Most (bar modern games) apps install and run fine on 95...in fact it might even be one of the 'faster' os's released by ms....
Which is precisely why I question the quality of the upgrade. Why would it hurt MicroSoft to release Win95 for free if 98, ME and XP are so wonderful? 98 was 95 with USB, ME was 98 with new icons, which leaves XP as the first major upgrade to the home user's version of Windows since 1995.
I find the entire matter odd really. Apple make OS 7.5 (and perhaps even 7.6) and lower available for free and have shown no signs of changing that. For people who have old hardware (such as the PowerPC 7200 which provides net access to our lounge room) an old OS is vital to making the system usable. I guess it's not really fair to expect a company to give away licences for anything but you have to wonder about the quality of upgrades if ending support for a 5 or 6 year old OS is going to affect a lot of people.
What do you mean? They will have been swamped by/. users almost instantly after the story was posted. This is slashcode 2.0 - it has faster response times.....
I quite like the Debian installer as well, however it suffers from the same problem that all Linux installers seem to - it doesn't consistently get X configuration right. For a server that's not a problem, for a desktop machine it is. Support for graphics cards, monitors, input devices etc in XFree86 seems to be pretty good now, but configuring it is still a nightmare. Installers (or better X) need to automatically detect the settings required and just work.
In fact, that's probably the biggest reason Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Once you get a system set up and configured right, it's fairly easy to use, particularly with KDE and GNOME these days, but if you can't get your system to that point then it's all for naught. Remember that not everyone has a local geek and Linux pretty much never comes preinstalled.
The chip is not likely to be the cause of melting - the DVD-ROM is. My housemates and I went on a CD copying spree one evening and would have copied about a hundred CDs using two burners, a ton of hard drive space (buffering) and about five CD-ROMs, including a G4 Cube. After some six hours of running the DVD-ROM constantly, it literally burnt the last CD we put into it. The CD came out slightly blackened and we decided to call it a night.
Notably though, the PowerBook G4 didn't have this problem - it's fan didn't even turn on.
We've done six major projects like this since March, and in all cases we finished within budget and on-schedule, and the systems are currently in production. They are all mission-critical systems running in either robotics environments or high-availability networks.
What do you mean by within budget? Do you mean that each party forked out exactly the amount of cash they said they would and so you are financially within budget, or do you mean that all resource usage was in line with the plan? The reason I ask, is that most projects that claim to be on schedule and within budget are actually way over budget but the extra hours put in by the development team (remember those long nights at work) aren't logged properly so the company can say it was on budget. By working with a fixed payment plan the whole way down the line, all you do is offset the over-budget problem from the client to the developers.
Worse yet these kinds of activities often lead to incorrect figures being used as the basis for estimation of the next project and so the budget just gets further out.
Even if this doesn't happen in your company, it shows that your company is not within budget because of fixed price payments. Though, it is very likely the reason you have gained extra business as the client is assured of the price and if you do go over budget, they get a bargain.
This is particularly interesting as it is quite rare on the net for the early to not wind up with the worm. A read an interview with the creators of Hotmail who said that the reason Hotmail was worth so much was because it was the first. Though there are now hundreds of free web-based mail providers, hotmail is by far and away the biggest because it was the first.
Largely, the same thing happened with search engines. I'm not as sure of the history but I would imagine Yahoo was in on the search engine idea very early in the game and that's how it became the biggest, but now google is leaving it for dead. It's nice to see that a quality product can come from behind in market share and take over - it doesn't happen too often in computing.
Well, the profit margin on a computer might be (after all costs) $30. It comes down to the fact that as soon as you provide decent tech support, every call probably costs you the profit you earned on 10 machines!
This is precisely why you won't get either quality hardware or good tech support - people insist on buying the cheapest crap they can find. If you walk into you local discount importer store and buy a garden rake, you'll get it for the cheapest price in town and it will come with a high failure rate and no warranty, but hey it was cheap so you don't care. So why is it that people expect quality and good tech support from dirt cheap computers? It's just not economically feasible.
If you raise your margins so that you can provide decent support, then you lose sales massively. The market is almost entirely price bound. There is no equivalent of BMW or other names that "mean quality" that people are willing to pay for (despite what Apple would desperately hope for).
This is where I disagree. There is a market for higher priced, well supported, quality computers. The fact that Apple has continued to survive and is currently performing better than most if not all computer manufacturers attests to that.
Sooner or later the general public will wake up to the fact that computers should just work and not break down constantly or crash. The/. crowd have been claiming this for some time on the software side - sooner or later people will realise Windows is crap and switch to Linux, but the same process will happen with hardware. When computers really become commodities they won't be upgraded every year so quality will become far more important. Most people buy crap because they figure that it will be out of date in a year anyway and they'd be best off buying another cheap replacement (or because they don't know enough to realise it's crap).
