we will have the RSI problem solved entirely until the technolody for brain-operated data entry is developped. Experiments in this area are still in the primative stages, but I think the goal merits the occational grant to univerisities willing to do the needed biofeedback and brain-mapping research.
Unfortunately visi is no longer "local". They used to kick ass, but now they seriously are starting to suck.
I know about a dozen people who work for visi, and while the "money people" behind it are different. (VISI has changed hands twice now, IIRC), the techies, the customer service people, and even the sales force have been the same crowd as always for years now, and they still kick serious ass for remote connections (whether via DSL, dial, or bigger pipes). I also know a hell of a lot of VISI customers (including the business where I work), and all have been remarkably happy. Yes, dsl.net has purchaced them, but they still operate as a separate entitiy.
As for co-location... I agree with you 100% that they are too expensive for those kinds of services. They have been for as long as I can remember. (On the other hand, you get what you pay for... they tend to babysit their corporate users better than other network companies do... so they are not the first choice for DIY types, but very good for hosting non-techie companies). If I ever want to do something like that, I will keep your suggestions of checking out Spacestar in mind.
If you live in the Twin Cities (which was a USWorst town until Qwest bought USWorst... now I like to refer to it as "Qworst"), and have been relying on Qwest for your broadband service, I suggest you check out VISI. They provide DSL service (using Qwest's pipes), for about the same price... the important difference being that they are local (they began as a mom-n-pop ISP, and expanded rapidly when Winternet took the dirt-nap), and their customer service is a hell of a lot better than you could ever hope to get from Qwest or MSN.
Those of you in other Qwest cities, there's a good chance that there is somebody like that where you live. Look around a little, and post it here if you find one.:)
A "Troll" is typically defined as somebody who plays "devil's advocate"... saying controversial things that they don't really believe in order to provoke a lot of angry responses.
Those who modded this guy down as a troll probably suspected that he was jerking us around.
Personally, I have meet enough people who actually think like this guy to believe that he probably means it... but the people who modded him down may have thought otherwise.
Not every negative moderation is an expression of opposition to the content. I have occationally applied negative moderation to a post which I agreed with only to have howls of bias against the viewpoint follow shortly afterwards.
I actually had mod points to spend when I saw his post, but did not moderate it one way or another, partly because I didn't see the need for it, and partly because I wanted to reply.
It's all kind of subjective. That's why we have lots of moderators.
if there was an operating system that did the following, it would be more popular than microsoft windows (it wouldn't matter if it was open or closed source):
1) driver support
2) nice GUI
3) standards
4) stability
5) ease of use, but included advanced functionality.
This is not a troll, I am just stating my opinion.
You may mod me down for saying this, but this is a purely American viewpoint.
Rather than mod you down unfairly, I will save my mod points and give you an honest reply.
You are somewhat correct in saying that free speech is an American viewpoint. It is also one of the things I love about America.
More than the prosperity, more than the lack of overcrowding, more than anything else, the thing that makes me want to live in America and makes me willing to lay down my life to protect it for future generations (if I must), is the freedoms we hold as absolute.
You obviously do not hold these freedoms as highly as we do here. That's fine with me. Better that you stay on your side of the ocean and grumble about how misguided we are than emmigrate to our shores and vote for tyrants would would limit our precious liberty.
But to give credit where credit is due... most of our ideas about the inherent and self-evident liberties of Man came from great European thinkers. Voltaire in particular comes to mind. I regret to see that his ideas have not taken hold as well on his own continent as they have here.
France does not have a lot of important exports, but if you want wine, oboe reeds, or philosophy from the Age of Enlightenment... they are pretty tough to beat. (On the other hand, California wineries make great cabernet, oboe reeds can now be made synthetically, and the supply of Age-of-Enlightenment philosphers ran out a long time ago, so I guess we don't really need France for much any more.)
That is untrue. The teacher's unions are, hands down, the largest lobby group in Washington. In both number of lobbyists and total dollars given to candidates, nobody else even comes close.
Other big ones include the TV & radio broadcasters, ADM (a huge agricultural coportaion), environmentalists (Sierra Club and others), the NRA, gun-control supporters, "big oil", minority groups (including the NAACP and the Rainbow Coalition), both sides of the abortion debate, conservative policy wonks (like Empower America and the Hoover Institute), liberal policy wonks (like People for the American Way and the ACLU), libertairian policy wonks (like The Cato Institute), religious groups (like The Christian Coalition), consumer advocacy, labor unions, small business organizations, etc. etc. etc.
