Adding new hardware without needing a driver disk isn't an experience unique to MacOS X - rather, needing the driver disk is an experience unique to Windows, as far as I can see.
I've used Linux for several years and MacOS X for almost a year. With Linux, it was always just a matter of sticking in the hardware (PCMCIA network cards, modems, Compact Flash adaptors) and listening to the laptop beep a couple times. MacOS X has a pretty similar approach to whatever USB gizmos I've found for it.
Windows, on the other hand, throws fits over anything more complex than swapping floppies (and sometimes over that, too). My Windows-using colleagues are doomed to an eternity of worrying about drivers.
I agree with a lot of the FSF's points, but... let's talk about what GNU software is actually part of the Linux operating system. I'm using the traditional definition of OS here - the bits that provide the interface between the applications and the hardware. If it runs in userspace, it is not the OS.
By that definition, what has GNU/FSF contributed? Let's see. glibc is the big one, that's what enables them to say "oh, we're the biggest contributor." Won't get very far without the C library, yes. And... Bash. Other than that, I found nothing in the list
of GNU software that is required to have a functional Linux system.
They have a valid point, but blathering on about how they wrote a chess program does not in any way make them look like major contributors to an OS.:)
This silliness all makes me glad that I'm running OS X... oh, wait, *that's* got GCC too. Sheesh. I wonder how long it is before someone wants me to call it "GNU/MacOS X!"
During the '90s, I was relatively involved with a band that never got quite as big as Bon Jovi did, but still sold millions of albums. (Those who know me know who the band is.)
At the beginning of the decade, they were asking some amount for lifetime membership in their fanclub. I don't remember the amount, but it was between $15 and $35. Got you a bunch of stickers, a newsletter, etc.
By the end of the decade, they were asking around $35 a year for a glossy magazine-style newsletter, preferential ticket sales, and backstage potential. (They were also selling 1/10th the albums.)
Doing it this way makes a lot of sense to me. Instead of charging extra to join the fanclub, put those unique codes on everything, and let folks punch in codes for everything they buy. Bought the CD? Yeah, we can hook you up with good seats at a good price. Bought the last five CD's, plus posters, videos and t-shirts? Front row center, baby!
Reward the folks who are dedicated to you, and all that stuff.
Okay, okay, yes, I know. Spacing them 50 miles apart is a lot harder when all you've got is a bunch of funky-shaped little landmasses in the middle of the ocean, 2300+ miles from the nearest continent. Oh well.
Of course, we have our own collection of
cool toys on a hill to play with... almost makes up for it.
I might run in slightly different circles than Shamash... most of the Alpha Geek sorts I know have at least two Unix flavors on the desktop, with OS X being one of them. I've got multiple Linux laptops (different distros, even) and an OS X iBook, other friends tend to have Linux or *BSD and OS X.
Interestingly, "Linux" (all distros combined) can have more desktop shipments (which is probably what the numbers quoted represent) in a given amount of time than OS X, while OS X remains "the most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system" (again, by shipments), if Apple sells more copies than any single Linux distro vendor.
Or maybe the Linux figure includes free downloads? Including free downloads of Darwin in the Apple numbers wouldn't bump them up much.:)
Then there are the Macs that run Linux, and the PC's that run Darwin, and it all gets so confusing...
On the one hand, Linux having a greater overall desktop market share than, say, OS X, is impressive, just since it doesn't have the big marketing dollars behind it on the desktop.
On the other hand, Linux has been around for 8 years, and could run on nearly 100% of the desktop systems out there today. OS X has been around for 2-3 years, and can only run on maybe 5% of the desktop systems out there today.
A 3.1% overall share out of a 5% possible overall share is, in some ways, more impressive than a 3.9% overall share out of a 100% possible overall share.:)
Ah, screw it, they're both great.
Re:Hah! The irony!
on
LinuXbox Boots
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I suppose since the Xbox is a Microsoft product, the porters felt obligated to have it boot into a networked state with our old insecure friend the telnet daemon running?
Hope they'll have sshd (one of the non-backdoored ones) in as a replacement soon.
The Achilles heel of the entire MCSE (and to some degree MC*anything* system) is, IMNSHO, the fact that you can have N+1 freshly-minted MCSEs lying around with *no* skills in common except running the OS and basic networking.
Take a look at
Microsoft's own MCSE info if you doubt this. The four required core courses cover Win2K Pro, Win2K server, networking, and directories. Then there are four design courses (network design, directory service design, security design, web solution design)... of which you have to take ONE.