The fact is, you probably don't need to upgrade your computer every year. The only thing that requires the ridiculous amount of processing power in modern computers is games and even they rely more on graphics cards than CPU these days.
How long will it be before we wake up and realise that we just don't need the cutting edge?
It's probably also worth noting that QuickTime can use mp3 as it's sound encoding format. QuickTime itself isn't actually a codec, it's just like avi in that it stores a collection of tracks which are individually encoded. So the quality of QuickTime is entirely dependant on which codecs you choose and the options you give to those codecs.
The problem here isn't so much that they're saying that computer crime is illegal - more that the punishment is ridiculously severe. When deciding on a punishment, you have to decide what the aim of punishment is and how best to achieve that aim. In this case however, the law makers seem to have the aim of getting votes and the best method is to be tough on terrorism of any kind. It pulls at the heart strings of the nation so of course it gets votes.
Besides the political goals though, there are two main aims people have for utilising jail terms as punishment. The first is to remove the villian from society so that we can all forget about them and feel safe again - the death penalty is much more effective at achieving this aim so why not just use it? Some countries take this approach and it works, there is almost zero crime because people know if they commit a crime they are either executed or deported. The problem with this approach is twofold, firstly it expects everyone to lead a near perfect life and never make a mistake (think of how many teenagers commit once off offences to look cool and later learn from their mistakes and go on to be useful to society. The other problem is that eventually you punish the wrong guy and there's no way to set him free again.
The other aim for imprisonment is to teach people a lesson so they can rejoin society and live happily with everyone else again. Countries such as the US and Australia (and many others) with long jail terms don't acheive this goal at all well. The revolving door prison system is well known - most offenders wind up committing more crimes and going back into the system. However, countries which use shorter jail terms tend to have much lower crime rates. Instead of being locked up for 20 years and becoming bitter against society, you spend one or two years in a correctional facility where you are taught skills to help you survive in the world, go through drug rehabilitation if needed and work with councellors to deal with a disturbed past that may be haunting you. After that you have a much better chance of coming back out into society and not only abiding by the law, but also contributing to the community. If you think the cost of this approach is just too great, think about the cost of keeping people in prison for those extra 18 years and you'll find it works out a lot cheaper. It is not a 100% effective measure, some people will recommit and you need to have ways to deal with that - either through different methods of punishment or by longer imprisonments. It does however give criminals a chance to learn from their errors and adopt new skills to remove the temptation to recommit. After all, isn't that what punishment is all about?
I heard from a co-worker late last week that Apple was laying off quite a few employees. Can anyone confirm this? It seems rather odd that a company that (according to some Mac/iMac users that I know) releases "such a great product" would be cutting their work force by so much.
I tend to go to a lot of Apple seminars and follow the Mac world pretty well and I would be exceptionally surprised if Apple was laying off employees at this stage. They are really working hard to get OS 10.1 out the door on time and make sure it's really polished. I have certainly seen no indication that they are slowing down at all. I would say if there are any lay offs they'd be in marketing/management positions rather than the research and development areas.
I can't understand is how Apple can stay in business when their computers cost a hell of a lot more than the Intel based PCs?
There have been a large number of studies which suggest that the total cost of ownership of owning a Mac is significantly less than owning a Windows based PC. Admitedly, people and business' don't tend to notice these things, and go for the immediate lower price. Apple stay in business by actually making a profit on their systems rather than trying to continuously undercut the competition - note how many PC manufacturers are going out of business.
The number of units you ship is far less important than whether or not you make enough profit to cover your development, production, management and other costs. Apple's pricing does this, Gateway Australia's pricing didn't (hence they've gone out of business). Apple has made a profit for something like 11 out of the last 12 quarters which is better than most PC manufacturers.
Apple also has a very dedicated (fanatic) installed user base which helps a lot. Mostly though they have innovation. They put firewire and USB in their computers, they popularise wireless networking and "Apple ignited the desktop publishing revolution" (to take their marketing speel).
was pricing laptops a couple weeks ago, and for the money it would have cost me to buy a moderately loaded iMac, I could have gotten a Thinkpad for roughly half the cost, comparably equipped.
This surprises me, though it obviously depends largely on what you want from your laptop. I went out pricing laptops about 6 months ago (long time in IT I know) and found that Apple's laptops were far and away better value than the PCs. Not that they were cheaper, but they were clearly sturdier, more feature packed and most significantly had better screens and battery life. The cheap PC laptop world makes a lot of sacrifices in functionality. Either they have ridiculously small screens or poor quality screens and two or three hour battery life was normal. Then you tended to give up a CDROM to make the laptop smaller and many PC laptops (nowhere near as many these days though) don't have ethernet as standard. Then there's the lact of dual head ability (most do video mirroring) or a lack of video output options (note that the iBook does not do dual head either, which is why I type this on a Titanium PowerBook). Now, for some people these trade offs are worth the cost savings - for some people they aren't even trade offs, but just remove unwanted features. For many people (including me) these features are invaluable.