The Bells are players, yes. Very big players... but not anywhere near the biggest.
Sort of like the web has made all major publications obsolete, because now anybody can be a publisher, and we have millions of personal home pages to choose from, right?
Sarcasm aside, most people will still want music the big labels, not just because the labels dominate what is promoted on the radio (although they do, and that's part of it), and not just because the labels can spend more on production (although they can, and that is also part of it), and not just because they control the retail pipelines (again, they do, and it's part)... The main reason why people will continue to buy from the labels is the same reason why "Armageddon" sold more tickets than a lot of superior independant films. Major labels are filters.
If you are the sort of person who actually enjoys bubblegum pop like Britney Spears (and millions of people are), you are far more likely to find stuff you like at the mall CD/DVD store than at the indie shop downtown that also sells bongs and tie-die shirts.
Independent music boosters: pop quiz. In ten seconds or less, name 3 indie albums that a 14 year-old girl would spend her lunch money on.
Sure, you like better music than what a 14 year-old girl does... but she spends more on records, tickets, t-shirts, etc than you do. As long as major labels keep producing albums that she would like, and promotes them in ways that will get the tunes stuck in her head, they will continue to me a media empire.
On the other hand, only a small handful of performers win the "teen idol" lottery each year. For every Britney Spears, there are thousands would-be pop stars who sing, dance, and look every bit as good as her, but will never make a penny. Most of the music world is divided this way: superstars and people with nothing.
But also for every Briney Spears, there are a few dozen really good bands who just manage to get by selling albums at shows, and never expect to make the "big score" of a label deal. (And they know that most labels that express interest in them are just out to rip them off.)
For those people, the rare middle-class of the music industry, this new license idea is quite a boon. College radio died somewhere in the middle of the 90's, and Internet broadcasting is slowly beginning to fill the void.
Lars doesn't want you trading his MP3's, but the bands playing in the bars just off-campus near your local university need you to trade their MP3's, because it is the only way their music will reach anybody new.
A machine with no moving parts should never break, and in five years that'll be the case with computers.
Umm... you are aware that a CPU has moving parts, right? Let me put this in terms even you can understand: Very small moving parts, like tiny little light-switches (we grown-ups call them "diodes"), live in the land of the computer chip and direct the flow of electricity (the stuff that's in lightning!) and allow your magic box (or "computer") to pretend it's thinking.
Furthermore, even if computer and printer maintenance becomes as trivial as you say, the company still does not me wasting my precious time with it. That's what we hire IT people for. Any programmer can do the janitor's job, too... but we don't. Instead, we hire a janitor. Since few people want a janitor's job, we are forced to pay a pretty darn good salary for somebody who never went to college. With sysadmins, it's the same thing.
And there is another reason we need IT people. Programmers make mistakes (like forgetting to close HTML tags) once in a while. Some mistakes (like forgetting to close HTML tags) are merely annoying. Others bring down servers.
Look at it this way: How many people employ a full-time driver/mechanic for their cars?
You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.
Correct.
Now, to apply your logic, how many people employ a full-time sysadmin for their home computers?
Not many... However, any company with a serious reliance on information technology owns the equivalent of one (1) Shitload of cars.
Just as somebody who runs a fleet of busses or taxis employs full-time mechanics, a company that relies on doing lots of math in a short period of time (i.e., a financial company) desperately needs a staff of IT professionals who know they're doing.
For a large segment of the corporate world, their data is their product. An insurance company that loses their data and can't restore from backup in a timely manner is a bankrupt insurance company before the month is over.
By the way, I do exactly no (0) system administration work in my job. I'm just a programmer, so I really have no vested interest in the debate to bias my viewpoint. (Our sysadmin spends most of his day swapping files on Napster, and we are all very happy that things are running smoothly enough for that to be the case, but there is no way in hell we would ever lay him off. Less that 50 large a year allows us to never worry about backups, crashes, or system upgrade decisions. We just sit around writing code and let the IT department take care of itself.)
OS X is a multitasking operating system. The old Mac OS was not. That is why the old Mac OS was able to be so fast and responsive, even on really old hard ware. Drag the mouse, and that's all your CPU was thinking about: dragging the mouse. Open an application, and you were forced to twiddle your thumbs while the application launches, but 100% of that machine was thinking about launching your application.
