Um, whatever dude. Oh, and PDF stands for Portable _DOCUMENT_ Format. Not data. Here's the definition. http://www.auburn.edu/helpdesk/glossary/pdf.html Please be educated beyond reading man pages and thinking you know what you are talking about.
Oh, and Palms can process PDF's yet most can't get on the web, so that kills your arguement on java. Plus, emacs is for teh gay. Real men use vi.
Go read Jon "Hannibal" Stokes article about the world of benchmarking., over on his site, Ars Technica.
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q99/benchmarking-1.h tm l
This will give you at least a basis for understanding why benchmarking is used, and what makes or breaks any given set of results. Also, feel free to argue about anything and everything that is said about these benchmarks, since, apparently, everyone of you is in the benchmarking labs day in and day out, testing systems and looking at the results on a scientific level.
I also think benchmark scores are, quite frankly, marketing bullshit. A processor designer can tweak a program and a compiler any number of ways to increase thier scores. The true test would be to use the SPEC benchmark suite with no flags set on the compiles for either platform. That way you are testing just the base processor, with no SIMD instructions, no disabling of the software prefetch algorhythms, no "cheats" as it were. Then test those same systems with every trick in the book thrown in. Then look at the difference. This will probably give you a better picture of the performance you will see in real world activities.
If you have a machine that absulotely sucks donkey when using no "cheats" and then you see this amazing boost in performance when the "cheats" are enabled, you probably are dealing with a highly optimized and specialized instruction set, which can be either very good for specific applications, but absolutely horrible for programmers who don't have access to, or don't bother to research, the abilities of that processor.
These are the benchmarks I'm interested in most. And it'll be at least late September before we see any of that.
Also, while all this is interesting, in an intelllectual sort of way, what about the actual perfomance gains over the current crop of G4's? Why not take a look at the difference between the SPEC scores of the dual 1.42GHz G4 towers, vs. the dual 2GHz G5's? That alone will tell you more about the increase in speed and power that has been delivered. If Apple had been smart, instead of trying to impress and piss off the x86 sparkheads they should have posted those scores as well, to give a real side by side comparrison between the speed and power of the G5 vs the bottlenecked, processor starving, gimp that is the G4. But that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? And you know marketing is all about confusing your consumer into beleiving that the latest and greatest is really what they want, not some old machine from 3 months ago...
Re:Had to be first, didn't you?
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Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
Um doofbunny, the freaking announcements aren't even over yet. The hardware hadn't even been announced when this story was up on the front page. That's lame. That's called not getting the whole story. That's called whatever you want to call it but it's just slack.
Had to be first, didn't you?
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Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Dude, the keynote isn't even over yet, and you're posting to the site about the news. Geez, talk about jumping the gun...
From what I could gather from trying to translate the legalese in the archived version of the license agreement, SCO didn't release the source code for System V Unix.
[quote] 3. LICENSED SOURCE CODE PRODUCTS
The SOURCE CODE PRODUCTS to which SCO grants rights under this Agreement are restricted to the following UNIX Operating Systems, including SUCCESSOR OPERATING SYSTEMs, that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System with specific exclusion of UNIX System V and successor operating systems:
Please not the line about "specific exclusion of UNIX System V and sucessor operating systems.
The source that was released was not the System V source, which is what they are licensing out now and what thier whole blah blah yackety noise is all about. Also, the UNIX that is archived on those sites (from a quick glance) does not include the source for UNIX System V. Remember kids, Solaris is a System V UNIX. AIX is a System V Unix. They are all based on the System V UNIX code base.
Any other version (System 32V, System 4, System 3, System 6 or 7), is a _different_ codebase, so if you see a source code tree out there on the web that's freely available, make sure you find out what code base it is before you go concluding that SCO's argument is wrong.
However, one funny thing. I wonder how much code repetition is in the System V, System 6, and System 7 codebases? I wonder if you dig into those source trees whether you'll find things in common with Linux code as well. Someone with more time on thier hands than me should probably look into that, just to start looking for possible clues as to the code that SCO might be ragging the Linux community about. I wonder if we can't find developer comments that match word for word in those codebases in the linux kernel source?
And on a final note, the Forbes article is rather sobering. I read it yesterday (before it was posted on/.) and discussed it with some people. While SCO's actions are dispicable (thank you Daffy Duck for improving my vocabulary) and seemingly unethical, they are _not_ illegal unless they are truly acting in a fraudulent manner. What's very disheartening is that the Justice Department will probably not even investigate the business practices of the canopy group, because as I've seen in the business world, what they are doing (basically trading stock between different entities, creating more capitol by having thier stock trades show up on the radar of Wall Street, thus "tricking" investors into putting outside investment capitol into the companies since thier is movement on thier charts), is what has become known in the common media as "accepted trade practices". Any of you corporate types (yes, there are corporate type geeks) look into your books. See how many entities exist within your corporate structure. How much money gets shuffled around between your companies? How often? For what purpose? I bet a lot of money changes hands between your different entities that seems to come and go out of nowhere. This is where Enron screwed up. They started spending some of that non-existent money. In reality, they had absolutely no cash to spend, and they went out and bought real shit with it, instead of trading out thier stock and making more money on the market that they could "really" use in thier operations. But that's just me talking out of my ass after observing the way American capitolism works. Maybe I can join thier club now and start making imaginary money start appearing as well and fool a few investors into paying for a lavish lifestyle of wheeling and dealing with OPM (Other Peoples Money). Wow. It's the 80's powerbroker shit all over again.
Simply because Microsoft would never truly give away software licenses unless it was to tie someone down to thier platform. The headline "School turns down $43K in Windows PCs" could easily be turned into "School wins $43K is useless software, has policy not to promote closed source monopoly".
And the second on you made up makes no sense. Um, hello, these are Microsoft employees. You know they don't have kids. They just assimalate other peoples kids...
Ah, but you seem to miss the advantages of a VM. If you can see exactly how you were compramised, you can then repeat the attack after going back and securing the vulnerability. Thus enabling you to have a fast and easy way to determine vulnerabilities in your code execution. Another great advantage of a virtual machine is that you can very simply and easily revert to a "clean" copy of your machine, before the attack, and have an effective downtime of 3 seconds (the time it takes to stop the VM, select the clean copy, and boot the VM again). So in a production enviornment, you have an added layer of redundancy.
Take a database as an example. You have your tape backups, your transaction logs, etc. etc, but what if your registry (I'm talking people running MSSQL, but for other platform, think of what happens when someone crafts an improper looping arguement into an SQL write query, hosing your data structures) gets completely foobared. What do you do? Do you a) pull out the tape and have a whole bunch of downtime? Or do you just boot an older VM and apply the transaction logs to the database just before the point where everything went stupid? I think the VM would be a much faster recovery (if you consider that you are running a database that stores several hundred gigs of data, this makes more and more sense). Anyway. It's just a question of whether you feel you can implement and manage it.