The final big advantage that I find with Apple is the OS. Mac OS X is a joy to use (I look forward to the reported responsiveness improvements of 10.1 naturally), there are rough edges and it is not perfect but the combination of UNIX and a solid, simple, clean, user friendly GUI is an absolute God send. I can happily use vim to hack away my perl scripts, test them with apache and postgresql and follow the design document which was written in Word. The lack of responsiveness that is currently in OS X is more than made up for by the fact that I don't have to reboot between Linux and MacOS anymore (for the record I don't remember the last time I booted into OS 9).
The morale: sometimes paying more in the short term is worthwhile in the long run, but it all depends on what you want to do.
except that a TV tuner card here in Australia costs under AUD$200, and a DV camera costs well over AUD$1500...in fact it may well end up costing more than the iMac.
Except that a TV tuner card is useless without fast SCSI hard drives and since you'll want them to be big, that makes a DV camera highly comparable in price considering the other functionality and benefits it has. Not to mention the fact that you avoid the problem of dropping frames which is so prevalent with TV tuner cards.
Censorship is anything that stops you from saying what you want to say or hearing what you want to hear - or at least, that seems to be the attitude of most people who complain about censorship. All the same, it is rather silly to ban songs because of a terrorist incident. Life must go on or the terrorists win and most songs on the list really aren't so inappropriate that they could be said to be inciting terrorism.
What interests me is that there are a heap of Linux users complaining that OSX has no apps when OSX runs almost any app that runs on Linux as well as those that run on OS X natively, those from NeXtStep and at a stretch classic Mac OS. Personally my favorite OS X app is vi though the Gimp isn't far behind. Go figure.
Extra NICs? SCSI adapter? TV tuner?
SCSI adapter - use firewire, TV tuner - DV camera does the job *much* better. Extra NIC you can't do easily, but seriously, how often do you need two? For a firewall/router/NAT box sure, but you're better off using a P100 or Mac LC instead of something as powerful as an iMac. The only other thing you'd want PCI for is for a second video card and that could be done through firewire if you really wanted (though I don't think such a product exists).
It strikes me as odd that something as portable as Java only seems to come for Windows and Linux. What about MacOS, Palm, BeOS, etc ad nausium. Now I'm sure that it could be ported but does it really offer any benefits over Java. Sure it's under the GPL but that is not an advantage in and of itself. Yes it supports C++ but you could have just created a C++ to Java bytecode compiler. It strikes me as very odd that people have such an aversion to non-free (speech) software. How about we concentrate on replacing the poor quality non-free software with free alternatives rather than trying to replace the things that already work.
Linus controlls what goes into the offical kernel,you are free to make your own fork, or to distribute patches against the kernel.
Sure, in theory, but how practical is it to fork the kernel? There's a difference between having the ability to do something and being allowed to do it. Also note, that just because you don't have the ability to maintain a kernel by yourself means that you should not be considered for the future of Linux, however, largely that is the possible situation. In any case, this is really heading way off topic, the point was to look at possible ways of improving the opensource model, not to say that Linus is a control freak. Next time I'll pick a less "religious" topic.
Agreed, and I really should have been more careful as I was in my original post to stress that not all free software projects work like that, however many do. It would seem that KDE works very much like FreeCard with which I have experience - it works on a concensus basis. It's not nessecarily a problem except for on occasions like this and instead of just blaming one of the other participant I thought it may be worth actually looking at some ways to prevent it happening.
Linus, unlike RMS, has never (to the best of my knowledge) insisted that even Linux be called Linux
But that's really not the point. I guess it's moving away from the event in question, but I was rather referring to the iron grip that Linus has around Linux and that most maintainers seem to have around their respective comments. Someone commented earlier (and I paraphrase) "that RMS would be screwed if Linus sold the rights to Linux". Now I don't know the legality of such a move, but it does sum up quite nicely how much Linux depends on Linus. Is it an operating system that we all own or is it Linus' OS that we all use and contribute to? Does it matter? Probably not, if it's a good OS, use it.
The problem with consensus is that you usually spend an awful lot of time talking and very little coding (as you found out).
Ah but once the talking was over with by goodness did we code rapidly. We were all agreed and focused on one goal and if the vacation period had lasted long enough to get a working product out the door we may well have made it all work. Not saying it's the best way to do it, but I think it had a lot of potential and it certainly avoids debacles like the topic of this story.