If that isn't silly enough, you get to pick TWO
elective courses to take... out of 25! So if your MCSE knows how to set up Exchange and design a messaging infrastructure, they probably *don't* know Jack about how to set up a webserver, a proxy, a database server, or anything else. If they know databases, they probably have no clue about mail. And so on.
In the UNIX world, we too have special titles for sysadmins who only know one small slice of the job... but they're unsuitable for repeating in mixed company.
Dividing up "single multiprocessor computers" and "clusters" into separate top500 lists would basically require saying "Okay, THESE kinds of interconnects are okay, but THOSE kinds aren't."
And it's not necessarily going to be easy. SGI's old low-end Origins (O200) had a special high-speed interconnect that'd let you connect two of them. You couldn't use that to build a cluster of N+1 machines, so in which camp would that interconnect fall?
It's also somewhat hard to defend a room full of ACSI-whatever-color as a "single multiprocessor computer." Do you draw the line at things where all the CPU's are on one board? Hung off the same backplane? Etc.
Maybe the Top500 folks feel that the benefits of splitting the list are outweighed by the difficulty of figuring out where to draw the line.
It wouldn't surprise me.
Of course, a quick visit to the Apple Store shows that gosh golly geewhiz, you can get one of the slots in your Xserve filled with... an Ultra160 SCSI card.
So... presumably one could buy this in a fairly low-storage configuration, and just hang the SCSI RAID Array Of Doom off it?
Ah, you're right, a G4 can only do one double precision floating point operation per clock cycle (which is still more than most desktop chips can do). So on a 1GHz dual G4, theoretical max is 2 LINPACK GFlops, compared to 15 plain ordinary GFLops.;)
I think the actual theoretical max for a 42U rack would thus be 84 GFlops, though, not 78.
Either way, drat! Now we'll need two racks of Xserves to outdo that T3E-1200!;)
Yeah, those are pretty nice specs. It gets a little more interesting when you take that theoretical peak performance of 630 GFlops for a rack of these babies and look at the most recent Top500 list.
A lot of us snickered when Apple pitched the G4 as a "supercomputer" (using the technical export definition), but if folks like Genentech build racks of these, clustered, and land in the top 10% of the Top500 list, Steve and company will be the ones laughing.
Let's see... the *bottom* of the Top500 list is currently a 116-CPU Cray T3E 1200, with a theoretical peak of about 139 GFlops... you'd only need enough Xserves to fill 1/4 of a rack to come up with that kind of power.
That's not just a dig at MS. Most of the big commercial UNIX vendors are license-anal too, as are the big app vendors - I'm thinking of Oracle here, with their ever-changing licensing schemes. Uh, it's per system, no, wait, per CPU, no, wait, per *connection* to the database...
Hmmm... I guess part of the problem is that the Mac is trying to automount the volume, or some such.
Anyway, I referred to the KBA yesterday, after the DVD-ROM drive on my wife's iBook wouldn't eject. Celine Dion wasn't to blame - our almost-3-year-old is a little too observant, and almost got the entire process correct:
Use the F12 key to eject... check.
Get DVD out of case... check.
Put it in, shiny side down... check.
Push drive closed... check.
Unfortunately, she missed the bit about pressing down on the DVD to make it click into place, before closing the drive.
I wound up having to use the paperclip, after trying the other approaches.
If she's disabling Macs at this tender age, maybe she's got a lucrative career in music ahead of her.
> Spammers are very apt at verifying that
> their address lists actually work.
Riiiiight. That's why in the last 3 months,
just as an example, my mail server has rejected
almost 50 attempts to mail djb991227@scream.org -
by the SAME outfit (networkpromotion.com).
And get this - they all came from
VERP
addresses, so if they *did* have a clue, they
could've done bounce processing, etc.
If anybody didn't draw the obvious conclusion,
that particular address existed briefly, over 2
years ago. It's been gone for 2+ years. And
networkpromotions.com didn't *start* trying to
spam it until this February.
If spammers were good at screening addresses,
my server wouldn't be logging those failed
attempts. Or the failed attempts to addresses
that have *never* existed in various domains I
run. Or the failed attempts to things that
aren't even addresses, but Usenet message-ID's.
Not to say that "legit" businesses do much better
at this, of course!