At least it would seem so from a few perspectives. Why the hell do you need to pump your music selection out to the masses? Do you really think I want to hear you favorite crap indie garage band mp3's? I mean really, people. Get over yourselves. If you really want to share your music selection with a friend (and I mean someone you know by thier birthname, not some jack off in another country with the AIM logon of DickBig070002) there are simple and perfectly legal ways of doing so. Burn a CD, or, if you're so smart, set up your own private pptp session between your 2 Macs and share that way. But honestly folks, what the hell do you need to be wasting bandwidth for? Does that bootleg of Madonna's latest album make you naughty bits tingle? Do you feel like you are a part of the revolution sitting at your computer taking money from the pockets of the performers and artists? Good for you. Viva la revelutione you bad ass. My god. No wonder everyone hates you. And don't think for a minute that I don't have aspirations of grandeure, and dream of becoming the next underground sensation that people will love forever and my music will be the greatest colelction of free speech/thought on the internet. Guess what. You are a dime a dozen in the world, so get over yourself. Go outside. Say hi to your neighbor and share some music with them. See if you don't enjoy someones actual company for once. Maybe they own a Mac too and you just didn't know if because you were too freakin busy posting on/. how much the RIAA and MPAA and Microsuck was beating you down. Asshats. All of you.
As an aside, I think it's pathetic how the RIAA pressured Apple into stopping the internet sharing. Come on, there was a hard coded limit of how many users could connect at one time. Plus, anything you stream on the net, whether it's audio or video or peanut butter, you can _ALWAYS_ capture to file. Bits are bits are bits. Nothing will ever stop them from being captured and written to disk. Asshats. That is the nature of computers. Geez. Maybe the RIAA thinks that the internet is a magical cloud of pixie dust and the data is magically wisked from one computer to another and if you have the pink pixie dust of the grand poohbah DRM you can't capture the data bits (kind of like a good acid trip). Morons. The entertainment industry is about ethereal things. Only it's too settled into the world of brick and mortar. They need to get out of the concrete and back into the minds of the audience. Interesting paradox; there are 5 media giant companies, who own 100's of affiliate distributions, that pump out the same 2 things, black or white (sides of the issue, not color of the skin). Maybe the biggest failure of our society is that we are such a binary culture.
Anyway. Enough postulating. Back to coding (WORK SLAVE WORK)
Um, no. I have to disagree on this one point. The early release crud. Guess what? It's not Apple that is causing the issues. It's the distibution channels that the independants are going through. You see, most resellers have had years of dealing with places like Ingram Micro and TechData for thier Apple product. They have credit accounts and what not with these distribution channels. Apple Stores do not. They get thier product directly from the warehouse. So if you think about this logically, when a reseller orders a product for stocking, they most likely order it from the distribution channel, not directly from Apple, since having a credit account with both Apple and Ingram/TechData is an added expense on thier books. So when Apple releases a product, the main reason the Apple Stores get thiers first is because the boxes don't have to be routed to the distribution houses, checked, inventoried, and processed to be shipped to the end destination. This can add up to almost a week to a month depending on the volume of orders and how well the account manager for the distribution house handles the work load. This is the "unfair" advantage that the Apple Stores get in distribution. Not some kind of freakin conspiracy. Oh, and I know this because I worked for a reseller that decided to continue using Ingram Micro instead of getting a credit account with Apple directly and getting the product from the source. And that all I have to say about that subject.
Maybe one day I'll have my very own droid that can go with me everywhere and have all my pr0...um, I mean files with me so I can do all the stuff I want while on the move. All you need to do is make this little think the size of a trashcan, put some big-ass rechargable batteries in it, add some beeping and chirping and whistling, and there you have it. Your personal assistant in a can. Makes life easier when you don't have to lug arounda laptop. Simply have it follow you around. Of course the early models will have to have a remote to control it, but later version will add autonomous following and features such as that. Imagine if it could also connect into the internet wirelessly and allow you to walk around and read your e-mail and surf the web/work from the park. That's where the computer and robotics industry should be focusing. Bring everyone thier own personal assistant and boom, instant fame and fortune. You know all the Star Wars geeks will be clamouring for one.
The real questions will be , "Does it run Windows or Mac OS X?"
Heh.
Dean Kamen could even adapt his Segue to have it function on 2 wheels just like the real R2-D2 from the movies. Now wouldn't that be interesting?
Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994
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OS X Hacks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Heh-heh. And they also wonder why the majority of people out there just don't 'get it'. I've always said the computer industry should really follow Apple's lead and make the computer more of an appliance for the dolts and a super machine for the experts. Amazingly Apple has managed to do this with Mac OS X. A 5 year old can use the GUI, and the crudgy old smelly *nix hacker can go hog wild on the command line. Now that's something I'm waiting for Windows to copy...
TNN now owns the rights to the franchise and they are making NEW episodes. And get this. They got John Kricfalucci (sp?) to make them. He created those characters to begin with and if any of you remember, those were aduly oriented cartoons. I mean seriously adult. And yet, kids loved it too, mainly because they either ignored the "adult" things, or just didn't get them. Then Nickelodeon kicked Johnboy out and started writing "clean" Ren and Stimpy. And guess what happened then? The ratings dropped like a brick and they ended up selling the franchise. Hooray! Now we can get more of the great wackiness of the J.K. days and get those belly laughs like we used to. Just though you should know.
What if this whole portable home directories thing is more along there lines. Take your iPod (10GB, whatever). You put your home directory on it. Then you go to another computer, plug your iPod in. Log into the computer with your account, even through that computer was never really set up with your user profile at first, but the OS detects your home directory, adds you to the Directory Services (temporarily) and lets you use the computer with your settings, your files, your e-mail, your bookmarks, etc. The only thing that would be missing would be silly UI hacks or other funky applications that may not be installed on that machine (hence, Apple's distaste for UI hacks). Then they take a lot of those silly UI hacks that don't go completely against Apple's own UI guidelines and they implement them in 10.3. Now, you can go to any Mac running 10.3 and have your stuff with you. If you don't have an iPod, you can set up the Mac to pull your home directory from.Mac (it only read your Library and then starts a slow download of all your other stuff, with some kind of algorhythm that pulls your most recently used items first). There's an interesting thought. Of course, this means that all those UI hackers are going to throw a hissy fit, but quite frankly I could care less (and so could Apple for that matter probably). I don't know how they'd pull it off with today's existing Directory Services but maybe they've been pulling extra hours in the programming department and figured out how to do it seemlessly (with only a few bugs). Also, it's very simple to sync a home directory to a remote server using several existing utilities (rsync, Mike Bombich's stuff, MacOSXLabs.org stuff). What would be great is if Apple implements this for us so we don't have to sit there and configure servers all the freaking time. Anyway. That's my thoughts on this whole "leapfrog" issue. I'd love to be right, but somehow I doubt it.