For years, Apple users have been screaming that they wanted preemptive multi-tasking, even though almost all Macs are used as single-client machines. Well, now you got it. Apple runs Apache web server nearly as fast as any other UNIX, but guess what, there's a price for all that power: doing several things at once takes more effort than doing one thing at a time.
Personally, I don't give a shit if IE or Omniweb takes an extra 10 seconds to launch, because now I can do other things while it is launching, instead of having my system be effectively dead to me while it loads an app from the hard drive.
But if reizing windows quickly is more important to you than having lots of background processes while you work, then boot to OS 9.1 and stay there. You won't be able to run UNIX apps, and your box won't be much good as a server, but at least you can launch your web browser quickly, which seems to be what really matters to you. I'm not just brushing you off here, I am serious. It really sounds like OS X is not for you at this stage in its development.
I'm sure you meant to rip on Intel a little with that comment, but the truth is if Intel shipped a computer with a heatsink that doubled as a Grillmaster, I would buy it.
Funny you should say that, because I am reading your post on a 350 MHz G3 (that's right, not G4, G3!) running OS X, and it can "handle it" just fine. If your G4 can't handle it, I gotta wonder what the hell you did to your system to make it run worse than a two year-old G3.
Yes, as of 10.0.1, desktop performace is a little sluggish because of calculations which the graphics chip should be handling are going through the CPU, but Apple has made correcting this a development priority, and you can expect to see this change quite a bit by 10.1 (which will probably come out sometime in July, when the first Macs to ship with OS X pre-installed come off the line).
Re:Ehh, there is a myth about this myth..
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What 1.7Ghz Is Like
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· Score: 1
Nice to hear some real-world comparisons from somebody who actually works with the systems he is talking about, instead of some "journalist" from ZD.
Regarding the comparison of OS X running on a single 466 G4 chip vs. (OS unspecified) running on dual PIII 800's... I sincerely hope the dual Intels would win that race! I would barely expect the G4-466 to score a tie when racing with one PIII-800 for most server tasks. (The G4 might do vectoring faster, but not everything you do will take advantage of that edge.)
On the bright side, you can probably expect to get a little more zing out of you OS X boxen later this year, when 10.1 ships. The current release (10.0.1) still demands the CPU to handle too many calculations that Apple believes belong on the graphics chip. Everything I've read indicates that clearing up this issue is one of their development priorities.
The phrase "Moore's Law" is just a nice example of dry geek humor. An inventor at Intel once predicted that as chip technology develops, the number of transistors that would fit on a chip would probably double every 18 months.
Since that time, a trend has emerged of chip speeds increasing at a rate of about 2x every year and a half. Since it has held up (for far longer that Moore could have expected, and applied in ways that he didn't mean for it to be) for so long, we jokingly refer to it as a physical Law of nature, named for the guy who first said it.
Some people would cite this as an example of a "self fulfilling prophesy" (everybody agrees that "Moore's Law" is a reasonable expectation, so that's what everybody shoots for to keep up with the competition). Whether that's true or not, I'll let others speculate about. "What if" debates give me a headache.
Slashdot Mirror
Your assumption is false.
I was speaking specifically of companies that try to screw you. (For example, companies that demand lots of on-call time with no compensation.)
If a company I work for and like asks for my advice, of course I give it freely.
My point was that if I am quitting a company because they pissed me off, they are not getting anything from me for free.
Also, anybody who seriously uses computers does not rely on help desks for anything other than reporting hardware defects.
Most of my "tech support" for software comes in the form of books with black&white drawings of animals on the front covers. :)
The louder somebody complains about poor tech support, the more likely it is that they are a clueless luser, mad that they had to wait 2 days to get an answer to a spreadsheet question that they could have found in the on-line documentation if they spend 15 minutes looking.
Should we bother listening to somebody complain about semantics when they don't even use the word "caveat" correctly?
By the way, I completely accept your definitions for "hacker" and "cracker", pallex. So do most Americans (those who do not treat the Jargon File like thier Bible, anyway).
People really need to get past this myth.
The only reason why politicians accept funding is so they can spend it persuading people to vote for them.
According to a recent column I saw in Newsweek, the typical Congressional candidate spends about $3.00 per vote. For some sentators, it has been as high as $7.00 per vote.