Having worked for a travel company, in the same building as a call center with hundreds of reservation agents, I don't think there's that much need to actually monitor exactly what they're doing. Whatever computer system you're using probably keeps track of when they get call, when the call ends, and whether anything sells during their call (and if so, for how much). That information alone will tell you who's pulling their weight and who's slacking. And if - like many reservation agents - they're paid at least partly on a commission basis, the good ones will get paid more anyway.
Sure, multi-function tools might not do the job as well as discrete ones. But it makes me laugh to see someone kvetching about them who's not only got a computer - a multi-function tool if there ever was one - but a computer with a camera built into it!
Sure, mini-stereos suck compared to a decent component system. They also cost about... what, as much as one, maybe two pieces of that system, tops?
Personally, I also will not buy a Treo - until they tell me that in addition to being a cell phone and a PDA, it can play MP3's. I've been waiting for a couple years for all three functions to be consolidated in a base unit without add-ons. Give me stereo headphones with a mike on the cord for the mp3 playback, and a device smart enough to pause the mp3's when a call comes in, and I'm happy.
I grew up in a house with about 4,000 books. This wasn't a bad thing, mind you - but they do take up space. I certainly wouldn't mind having some titles available on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, or on the web, and since I don't have the money for many dead trees or *ROMs right now, I do get a lot of information off the web.
That said, if my DSL flakes out, "Fixing DSL for People of Slightly Above Average Height" had better be somewhere other than on the web. And if my DVD-ROM drive acts up, "DVD-ROM Drive Repairs for the Long-Haired" should definitely not be on a DVD-ROM. Documentation for FOO must be accessible if FOO is broken.
However, I'm perfectly happy with electronic documentation for programming languages, programs, et cetera.
As far as titles... hmm. I've still never quite managed to learn C, C++ or Java, after all these years (aside from a brief stint programming in LPC on LPMUDs), despite dealing with things like Perl and PHP and JavaScript that share lots of logical structure and syntax with C. So I'd probably be interested in "Teach Yourself C in 24 Months."
I notice that Dorling Kindersley's new line of books for the clueless includes one covering the
Kama Sutra, but I might be open to a more tech-savvy approach to that topic.
Re:slashdotted? Sure, but Google can find it...
on
Panasonic Dual-LCD PC
·
· Score: 2
There are photos of it on Japanese pages here
and of course on Panasonic's own Japanese sites,
here
and
here.
(Doesn't anybody use Google any more?)
Microsoft's new focus on security is so intense that they've taken their own developer e-commerce site (developerstore.com) out of service temporarily, after flaws were discovered in the way it used ASP and SQL Server.
Obviously, focusing on security is a Good Thing. After all, they've made these products and are selling them to all comers - it's good for them to know how to use them properly too.
We travel folks pick the strangest languages... ;)
on
Common Lisp: Inside Sabre
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Although SABRE (as others have pointed out) doesn't build their stuff in common LISP like ITA, they're not exactly using the fashionable language of the week for everything, either. Their web-based stuff (Travelocity, and transactional sites they've built for other people) has at least at times used the Vignette framework, which is heavy on... you got it, Tcl! And Vignette also shows up on various other travel sites. So being a developer in one of the few dot-com segments that's actually widely viewed as sustainable, when one runs into a developer from a more "normal" place, the inevitable discussion goes something like this:
Other guy: So, what's your system coded in?
Travel guy: Well, there's a little C for API glue, but about 99% of it is in (LISP, Tcl, etc).
The reactions are lots of fun, from confusion to disbelief to horror.
Let's see... out of about a thousand people in the company, there are probably 50-75 I know by name. Most of them are in IT, natch. The rest are key people in other departments. There are under 10 I'd consider hanging out with outside of work (or directly work-related stuff, like business trips), and as far as ones I actually want to see more often than I already do... geez, one or two, tops.
But then again, I'm not properly socialized, and tend to interact mostly with my wife and kid.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Linux for several years and MacOS X for almost a year. With Linux, it was always just a matter of sticking in the hardware (PCMCIA network cards, modems, Compact Flash adaptors) and listening to the laptop beep a couple times. MacOS X has a pretty similar approach to whatever USB gizmos I've found for it.
Windows, on the other hand, throws fits over anything more complex than swapping floppies (and sometimes over that, too). My Windows-using colleagues are doomed to an eternity of worrying about drivers.