Because of simple things like VNC and keyloggers that sit between the keyboard and main memory or in the case of display signal splitters that can capture the frame buffer from the graphics chip and send it out on the wire. Of course this is silly because all you'd have to do is set up some Van Eck phreaking and steal the frame buffer from the electonic signals being sent through that "secure channel" between the display interface and the graphics chip. Yeah, Neal Stephenson is sci-fi, but there is science there. I'll let you work out how. Plus, this is just silly considering that a "secure" computer system is one that sits in a EMI cage and doesn't have any connection to the outside world. Blarg!
Okay, I think some of you need a little education on how Apple operates. First off, the whole beta program fro Safari is/was managed by a small team. Second, that team has a goal to release either the next public beta or the full 1.0 release by June 30th, 2003. You can verify this by opening up the terminal and navigating to/Applications/Safari.app/Content/MacOS/ and typing in the command 'strings Safari | grep June'. You will see two line in the binary that read "Safari Beta will expire on June 30, 2003. Safari Beta expired on June 30, 2003." This means that they are on a deadline and have a lot of work to do. A lot of people who have posted here are suggesting that they should do MORE work and add easter eggs/stenographics/blah-blah/security tracking to the seeded releases. Now you tell me, does that sound like a good way to reach a deadline? Especially one that is hard coded into the binary of the public beta? Now you could argue that putting in an arbitrary deadline is a "bad idea" or whatever, but I think it's a great way to keep a project both on track and managable. Pressure to perform and all that rot. The other thing a lot of people are apparently misguided in thinking is that Apple was naive about releasing these developer seeds. For this you have to understand a little bit about Apple's corporate culture and social philosophy. While you may not agree with it, I and a lot of others, think it's a great experiment and helps move our culture along. To understand thier philosophy, just look at Apple's public stance on music piracy. They have put in place some very basic and easily defeatable mechanisms with the iPod that prevents users from sharing music freely with thier iPod. They have not completely crippled your ability to share music, however they do put s little sticker on the iPod's that says "Don't steal music." They have also publicly stated in many debates about music piracy that it is a social problem, not a technological one, and that technology will not solve the issue. So in that statement, they have made reasonably clear that they don't really want to spend a lot of time working on something that they see as inevitable. They also want to trust those that they sign up for the seed programs. If you can't trust your testers to give you good reliable feedback, you are wasting your time and effort and you won't get your project completed or your bug fixed. Now the thing with the Safari seeds is that they gave the seed users 3 chances, basically 3 strikes, your out. After the 3rd strike, they pulled the program because they saw it as more detrimental that useful. I'm sure they started getting an unmanagable amount of negative feedback or duplicate bug reports, or even worse, useless ones because all these people that downloaded the seeds that were not part of the seed program probably started sending in incomplete bug reports or even worse, stupid things like "the thingy with the buttons, doesn't work on my puter, fix it now assholes", or something to that effect. This means that those managing the bug database and trying to glean useful information or even just track any real bugs now have to sift through thousands of shit reports. Needle in haystack time. Any of this sound reasonable. And finally, the most telling thing would be the reports on rumor sites. Apple hates rumor sites. They are counter productive to thier business (believe it or now, they are). If someone reads on a rumor site that such and such feature is missing/broken/doesn't work or whatever on a rumor site, and bases thier judgement on that rumor sites word (I know, stupid people, but it does happen, I have plenty of ad hom proof), they end up loosing a potential customer, or thier market image gets tarnished. I don't know about most of you, but these are the reasons that I see Apple's decision to pull the plug as both necessary and smart on Apple's part. Argue all you want about "the way it should be" or whatever, but these are the realities of this business. If you
The current "computer industry" doesn't see the web as an application development enviornment. They see it as an advertising/marketing showplace. Some people (education/individuals/orgs) see it as an information sharing and collecting service (which is what www was supposed to be). However the only new thing that I've seen that made me go "hey, that's pretty nifty, and sort of new" has been the advent of "Web Services" such as XML based applications like Watson and now Sherlock 3 from Apple. Where content is pulled from a source but the source isn't exactly all planned out. It's annoying to have to look at some websites that are just flash animations and pretty fonts that look like scribblings of a demented 4 year old. I want the info, the words that mean something, the movie clip, the data. I don't want your love of the color puce to make me want to retch when I'm trying to look up a flight time, or read and article (web designers, take note, you know who you are, and I hate you because of it).
We should be using the web more as a resource for storing and retrieving data. Graphics and pretty page layouts are nice and all but if I could, I'd abolish most of it and just look for a summary of the info with a little link saying "Want to know more? Click here..."
Blarg. It's the data. It's all about the data. Information wants to be in your pants. In Soviet Russia, the pants are in the hot grits.
Actually, there is a note called the "brown" note. It's a tone that causes humans to lose bowel control (I don't know if this has already been mentioned, I read comments at a level 3 or above rating. Yeah, I'm lazy, fuck you trolls *thwack*). There are also tones that induce vomiting, nasal bleeds, and lung failure, heart failure, and epiliptic seizures in non-eplilectis subjects. It has to do with the tonal resonance on the cells and other such meat space stuff. There are a lot of things that cause sympathetic vibrations in matter. Most people are not aware of this, but if you live in a large city, the feeling you get when you are out away from civilization (like I mean, out there, away from power lines a must), is the lack of the low tonal B vibration caused by the 60 (or 50, or 47, or 78, depending on your country of origin) in the air. Electricity flowing through power lines in power grids causes a tonal vibration that can actually be measured by human senses. You can actually feel the difference. As an anecdotal reference, I was travelling cross counrty (USA), and was out in the desert (no power lines within several score miles). It was peaceful. It was quiet. My senses felt jazzed and alive, mainly because they weren't constantly being bombarded by that 60 cycle hum of electrics around me. Anyway. So natch.
Finally they release this thing. I've been waiting for this hardware since last MWNY. But anyway. Have you taken a look at the pricing for the 2GB PCI Fibre cards they're selling? $500. Good god that is cheap. I haven't seen a decent fibre card for less than $1500 (retail). Must have this hardware (actually, I will once it ships). Yay for me. More fibre stuff. Client : I want something really big, and really fast, and really cheap. Me : Then you don't want anything from these guys (M$).
Re:Probably little kids that did that.