So, if you make me a donation of $30,000 (actually, you can't make a donation that large to me under current campaign finance law... but you can donate that to my party or spend it on ads bashing my opponent), there is no way I am going to return the favor by doing something that costs me 15,000 votes, no matter how corrupt I am.
Unfortunately, people with your attitude never bother to let your elected leaders know what it is that you want. When that Big Donor tells them that Bill x is a Good Thing, and they are not hearing otherwise from their constituents, they are more likely to listen to the guy who is helping their next campaign.
But hey, you just go ahead and keep telling yourself how 1337 you are for knowing better than to bother. You might as well stay home on Election Day too, since you are so powerless.
Meanwhile, pardon the rest of us while we continue to tilt at windmills, blissfully unaware of the hopelessness of our situation.
Worst case, the UK or US navy takes out the whole structure (after giving them time to evacuate).
I think concepts like FreeNet offer a lot more promise.
William Gibson's "Walled City" concept could also be adapted to vpn technology, if the file-sharing crowd were so inclined.
HavenCo's problem is the have a physical presence (a.k.a. "a target")... in international waters no less. The Chinese recently reminded us all about how much you can get away with in international waters. If a submarine were to "accidentally" bomb the shit out of that oil platform, what could anybody do about it?
Is it not obvious to nearly everybody that cutting HavenCo off from the rest of the net would be a very easy thing to accomplish, if the US and/or UK cared enough to do so?
I'm betting that you were cruising along on I-94 the whole way.... wide-open rolling hills of Wisconsin prairie and relatively straight road on the first pleasant spring weekend of the year. Traffic on that road was probably heavier than usual, and a lot of drivers probably gave in to the temptaion to speed the 400+ mile road trip by flooring the ol' gas pedal.
I would probably drive about 95 MPH on that highway too, if I didn't already know there were lots of speed traps there. :)
Sure, you could talk to a labor lawyer, find out how your state's laws apply to your situation, then go back to the company and say "this is what my lawyer told me, and here's what you should do to avoid legal problems"...
You could do that, but then you would be giving them free legal advice! Finding out if they are exposing themselves to legal hassles is their problem. Let them find out that kind of crap on their own time and with their own money
If you are unhappy being on-call and not being paid for it (and you should be), then here is what you should do: Utter not a single word of complaint, and start interviewing with other companies for your next job.
During your "exit interview", they will surely want to know why you quit. You might be tempted to use this opportunity to vent about all they have done wrong and why they are so unfair... Don't. If they want your advise about what they should change, they should pay you for it. Just smile and say you like your new opportunities at your new position better, shake hands, and walk away. Otherwise, you are breaking the One Rule for dealing with bad companies: Never consult for free!
1) 10-key number entry (done by accountants, office secretaries, etc. All day, every day.)
2) Mouse control. An astounding number of mouse and trackball set-ups are horridly un-ergonomic, including most varieties of the beloved 3-button mouse. Many of the gadgets sold to help with this problem (like wrist rests) actually make it worse.
3) Games. No matter what your keyboard layout, serious shooter masters know that you need some form of forward-back under your middle finger, and strafe left & right under your index and ring fingers.
Personally, I don't think we will have the RSI problem solved entirely until the technolody for brain-operated data entry is developped. Experiments in this area are still in the primative stages, but I think the goal merits the occational grant to univerisities willing to do the needed biofeedback and brain-mapping research.
I know about a dozen people who work for visi, and while the "money people" behind it are different. (VISI has changed hands twice now, IIRC), the techies, the customer service people, and even the sales force have been the same crowd as always for years now, and they still kick serious ass for remote connections (whether via DSL, dial, or bigger pipes). I also know a hell of a lot of VISI customers (including the business where I work), and all have been remarkably happy. Yes, dsl.net has purchaced them, but they still operate as a separate entitiy.
As for co-location... I agree with you 100% that they are too expensive for those kinds of services. They have been for as long as I can remember. (On the other hand, you get what you pay for... they tend to babysit their corporate users better than other network companies do... so they are not the first choice for DIY types, but very good for hosting non-techie companies). If I ever want to do something like that, I will keep your suggestions of checking out Spacestar in mind.
As for DSL, I'm switching to VISI this month.
Those of you in other Qwest cities, there's a good chance that there is somebody like that where you live. Look around a little, and post it here if you find one. :)
Those who modded this guy down as a troll probably suspected that he was jerking us around.