By that definition, what has GNU/FSF contributed? Let's see. glibc is the big one, that's what enables them to say "oh, we're the biggest contributor." Won't get very far without the C library, yes. And... Bash. Other than that, I found nothing in the list of GNU software that is required to have a functional Linux system.
They have a valid point, but blathering on about how they wrote a chess program does not in any way make them look like major contributors to an OS. :)
This silliness all makes me glad that I'm running OS X... oh, wait, *that's* got GCC too. Sheesh. I wonder how long it is before someone wants me to call it "GNU/MacOS X!"
At the beginning of the decade, they were asking some amount for lifetime membership in their fanclub. I don't remember the amount, but it was between $15 and $35. Got you a bunch of stickers, a newsletter, etc.
By the end of the decade, they were asking around $35 a year for a glossy magazine-style newsletter, preferential ticket sales, and backstage potential. (They were also selling 1/10th the albums.)
Doing it this way makes a lot of sense to me. Instead of charging extra to join the fanclub, put those unique codes on everything, and let folks punch in codes for everything they buy. Bought the CD? Yeah, we can hook you up with good seats at a good price. Bought the last five CD's, plus posters, videos and t-shirts? Front row center, baby!
Reward the folks who are dedicated to you, and all that stuff.
Okay, okay, yes, I know. Spacing them 50 miles apart is a lot harder when all you've got is a bunch of funky-shaped little landmasses in the middle of the ocean, 2300+ miles from the nearest continent. Oh well.
Of course, we have our own collection of cool toys on a hill to play with... almost makes up for it.
Interestingly, "Linux" (all distros combined) can have more desktop shipments (which is probably what the numbers quoted represent) in a given amount of time than OS X, while OS X remains "the most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system" (again, by shipments), if Apple sells more copies than any single Linux distro vendor.
Or maybe the Linux figure includes free downloads? Including free downloads of Darwin in the Apple numbers wouldn't bump them up much. :)
Then there are the Macs that run Linux, and the PC's that run Darwin, and it all gets so confusing...
On the one hand, Linux having a greater overall desktop market share than, say, OS X, is impressive, just since it doesn't have the big marketing dollars behind it on the desktop.
On the other hand, Linux has been around for 8 years, and could run on nearly 100% of the desktop systems out there today. OS X has been around for 2-3 years, and can only run on maybe 5% of the desktop systems out there today.
A 3.1% overall share out of a 5% possible overall share is, in some ways, more impressive than a 3.9% overall share out of a 100% possible overall share. :)
Ah, screw it, they're both great.
Hope they'll have sshd (one of the non-backdoored ones) in as a replacement soon.
Take a look at Microsoft's own MCSE info if you doubt this. The four required core courses cover Win2K Pro, Win2K server, networking, and directories. Then there are four design courses (network design, directory service design, security design, web solution design)... of which you have to take ONE.
If that isn't silly enough, you get to pick TWO elective courses to take... out of 25! So if your MCSE knows how to set up Exchange and design a messaging infrastructure, they probably *don't* know Jack about how to set up a webserver, a proxy, a database server, or anything else. If they know databases, they probably have no clue about mail. And so on.
In the UNIX world, we too have special titles for sysadmins who only know one small slice of the job... but they're unsuitable for repeating in mixed company.
-Dan
And it's not necessarily going to be easy. SGI's old low-end Origins (O200) had a special high-speed interconnect that'd let you connect two of them. You couldn't use that to build a cluster of N+1 machines, so in which camp would that interconnect fall?
It's also somewhat hard to defend a room full of ACSI-whatever-color as a "single multiprocessor computer." Do you draw the line at things where all the CPU's are on one board? Hung off the same backplane? Etc.
Maybe the Top500 folks feel that the benefits of splitting the list are outweighed by the difficulty of figuring out where to draw the line. It wouldn't surprise me.
So... presumably one could buy this in a fairly low-storage configuration, and just hang the SCSI RAID Array Of Doom off it?
That's the Super ATA Next-generation (SATAN) technology. It'll be making its, er, mark on computers worldwide soon.
I think the actual theoretical max for a 42U rack would thus be 84 GFlops, though, not 78.
Either way, drat! Now we'll need two racks of Xserves to outdo that T3E-1200! ;)
Thanks for the correction.
-Dan (bring on the higher clock speeds!)
A lot of us snickered when Apple pitched the G4 as a "supercomputer" (using the technical export definition), but if folks like Genentech build racks of these, clustered, and land in the top 10% of the Top500 list, Steve and company will be the ones laughing.