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Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
I used to work at an Apple Specialist shop. We had a customer bring in an iMac with a mysterious brown fluid in the casing. Turns out his son, a 2 year old, decided that the iMac needed to have maple syrup poured into the vents on the top of the machine. 2 Quarts of maple syrup. Ever smelled burnt electonics and maple syrup? Made all us technicians hungry (Mmmmm, pancakes and silicon). So anyway. We took the machine apart, down do it's bare bones. Washed and rinsed all the components with isopropyl alcohol and dried it off with compressed air. Let it sit for a day. Reassembled and, viola (damn alto violins), we had a working Mac again. No damage. In fact, as far as I know, the machine is still in use. Amazing. Had another friend who worked in a PC shop come to me with a story about pretty much the same thing, only this time with Cayro syrup on a Compaq. No compaq, no more.
So, now we have one source for all our radio entertainment. Actually, it's more allow the lines that Clear Channel and the RIAA are dictating to us what is "popular" and what is "cool" and what is "hot". This is known as programming. Social programming. They dictate what you hear, when you hear it, and how you should feel about it. They want to control you. And the money they get from the advertisers supports them. Welcome to the age of information control. Welcome to a corporation telling you what, when, how, where, and who you should be. Yes, Clear Channel is affiliated with the RIAA. Clear Channel is the number 1 distribution and marketting tool of the recording industry. More than MTV. More than your record store. The control the airwaves, they control the content. You just sit there and soak up the waves. The only freaking radio station that has national and local coverage that I've heard in a long time is NPR. Yeah, it's not the latest Britney pop crud, it's historical pop. But it's also national and a little local news. EFF, FSF, OSS, and anyone with a brain should support this existing institution. Cause guess what? If Clear Channel could, they'd buy up those frequencies and broadcast more consumerism and mind control. Guess what would happen to the national social structure if Clear Channel stopped broadcasting for a week? Maybe people would wake up and start going into withdrawl. That would be fun. Can't get your fix of stupid mind numb and you realize just how much a a messed up society America has allowed itself to become. Control by corporations. The board of director decides that you need to see more jiggling boobies to pacify you. You need to hear another bad commodity "punk/hardrock" band who is angry, rebels without a clue. And it's not just radio. Television has been this way from the beginning. Look at cable. 99 channels of centralized propaganda (CNN/FOXNews/MSNBC/etc.). And don't think they won't fight to keep it that way. And they have the money. They have the control. They have the "law" on thier side. As long as they keep the money rolling in, the get to keep the castle. I say all this and know I will be scoffed at as a lunatic. I will be speken about with unkind words and referred to as a little too paranoid for a rational reader to agree with. But 20 minutes into the future has already happened. We are living in the age of information control. And besides, Max Headroom was just a bot with a tweaked logic algorythm modelled after a paranoid, hyper, driven man who hit his head because he tried to speak about "truth". Truth only exist. No one ever sees it for what it is. And we are all lying. Every one of us. Screw it, I always wanted to be a console jockey. I even know a few bars that will serve nicely as good hang-outs in the Sprawn when it finally gets it's name. Jack in, have fun, but watch out for that black ice. It killer.
Measure a photon? I'd like to see that one...
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 1
considering a photon is a poor mans explination for something that behaves like a particle and a wave at the same time. I learned in first year physics that the only way to measure something is to stop is. But since you can't exactly stop light, only measure it's reflection or absorbtion, it makes it rather difficult to accurately gauge it's speed (distance over time). There is also the fact that the speed of light is a mathematical calculation based on measurable observations. The only issue with such calculations is that it is subject to the hypothesis that light can be measured in the same way as a particle. Now the next incongruous statement I shall make devolves to the actual question of energy. Einstien's theory of relativity is actually the equation for measuring the energy of a particle in relation to object mass. This is actually an attempt at as close to a grand unification theory as has been widely accepted in this civilization (of course, religion is the other one, but that's another topic not to be breached today). There's also the wonderful coinsidence that Einstein's theory is called the theory of relativity, not the theory of constants, so every variable in the equation is relative to the application of the theory. It's freakin New Year's Eve (actually 4AM) and I'm posting a stupid reply to a way too intellectual discussion on Slashdot. I have no life. Screw it, I'm going to bed.
heh, iRack's rock. I have one as my primary domain/web/mail/ftp/sql server. Running at 266mhz no less. And you want to know the best part about it? No one knows there's a Mac in my server rack by looking. It looks like a regular 1U rack mount server. Yeah, it's not the fastest but it handles what I need.
So what if they want to use XP. Let 'em, unless they are asking you to maintain the machines for them. Then you hit them with the standard Windows administrator line. Overtime. Since it adds to your normal management duties, and since security is critical, you will need to spend extra time maintaining these machines. And since they are no your network and you are the network admin, you should be responsible for the machines on your network. So make sure they only have a standard user account in XP, and be sure to use a good secure password scheme so they can't admin the machine and install any applications without authorization. In fact, I'm sure you have a Mac OS X server on your network (right?) so set it up as a primary domain controller and make thier user accounts be roaming profiles. That way, thier user accounts are easily managed on the server and not on the desktop machine. Essentially, you've then taken away all thier control of these machines. They can use them to run the software you deem safe on your network, and it's a PC running Windows XP Professional. If they have any issues after that, they can suck on it because you have bent over backwards to give them what they wanted. A corporate envionrment, where the machine is an asset of the company and therefor, belongs to the company and is maintained by the company. If you need help in setting up these systems, there are tons of resources on the web, or you could even hire a consultant (whoo-hoo, more IT spending, even in a recession!!!). And the best thing is, you with charging overtime, you can afford to save up for a new Tibook running at 1Ghz (sweet machines). Heh. If that doesn't get them, then the other option would be to do what someone else suggested and make them sign a waiver of resposibility for any risks.
And for that comment on Macs. Most applications for Mac OS X have to be installed in the/Applications/ directory (at least the ones that come with OS X). Otherwise, when you run an update, the updater doesn't work correctly because the install path for the applications is set to be/Applications/. I'm sure they could throw in a search for file location script in there as well, but for the most part it hasn't happened yet. Actually, I like having all my GUI apps located in the same place. I provides at least a little constancy for using my computer or telling people where to find applications on thier computers. I also appreciate the Cocoa approach to having the Applications in reality being just bundled directories. Much cleaner user interface. That and you can drag and drop an application and you don't have to worry about missing a file necessary for the app to function. If only the freaking Carbon developers would get a clue. But then again, that's legacy code for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, whatever dude.
Oh, and PDF stands for Portable _DOCUMENT_ Format. Not data. Here's the definition. http://www.auburn.edu/helpdesk/glossary/pdf.html
Please be educated beyond reading man pages and thinking you know what you are talking about.