Personally, I have meet enough people who actually think like this guy to believe that he probably means it... but the people who modded him down may have thought otherwise.
Not every negative moderation is an expression of opposition to the content. I have occationally applied negative moderation to a post which I agreed with only to have howls of bias against the viewpoint follow shortly afterwards.
I actually had mod points to spend when I saw his post, but did not moderate it one way or another, partly because I didn't see the need for it, and partly because I wanted to reply.
It's all kind of subjective. That's why we have lots of moderators.
1) driver support
2) nice GUI
3) standards
4) stability
5) ease of use, but included advanced functionality.
This is not a troll, I am just stating my opinion.
Actually, somebody already tried that.
Rather than mod you down unfairly, I will save my mod points and give you an honest reply.
You are somewhat correct in saying that free speech is an American viewpoint. It is also one of the things I love about America.
More than the prosperity, more than the lack of overcrowding, more than anything else, the thing that makes me want to live in America and makes me willing to lay down my life to protect it for future generations (if I must), is the freedoms we hold as absolute.
You obviously do not hold these freedoms as highly as we do here. That's fine with me. Better that you stay on your side of the ocean and grumble about how misguided we are than emmigrate to our shores and vote for tyrants would would limit our precious liberty.
But to give credit where credit is due... most of our ideas about the inherent and self-evident liberties of Man came from great European thinkers. Voltaire in particular comes to mind. I regret to see that his ideas have not taken hold as well on his own continent as they have here.
France does not have a lot of important exports, but if you want wine, oboe reeds, or philosophy from the Age of Enlightenment... they are pretty tough to beat. (On the other hand, California wineries make great cabernet, oboe reeds can now be made synthetically, and the supply of Age-of-Enlightenment philosphers ran out a long time ago, so I guess we don't really need France for much any more.)
The NRA gun-control supporters.
"big oil" minority groups
consumer advocacy labor unions
Even one phrase that forms a complete, if weird, sentence:
Both sides of the abortion debate conservative policy wonks.
It kind of looks like stuff from the liner notes of an old Talking Heads album. :)
Other big ones include the TV & radio broadcasters, ADM (a huge agricultural coportaion), environmentalists (Sierra Club and others), the NRA, gun-control supporters, "big oil", minority groups (including the NAACP and the Rainbow Coalition), both sides of the abortion debate, conservative policy wonks (like Empower America and the Hoover Institute), liberal policy wonks (like People for the American Way and the ACLU), libertairian policy wonks (like The Cato Institute), religious groups (like The Christian Coalition), consumer advocacy, labor unions, small business organizations, etc. etc. etc.
The Bells are players, yes. Very big players... but not anywhere near the biggest.
Sarcasm aside, most people will still want music the big labels, not just because the labels dominate what is promoted on the radio (although they do, and that's part of it), and not just because the labels can spend more on production (although they can, and that is also part of it), and not just because they control the retail pipelines (again, they do, and it's part)... The main reason why people will continue to buy from the labels is the same reason why "Armageddon" sold more tickets than a lot of superior independant films. Major labels are filters.
If you are the sort of person who actually enjoys bubblegum pop like Britney Spears (and millions of people are), you are far more likely to find stuff you like at the mall CD/DVD store than at the indie shop downtown that also sells bongs and tie-die shirts.
Independent music boosters: pop quiz. In ten seconds or less, name 3 indie albums that a 14 year-old girl would spend her lunch money on.
Sure, you like better music than what a 14 year-old girl does... but she spends more on records, tickets, t-shirts, etc than you do. As long as major labels keep producing albums that she would like, and promotes them in ways that will get the tunes stuck in her head, they will continue to me a media empire.
On the other hand, only a small handful of performers win the "teen idol" lottery each year. For every Britney Spears, there are thousands would-be pop stars who sing, dance, and look every bit as good as her, but will never make a penny. Most of the music world is divided this way: superstars and people with nothing.
But also for every Briney Spears, there are a few dozen really good bands who just manage to get by selling albums at shows, and never expect to make the "big score" of a label deal. (And they know that most labels that express interest in them are just out to rip them off.)
For those people, the rare middle-class of the music industry, this new license idea is quite a boon. College radio died somewhere in the middle of the 90's, and Internet broadcasting is slowly beginning to fill the void.
Lars doesn't want you trading his MP3's, but the bands playing in the bars just off-campus near your local university need you to trade their MP3's, because it is the only way their music will reach anybody new.