Let's see... the *bottom* of the Top500 list is currently a 116-CPU Cray T3E 1200, with a theoretical peak of about 139 GFlops... you'd only need enough Xserves to fill 1/4 of a rack to come up with that kind of power.
Okay, okay, I guess I want some too.
That's not just a dig at MS. Most of the big commercial UNIX vendors are license-anal too, as are the big app vendors - I'm thinking of Oracle here, with their ever-changing licensing schemes. Uh, it's per system, no, wait, per CPU, no, wait, per *connection* to the database...
Anyway, I referred to the KBA yesterday, after the DVD-ROM drive on my wife's iBook wouldn't eject. Celine Dion wasn't to blame - our almost-3-year-old is a little too observant, and almost got the entire process correct:
- Use the F12 key to eject... check.
- Get DVD out of case... check.
- Put it in, shiny side down... check.
- Push drive closed... check.
Unfortunately, she missed the bit about pressing down on the DVD to make it click into place, before closing the drive.I wound up having to use the paperclip, after trying the other approaches.
If she's disabling Macs at this tender age, maybe she's got a lucrative career in music ahead of her.
> their address lists actually work.
Riiiiight. That's why in the last 3 months, just as an example, my mail server has rejected almost 50 attempts to mail djb991227@scream.org - by the SAME outfit (networkpromotion.com).
And get this - they all came from VERP addresses, so if they *did* have a clue, they could've done bounce processing, etc.
If anybody didn't draw the obvious conclusion, that particular address existed briefly, over 2 years ago. It's been gone for 2+ years. And networkpromotions.com didn't *start* trying to spam it until this February.
If spammers were good at screening addresses, my server wouldn't be logging those failed attempts. Or the failed attempts to addresses that have *never* existed in various domains I run. Or the failed attempts to things that aren't even addresses, but Usenet message-ID's.
Not to say that "legit" businesses do much better at this, of course!
-Dan
Having worked for a travel company, in the same building as a call center with hundreds of reservation agents, I don't think there's that much need to actually monitor exactly what they're doing. Whatever computer system you're using probably keeps track of when they get call, when the call ends, and whether anything sells during their call (and if so, for how much). That information alone will tell you who's pulling their weight and who's slacking. And if - like many reservation agents - they're paid at least partly on a commission basis, the good ones will get paid more anyway.
Pants non-optional? Geez, didn't anyone tell you NOT to marry a "Miss Manners" columnist?
Sure, mini-stereos suck compared to a decent component system. They also cost about... what, as much as one, maybe two pieces of that system, tops?
Personally, I also will not buy a Treo - until they tell me that in addition to being a cell phone and a PDA, it can play MP3's. I've been waiting for a couple years for all three functions to be consolidated in a base unit without add-ons. Give me stereo headphones with a mike on the cord for the mp3 playback, and a device smart enough to pause the mp3's when a call comes in, and I'm happy.
-Dan
That said, if my DSL flakes out, "Fixing DSL for People of Slightly Above Average Height" had better be somewhere other than on the web. And if my DVD-ROM drive acts up, "DVD-ROM Drive Repairs for the Long-Haired" should definitely not be on a DVD-ROM. Documentation for FOO must be accessible if FOO is broken.
However, I'm perfectly happy with electronic documentation for programming languages, programs, et cetera.
As far as titles... hmm. I've still never quite managed to learn C, C++ or Java, after all these years (aside from a brief stint programming in LPC on LPMUDs), despite dealing with things like Perl and PHP and JavaScript that share lots of logical structure and syntax with C. So I'd probably be interested in "Teach Yourself C in 24 Months."
I notice that Dorling Kindersley's new line of books for the clueless includes one covering the Kama Sutra, but I might be open to a more tech-savvy approach to that topic.
There are photos of it on Japanese pages here and of course on Panasonic's own Japanese sites, here and here. (Doesn't anybody use Google any more?)
Obviously, focusing on security is a Good Thing. After all, they've made these products and are selling them to all comers - it's good for them to know how to use them properly too.
Other guy: So, what's your system coded in?
Travel guy: Well, there's a little C for API glue, but about 99% of it is in (LISP, Tcl, etc).
The reactions are lots of fun, from confusion to disbelief to horror.
But then again, I'm not properly socialized, and tend to interact mostly with my wife and kid.