Oh, and Palms can process PDF's yet most can't get on the web, so that kills your arguement on java. Plus, emacs is for teh gay. Real men use vi.
Go read Jon "Hannibal" Stokes article about the world of benchmarking., over on his site, Ars Technica.
h tm l
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q99/benchmarking-1.
This will give you at least a basis for understanding why benchmarking is used, and what makes or breaks any given set of results. Also, feel free to argue about anything and everything that is said about these benchmarks, since, apparently, everyone of you is in the benchmarking labs day in and day out, testing systems and looking at the results on a scientific level.
I also think benchmark scores are, quite frankly, marketing bullshit. A processor designer can tweak a program and a compiler any number of ways to increase thier scores. The true test would be to use the SPEC benchmark suite with no flags set on the compiles for either platform. That way you are testing just the base processor, with no SIMD instructions, no disabling of the software prefetch algorhythms, no "cheats" as it were. Then test those same systems with every trick in the book thrown in. Then look at the difference. This will probably give you a better picture of the performance you will see in real world activities.
If you have a machine that absulotely sucks donkey when using no "cheats" and then you see this amazing boost in performance when the "cheats" are enabled, you probably are dealing with a highly optimized and specialized instruction set, which can be either very good for specific applications, but absolutely horrible for programmers who don't have access to, or don't bother to research, the abilities of that processor.
These are the benchmarks I'm interested in most. And it'll be at least late September before we see any of that.
Also, while all this is interesting, in an intelllectual sort of way, what about the actual perfomance gains over the current crop of G4's? Why not take a look at the difference between the SPEC scores of the dual 1.42GHz G4 towers, vs. the dual 2GHz G5's? That alone will tell you more about the increase in speed and power that has been delivered. If Apple had been smart, instead of trying to impress and piss off the x86 sparkheads they should have posted those scores as well, to give a real side by side comparrison between the speed and power of the G5 vs the bottlenecked, processor starving, gimp that is the G4. But that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? And you know marketing is all about confusing your consumer into beleiving that the latest and greatest is really what they want, not some old machine from 3 months ago...
Um doofbunny, the freaking announcements aren't even over yet. The hardware hadn't even been announced when this story was up on the front page. That's lame. That's called not getting the whole story. That's called whatever you want to call it but it's just slack.
Dude, the keynote isn't even over yet, and you're posting to the site about the news. Geez, talk about jumping the gun...
From what I could gather from trying to translate the legalese in the archived version of the license agreement, SCO didn't release the source code for System V Unix.
/.) and discussed it with some people. While SCO's actions are dispicable (thank you Daffy Duck for improving my vocabulary) and seemingly unethical, they are _not_ illegal unless they are truly acting in a fraudulent manner. What's very disheartening is that the Justice Department will probably not even investigate the business practices of the canopy group, because as I've seen in the business world, what they are doing (basically trading stock between different entities, creating more capitol by having thier stock trades show up on the radar of Wall Street, thus "tricking" investors into putting outside investment capitol into the companies since thier is movement on thier charts), is what has become known in the common media as "accepted trade practices". Any of you corporate types (yes, there are corporate type geeks) look into your books. See how many entities exist within your corporate structure. How much money gets shuffled around between your companies? How often? For what purpose? I bet a lot of money changes hands between your different entities that seems to come and go out of nowhere. This is where Enron screwed up. They started spending some of that non-existent money. In reality, they had absolutely no cash to spend, and they went out and bought real shit with it, instead of trading out thier stock and making more money on the market that they could "really" use in thier operations. But that's just me talking out of my ass after observing the way American capitolism works. Maybe I can join thier club now and start making imaginary money start appearing as well and fool a few investors into paying for a lavish lifestyle of wheeling and dealing with OPM (Other Peoples Money). Wow. It's the 80's powerbroker shit all over again.
[quote]
3. LICENSED SOURCE CODE PRODUCTS
The SOURCE CODE PRODUCTS to which SCO grants rights under this
Agreement are restricted to the following UNIX Operating Systems,
including SUCCESSOR OPERATING SYSTEMs, that operate on the 16-Bit
PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System
with specific exclusion of UNIX System V and successor operating
systems:
16-Bit UNIX Editions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
32-bit 32V
[/quote]
Please not the line about "specific exclusion of UNIX System V and sucessor operating systems.
The source that was released was not the System V source, which is what they are licensing out now and what thier whole blah blah yackety noise is all about. Also, the UNIX that is archived on those sites (from a quick glance) does not include the source for UNIX System V. Remember kids, Solaris is a System V UNIX. AIX is a System V Unix. They are all based on the System V UNIX code base.
Any other version (System 32V, System 4, System 3, System 6 or 7), is a _different_ codebase, so if you see a source code tree out there on the web that's freely available, make sure you find out what code base it is before you go concluding that SCO's argument is wrong.
However, one funny thing. I wonder how much code repetition is in the System V, System 6, and System 7 codebases? I wonder if you dig into those source trees whether you'll find things in common with Linux code as well. Someone with more time on thier hands than me should probably look into that, just to start looking for possible clues as to the code that SCO might be ragging the Linux community about. I wonder if we can't find developer comments that match word for word in those codebases in the linux kernel source?
And on a final note, the Forbes article is rather sobering.
I read it yesterday (before it was posted on
Um, no.
Simply because Microsoft would never truly give away software licenses unless it was to tie someone down to thier platform. The headline "School turns down $43K in Windows PCs" could easily be turned into "School wins $43K is useless software, has policy not to promote closed source monopoly".
And the second on you made up makes no sense. Um, hello, these are Microsoft employees. You know they don't have kids. They just assimalate other peoples kids...
Ah, but you seem to miss the advantages of a VM. If you can see exactly how you were compramised, you can then repeat the attack after going back and securing the vulnerability. Thus enabling you to have a fast and easy way to determine vulnerabilities in your code execution. Another great advantage of a virtual machine is that you can very simply and easily revert to a "clean" copy of your machine, before the attack, and have an effective downtime of 3 seconds (the time it takes to stop the VM, select the clean copy, and boot the VM again). So in a production enviornment, you have an added layer of redundancy.
Take a database as an example. You have your tape backups, your transaction logs, etc. etc, but what if your registry (I'm talking people running MSSQL, but for other platform, think of what happens when someone crafts an improper looping arguement into an SQL write query, hosing your data structures) gets completely foobared. What do you do? Do you a) pull out the tape and have a whole bunch of downtime? Or do you just boot an older VM and apply the transaction logs to the database just before the point where everything went stupid? I think the VM would be a much faster recovery (if you consider that you are running a database that stores several hundred gigs of data, this makes more and more sense). Anyway. It's just a question of whether you feel you can implement and manage it.