Umm... you are aware that a CPU has moving parts, right? Let me put this in terms even you can understand: Very small moving parts, like tiny little light-switches (we grown-ups call them "diodes"), live in the land of the computer chip and direct the flow of electricity (the stuff that's in lightning!) and allow your magic box (or "computer") to pretend it's thinking.
Furthermore, even if computer and printer maintenance becomes as trivial as you say, the company still does not me wasting my precious time with it. That's what we hire IT people for. Any programmer can do the janitor's job, too... but we don't. Instead, we hire a janitor. Since few people want a janitor's job, we are forced to pay a pretty darn good salary for somebody who never went to college. With sysadmins, it's the same thing.
Sorry for the eyesore of all that bold text.
You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.
Correct.
Now, to apply your logic, how many people employ a full-time sysadmin for their home computers?
Not many... However, any company with a serious reliance on information technology owns the equivalent of one (1) Shitload of cars.
Just as somebody who runs a fleet of busses or taxis employs full-time mechanics, a company that relies on doing lots of math in a short period of time (i.e., a financial company) desperately needs a staff of IT professionals who know they're doing.
For a large segment of the corporate world, their data is their product. An insurance company that loses their data and can't restore from backup in a timely manner is a bankrupt insurance company before the month is over.
By the way, I do exactly no (0) system administration work in my job. I'm just a programmer, so I really have no vested interest in the debate to bias my viewpoint. (Our sysadmin spends most of his day swapping files on Napster, and we are all very happy that things are running smoothly enough for that to be the case, but there is no way in hell we would ever lay him off. Less that 50 large a year allows us to never worry about backups, crashes, or system upgrade decisions. We just sit around writing code and let the IT department take care of itself.)
OS X is a multitasking operating system. The old Mac OS was not. That is why the old Mac OS was able to be so fast and responsive, even on really old hard ware. Drag the mouse, and that's all your CPU was thinking about: dragging the mouse. Open an application, and you were forced to twiddle your thumbs while the application launches, but 100% of that machine was thinking about launching your application.
For years, Apple users have been screaming that they wanted preemptive multi-tasking, even though almost all Macs are used as single-client machines. Well, now you got it. Apple runs Apache web server nearly as fast as any other UNIX, but guess what, there's a price for all that power: doing several things at once takes more effort than doing one thing at a time.
Personally, I don't give a shit if IE or Omniweb takes an extra 10 seconds to launch, because now I can do other things while it is launching, instead of having my system be effectively dead to me while it loads an app from the hard drive.
But if reizing windows quickly is more important to you than having lots of background processes while you work, then boot to OS 9.1 and stay there. You won't be able to run UNIX apps, and your box won't be much good as a server, but at least you can launch your web browser quickly, which seems to be what really matters to you. I'm not just brushing you off here, I am serious. It really sounds like OS X is not for you at this stage in its development.
Mmmm... burgers.
Yes, as of 10.0.1, desktop performace is a little sluggish because of calculations which the graphics chip should be handling are going through the CPU, but Apple has made correcting this a development priority, and you can expect to see this change quite a bit by 10.1 (which will probably come out sometime in July, when the first Macs to ship with OS X pre-installed come off the line).
Regarding the comparison of OS X running on a single 466 G4 chip vs. (OS unspecified) running on dual PIII 800's... I sincerely hope the dual Intels would win that race! I would barely expect the G4-466 to score a tie when racing with one PIII-800 for most server tasks. (The G4 might do vectoring faster, but not everything you do will take advantage of that edge.)
On the bright side, you can probably expect to get a little more zing out of you OS X boxen later this year, when 10.1 ships. The current release (10.0.1) still demands the CPU to handle too many calculations that Apple believes belong on the graphics chip. Everything I've read indicates that clearing up this issue is one of their development priorities.
Since that time, a trend has emerged of chip speeds increasing at a rate of about 2x every year and a half. Since it has held up (for far longer that Moore could have expected, and applied in ways that he didn't mean for it to be) for so long, we jokingly refer to it as a physical Law of nature, named for the guy who first said it.
Some people would cite this as an example of a "self fulfilling prophesy" (everybody agrees that "Moore's Law" is a reasonable expectation, so that's what everybody shoots for to keep up with the competition). Whether that's true or not, I'll let others speculate about. "What if" debates give me a headache.