At least it would seem so from a few perspectives. Why the hell do you need to pump your music selection out to the masses? Do you really think I want to hear you favorite crap indie garage band mp3's? I mean really, people. Get over yourselves. If you really want to share your music selection with a friend (and I mean someone you know by thier birthname, not some jack off in another country with the AIM logon of DickBig070002) there are simple and perfectly legal ways of doing so. Burn a CD, or, if you're so smart, set up your own private pptp session between your 2 Macs and share that way. But honestly folks, what the hell do you need to be wasting bandwidth for? Does that bootleg of Madonna's latest album make you naughty bits tingle? Do you feel like you are a part of the revolution sitting at your computer taking money from the pockets of the performers and artists? Good for you. Viva la revelutione you bad ass. My god. No wonder everyone hates you. And don't think for a minute that I don't have aspirations of grandeure, and dream of becoming the next underground sensation that people will love forever and my music will be the greatest colelction of free speech/thought on the internet. Guess what. You are a dime a dozen in the world, so get over yourself. Go outside. Say hi to your neighbor and share some music with them. See if you don't enjoy someones actual company for once. Maybe they own a Mac too and you just didn't know if because you were too freakin busy posting on /. how much the RIAA and MPAA and Microsuck was beating you down. Asshats. All of you.
As an aside, I think it's pathetic how the RIAA pressured Apple into stopping the internet sharing. Come on, there was a hard coded limit of how many users could connect at one time. Plus, anything you stream on the net, whether it's audio or video or peanut butter, you can _ALWAYS_ capture to file. Bits are bits are bits. Nothing will ever stop them from being captured and written to disk. Asshats. That is the nature of computers. Geez. Maybe the RIAA thinks that the internet is a magical cloud of pixie dust and the data is magically wisked from one computer to another and if you have the pink pixie dust of the grand poohbah DRM you can't capture the data bits (kind of like a good acid trip). Morons. The entertainment industry is about ethereal things. Only it's too settled into the world of brick and mortar. They need to get out of the concrete and back into the minds of the audience. Interesting paradox; there are 5 media giant companies, who own 100's of affiliate distributions, that pump out the same 2 things, black or white (sides of the issue, not color of the skin). Maybe the biggest failure of our society is that we are such a binary culture.
Anyway. Enough postulating. Back to coding (WORK SLAVE WORK)
Um, no. I have to disagree on this one point. The early release crud. Guess what? It's not Apple that is causing the issues. It's the distibution channels that the independants are going through. You see, most resellers have had years of dealing with places like Ingram Micro and TechData for thier Apple product. They have credit accounts and what not with these distribution channels. Apple Stores do not. They get thier product directly from the warehouse. So if you think about this logically, when a reseller orders a product for stocking, they most likely order it from the distribution channel, not directly from Apple, since having a credit account with both Apple and Ingram/TechData is an added expense on thier books. So when Apple releases a product, the main reason the Apple Stores get thiers first is because the boxes don't have to be routed to the distribution houses, checked, inventoried, and processed to be shipped to the end destination. This can add up to almost a week to a month depending on the volume of orders and how well the account manager for the distribution house handles the work load. This is the "unfair" advantage that the Apple Stores get in distribution. Not some kind of freakin conspiracy.
Oh, and I know this because I worked for a reseller that decided to continue using Ingram Micro instead of getting a credit account with Apple directly and getting the product from the source. And that all I have to say about that subject.
Maybe one day I'll have my very own droid that can go with me everywhere and have all my pr0...um, I mean files with me so I can do all the stuff I want while on the move. All you need to do is make this little think the size of a trashcan, put some big-ass rechargable batteries in it, add some beeping and chirping and whistling, and there you have it. Your personal assistant in a can.
Makes life easier when you don't have to lug arounda laptop. Simply have it follow you around. Of course the early models will have to have a remote to control it, but later version will add autonomous following and features such as that. Imagine if it could also connect into the internet wirelessly and allow you to walk around and read your e-mail and surf the web/work from the park. That's where the computer and robotics industry should be focusing. Bring everyone thier own personal assistant and boom, instant fame and fortune. You know all the Star Wars geeks will be clamouring for one.
The real questions will be , "Does it run Windows or Mac OS X?"
Heh.
Dean Kamen could even adapt his Segue to have it function on 2 wheels just like the real R2-D2 from the movies. Now wouldn't that be interesting?
Heh-heh. And they also wonder why the majority of people out there just don't 'get it'. I've always said the computer industry should really follow Apple's lead and make the computer more of an appliance for the dolts and a super machine for the experts. Amazingly Apple has managed to do this with Mac OS X. A 5 year old can use the GUI, and the crudgy old smelly *nix hacker can go hog wild on the command line. Now that's something I'm waiting for Windows to copy...
TNN now owns the rights to the franchise and they are making NEW episodes. And get this. They got John Kricfalucci (sp?) to make them. He created those characters to begin with and if any of you remember, those were aduly oriented cartoons. I mean seriously adult. And yet, kids loved it too, mainly because they either ignored the "adult" things, or just didn't get them. Then Nickelodeon kicked Johnboy out and started writing "clean" Ren and Stimpy. And guess what happened then? The ratings dropped like a brick and they ended up selling the franchise. Hooray! Now we can get more of the great wackiness of the J.K. days and get those belly laughs like we used to. Just though you should know.
What if this whole portable home directories thing is more along there lines. .Mac (it only read your Library and then starts a slow download of all your other stuff, with some kind of algorhythm that pulls your most recently used items first). There's an interesting thought. Of course, this means that all those UI hackers are going to throw a hissy fit, but quite frankly I could care less (and so could Apple for that matter probably). I don't know how they'd pull it off with today's existing Directory Services but maybe they've been pulling extra hours in the programming department and figured out how to do it seemlessly (with only a few bugs). Also, it's very simple to sync a home directory to a remote server using several existing utilities (rsync, Mike Bombich's stuff, MacOSXLabs.org stuff). What would be great is if Apple implements this for us so we don't have to sit there and configure servers all the freaking time. Anyway. That's my thoughts on this whole "leapfrog" issue. I'd love to be right, but somehow I doubt it.
Take your iPod (10GB, whatever). You put your home directory on it. Then you go to another computer, plug your iPod in. Log into the computer with your account, even through that computer was never really set up with your user profile at first, but the OS detects your home directory, adds you to the Directory Services (temporarily) and lets you use the computer with your settings, your files, your e-mail, your bookmarks, etc. The only thing that would be missing would be silly UI hacks or other funky applications that may not be installed on that machine (hence, Apple's distaste for UI hacks). Then they take a lot of those silly UI hacks that don't go completely against Apple's own UI guidelines and they implement them in 10.3. Now, you can go to any Mac running 10.3 and have your stuff with you. If you don't have an iPod, you can set up the Mac to pull your home directory from
Because of simple things like VNC and keyloggers that sit between the keyboard and main memory or in the case of display signal splitters that can capture the frame buffer from the graphics chip and send it out on the wire.
Of course this is silly because all you'd have to do is set up some Van Eck phreaking and steal the frame buffer from the electonic signals being sent through that "secure channel" between the display interface and the graphics chip. Yeah, Neal Stephenson is sci-fi, but there is science there. I'll let you work out how.
Plus, this is just silly considering that a "secure" computer system is one that sits in a EMI cage and doesn't have any connection to the outside world.
Blarg!
Who would buy a computer without a keyboard?
Um. Tablet PC.
Seems Willy Gates is hot for it....
Okay, I think some of you need a little education on how Apple operates. /Applications/Safari.app/Content/MacOS/ and typing in the command 'strings Safari | grep June'. You will see two line in the binary that read "Safari Beta will expire on June 30, 2003.
First off, the whole beta program fro Safari is/was managed by a small team. Second, that team has a goal to release either the next public beta or the full 1.0 release by June 30th, 2003. You can verify this by opening up the terminal and navigating to
Safari Beta expired on June 30, 2003."
This means that they are on a deadline and have a lot of work to do. A lot of people who have posted here are suggesting that they should do MORE work and add easter eggs/stenographics/blah-blah/security tracking to the seeded releases. Now you tell me, does that sound like a good way to reach a deadline? Especially one that is hard coded into the binary of the public beta? Now you could argue that putting in an arbitrary deadline is a "bad idea" or whatever, but I think it's a great way to keep a project both on track and managable. Pressure to perform and all that rot.
The other thing a lot of people are apparently misguided in thinking is that Apple was naive about releasing these developer seeds. For this you have to understand a little bit about Apple's corporate culture and social philosophy. While you may not agree with it, I and a lot of others, think it's a great experiment and helps move our culture along. To understand thier philosophy, just look at Apple's public stance on music piracy. They have put in place some very basic and easily defeatable mechanisms with the iPod that prevents users from sharing music freely with thier iPod. They have not completely crippled your ability to share music, however they do put s little sticker on the iPod's that says "Don't steal music." They have also publicly stated in many debates about music piracy that it is a social problem, not a technological one, and that technology will not solve the issue. So in that statement, they have made reasonably clear that they don't really want to spend a lot of time working on something that they see as inevitable.
They also want to trust those that they sign up for the seed programs. If you can't trust your testers to give you good reliable feedback, you are wasting your time and effort and you won't get your project completed or your bug fixed.
Now the thing with the Safari seeds is that they gave the seed users 3 chances, basically 3 strikes, your out. After the 3rd strike, they pulled the program because they saw it as more detrimental that useful. I'm sure they started getting an unmanagable amount of negative feedback or duplicate bug reports, or even worse, useless ones because all these people that downloaded the seeds that were not part of the seed program probably started sending in incomplete bug reports or even worse, stupid things like "the thingy with the buttons, doesn't work on my puter, fix it now assholes", or something to that effect. This means that those managing the bug database and trying to glean useful information or even just track any real bugs now have to sift through thousands of shit reports. Needle in haystack time.
Any of this sound reasonable.
And finally, the most telling thing would be the reports on rumor sites. Apple hates rumor sites. They are counter productive to thier business (believe it or now, they are). If someone reads on a rumor site that such and such feature is missing/broken/doesn't work or whatever on a rumor site, and bases thier judgement on that rumor sites word (I know, stupid people, but it does happen, I have plenty of ad hom proof), they end up loosing a potential customer, or thier market image gets tarnished.
I don't know about most of you, but these are the reasons that I see Apple's decision to pull the plug as both necessary and smart on Apple's part. Argue all you want about "the way it should be" or whatever, but these are the realities of this business. If you
The current "computer industry" doesn't see the web as an application development enviornment. They see it as an advertising/marketing showplace. Some people (education/individuals/orgs) see it as an information sharing and collecting service (which is what www was supposed to be). However the only new thing that I've seen that made me go "hey, that's pretty nifty, and sort of new" has been the advent of "Web Services" such as XML based applications like Watson and now Sherlock 3 from Apple. Where content is pulled from a source but the source isn't exactly all planned out. It's annoying to have to look at some websites that are just flash animations and pretty fonts that look like scribblings of a demented 4 year old. I want the info, the words that mean something, the movie clip, the data. I don't want your love of the color puce to make me want to retch when I'm trying to look up a flight time, or read and article (web designers, take note, you know who you are, and I hate you because of it).
We should be using the web more as a resource for storing and retrieving data. Graphics and pretty page layouts are nice and all but if I could, I'd abolish most of it and just look for a summary of the info with a little link saying "Want to know more? Click here..."
Blarg.
It's the data.
It's all about the data.
Information wants to be in your pants.
In Soviet Russia, the pants are in the hot grits.
Bleh.
Actually, there is a note called the "brown" note. It's a tone that causes humans to lose bowel control (I don't know if this has already been mentioned, I read comments at a level 3 or above rating. Yeah, I'm lazy, fuck you trolls *thwack*). There are also tones that induce vomiting, nasal bleeds, and lung failure, heart failure, and epiliptic seizures in non-eplilectis subjects. It has to do with the tonal resonance on the cells and other such meat space stuff. There are a lot of things that cause sympathetic vibrations in matter. Most people are not aware of this, but if you live in a large city, the feeling you get when you are out away from civilization (like I mean, out there, away from power lines a must), is the lack of the low tonal B vibration caused by the 60 (or 50, or 47, or 78, depending on your country of origin) in the air. Electricity flowing through power lines in power grids causes a tonal vibration that can actually be measured by human senses. You can actually feel the difference.
As an anecdotal reference, I was travelling cross counrty (USA), and was out in the desert (no power lines within several score miles). It was peaceful. It was quiet. My senses felt jazzed and alive, mainly because they weren't constantly being bombarded by that 60 cycle hum of electrics around me.
Anyway.
So natch.
Finally they release this thing. I've been waiting for this hardware since last MWNY. But anyway. Have you taken a look at the pricing for the 2GB PCI Fibre cards they're selling? $500. Good god that is cheap. I haven't seen a decent fibre card for less than $1500 (retail). Must have this hardware (actually, I will once it ships). Yay for me. More fibre stuff.
Client : I want something really big, and really fast, and really cheap.
Me : Then you don't want anything from these guys (M$).
I used to work at an Apple Specialist shop. We had a customer bring in an iMac with a mysterious brown fluid in the casing. Turns out his son, a 2 year old, decided that the iMac needed to have maple syrup poured into the vents on the top of the machine. 2 Quarts of maple syrup. Ever smelled burnt electonics and maple syrup? Made all us technicians hungry (Mmmmm, pancakes and silicon). So anyway. We took the machine apart, down do it's bare bones. Washed and rinsed all the components with isopropyl alcohol and dried it off with compressed air. Let it sit for a day. Reassembled and, viola (damn alto violins), we had a working Mac again. No damage. In fact, as far as I know, the machine is still in use. Amazing.
Had another friend who worked in a PC shop come to me with a story about pretty much the same thing, only this time with Cayro syrup on a Compaq. No compaq, no more.
So, now we have one source for all our radio entertainment. Actually, it's more allow the lines that Clear Channel and the RIAA are dictating to us what is "popular" and what is "cool" and what is "hot". This is known as programming. Social programming. They dictate what you hear, when you hear it, and how you should feel about it. They want to control you. And the money they get from the advertisers supports them. Welcome to the age of information control. Welcome to a corporation telling you what, when, how, where, and who you should be. Yes, Clear Channel is affiliated with the RIAA. Clear Channel is the number 1 distribution and marketting tool of the recording industry. More than MTV. More than your record store. The control the airwaves, they control the content. You just sit there and soak up the waves. The only freaking radio station that has national and local coverage that I've heard in a long time is NPR. Yeah, it's not the latest Britney pop crud, it's historical pop. But it's also national and a little local news. EFF, FSF, OSS, and anyone with a brain should support this existing institution. Cause guess what? If Clear Channel could, they'd buy up those frequencies and broadcast more consumerism and mind control. Guess what would happen to the national social structure if Clear Channel stopped broadcasting for a week? Maybe people would wake up and start going into withdrawl. That would be fun. Can't get your fix of stupid mind numb and you realize just how much a a messed up society America has allowed itself to become. Control by corporations. The board of director decides that you need to see more jiggling boobies to pacify you. You need to hear another bad commodity "punk/hardrock" band who is angry, rebels without a clue.
And it's not just radio. Television has been this way from the beginning. Look at cable. 99 channels of centralized propaganda (CNN/FOXNews/MSNBC/etc.). And don't think they won't fight to keep it that way. And they have the money. They have the control. They have the "law" on thier side. As long as they keep the money rolling in, the get to keep the castle.
I say all this and know I will be scoffed at as a lunatic. I will be speken about with unkind words and referred to as a little too paranoid for a rational reader to agree with. But 20 minutes into the future has already happened. We are living in the age of information control. And besides, Max Headroom was just a bot with a tweaked logic algorythm modelled after a paranoid, hyper, driven man who hit his head because he tried to speak about "truth". Truth only exist. No one ever sees it for what it is. And we are all lying. Every one of us.
Screw it, I always wanted to be a console jockey. I even know a few bars that will serve nicely as good hang-outs in the Sprawn when it finally gets it's name.
Jack in, have fun, but watch out for that black ice. It killer.
considering a photon is a poor mans explination for something that behaves like a particle and a wave at the same time.
I learned in first year physics that the only way to measure something is to stop is. But since you can't exactly stop light, only measure it's reflection or absorbtion, it makes it rather difficult to accurately gauge it's speed (distance over time). There is also the fact that the speed of light is a mathematical calculation based on measurable observations. The only issue with such calculations is that it is subject to the hypothesis that light can be measured in the same way as a particle.
Now the next incongruous statement I shall make devolves to the actual question of energy. Einstien's theory of relativity is actually the equation for measuring the energy of a particle in relation to object mass. This is actually an attempt at as close to a grand unification theory as has been widely accepted in this civilization (of course, religion is the other one, but that's another topic not to be breached today).
There's also the wonderful coinsidence that Einstein's theory is called the theory of relativity, not the theory of constants, so every variable in the equation is relative to the application of the theory.
It's freakin New Year's Eve (actually 4AM) and I'm posting a stupid reply to a way too intellectual discussion on Slashdot. I have no life.
Screw it, I'm going to bed.
Someone please explain to me why I have no legs?
heh, iRack's rock.
I have one as my primary domain/web/mail/ftp/sql server. Running at 266mhz no less. And you want to know the best part about it? No one knows there's a Mac in my server rack by looking. It looks like a regular 1U rack mount server. Yeah, it's not the fastest but it handles what I need.
FOO
So what if they want to use XP. Let 'em, unless they are asking you to maintain the machines for them. Then you hit them with the standard Windows administrator line. Overtime. Since it adds to your normal management duties, and since security is critical, you will need to spend extra time maintaining these machines. And since they are no your network and you are the network admin, you should be responsible for the machines on your network. So make sure they only have a standard user account in XP, and be sure to use a good secure password scheme so they can't admin the machine and install any applications without authorization. In fact, I'm sure you have a Mac OS X server on your network (right?) so set it up as a primary domain controller and make thier user accounts be roaming profiles. That way, thier user accounts are easily managed on the server and not on the desktop machine. Essentially, you've then taken away all thier control of these machines. They can use them to run the software you deem safe on your network, and it's a PC running Windows XP Professional. If they have any issues after that, they can suck on it because you have bent over backwards to give them what they wanted. A corporate envionrment, where the machine is an asset of the company and therefor, belongs to the company and is maintained by the company. If you need help in setting up these systems, there are tons of resources on the web, or you could even hire a consultant (whoo-hoo, more IT spending, even in a recession!!!). And the best thing is, you with charging overtime, you can afford to save up for a new Tibook running at 1Ghz (sweet machines). Heh. If that doesn't get them, then the other option would be to do what someone else suggested and make them sign a waiver of resposibility for any risks.
/usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin/ /usr/share/bin/ /usr/sbin/
/Applications/ directory (at least the ones that come with OS X). Otherwise, when you run an update, the updater doesn't work correctly because the install path for the applications is set to be /Applications/. I'm sure they could throw in a search for file location script in there as well, but for the most part it hasn't happened yet. Actually, I like having all my GUI apps located in the same place. I provides at least a little constancy for using my computer or telling people where to find applications on thier computers. I also appreciate the Cocoa approach to having the Applications in reality being just bundled directories. Much cleaner user interface. That and you can drag and drop an application and you don't have to worry about missing a file necessary for the app to function. If only the freaking Carbon developers would get a clue.
Yeah. Whatever. Windowz.
And for that comment on Macs.
Most applications for Mac OS X have to be installed in the
But then again, that's legacy code for you.
I don't sig, I just eat cheese.