Here's an interesting view that will probably send my karma soaring into the negatives... Perhaps the glibc project, RMS and Drepper are not the only people who claim more control and glory than they deserve. What about the lead maintainers of most other free software projects as well? What about Linus Torvalds himself?
Now, I'm not trying to paint all maintainers as power hungry freaks by any means, but it is interesting to note that free software is not really a team of developers working together to create great software. Rather, it is a large group of developers submitting code to one central person who collates it and releases it. Is this a bad thing? Not nessecarily. When it works well and everyone is happy it's a good thing, but when more than one person want to be the lead maintainer or when noone wants to be the lead maintainer it very definitely is a bad thing.
How many projects do you know have been abandoned because their lead developer no longer has time for them - even when the software was extremely promising? How many pieces of software are actually created from scratch as an opensource effort rather than being initially created by one person and then released to the public.
How many patches are submitted because they are not taking the project in the right direction - even when they were technically competent and very useful? Naturally, software can't go in every direction or you wind up with emacs but it shows that even in free software, we go where others want us to because forking (despite being allowed) is just not a feasible option, as was pointed out in this message.
So, is there a better way of doing it? I'm not sure. I am part of the FreeCard Project which has no defined leader and is run based on consensus. We've had some very long debates about different things but eventually we come to a decision that everyone is happy about. Sadly, very little work is being done on the project these days because we never really gained enough developers to support the project and there were just too many jobs going undone - such as updating the web site. We haven't given up yet (and help is welcome) but it certainly shows that a concensus based approach doesn't solve all the problems.
The other option that I see is a "rapid forking development" whereby everyone maintains a version of the product and generally chaos reigns. It would certainly have some interesting properties but would require a massive amount of duplicated effort and be way too confusing to end users.
So the big question remains - what other options are there that avoid this "control bottleneck" that is so common in free software (whether or not it causes problems)?
Re:Apple must have a brain-wash app.
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because the G4 RISC instructions do more per cycle. Clearly the several people who made the statement would fail their comp arch course. The RISC strategy was to reduce the complexity of individual instructions,
Note how easily you exchanged the word instruction and the word cycle and by doing so fail your computer architecture 101 class. The idea of RISC is to do less per instruction, correct, but that does not imply less per cycle. 1 instruction is not nessecarily the same as 1 cycle. So in fact it is entirely true that the G4 does less per instruction and more per cycle than the P4.
It is important to remember that a university can't teach you everything. You need to take your learning into your own hands at times. My University only uses Java, and yet from that basis I've been able to easily pick up a variety of languages like C, C++, PERL, prolog, POP-11, Haskell and more. The reason I've been able to achieve this is because I don't try to pass my course, I try to understand it. People really notice that and I've been turning down part time programming jobs ever since my first year in the course.
Let me shed a little light on how you can pick up concepts that you hilighted were missing and that can be learned from Java:
Pointers - Java actually has support for pointers and you need to understand them to be able to use Java. The catch is that Java doesn't call them pointers. Java calls them references. eg: Object obj = new Object();
will return a reference, or pointer to an object. If you pass it as a parameter to a function any changes made to the object will affect the calling method. It's the same deal in C, but Java doesn't use the difficult syntax.
Memory Allocation - Java uses memory and as such memory allocation is important to understand. Again, it's simpler than in C, but it does exist. Where you declare a variable affects how it's memory is allocated and you have to be careful that all references to Objects are "released" when they're no longer required to avoid memory leaks. Avoiding recursive references to Objects requires some advanced memory management techniques at times.
Linking object files - Seriously, how hard is that to understand? Java uses the same idea again though, classes link to each other. The difference is when the links are made, C does it at compile time, Java does it at runtime.
Basically, Java doesn't make you think about these concepts like C does, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. Anyone at university should be working to understand things, not just pass the course. If your university only teaches you one language, go out and learn some others in your spare time! If you're not excited about learning IT concepts and want to do it, you need to find a new career because you'll be left behind.
The IT world moves rapidly, if you need someone to teach you everything you'll go nowhere fast. If you think for yourself and seek understanding not knowledge, you'll go a long way in this business.
I'm not sure why this is big news. As I look through the Darwin source code, I notice a directory called "vfs". Basically, it's a layered file system that allows you to add any number of "feature layers" that encrypt data, translate file names, compress data or whatever. Basically, it's a plug in architecture.
VFS seems to be more flexible than the plug in architecture planned for ReiserFS since it gives you the ability to override any call to the file system.
It's worth noting too that I don't know where VFS came from, it may not have been an Apple invention in Darwin but I don't see it in the NetBSD source code, so maybe it is.
In my residences at Griffith University Australia we have one of the great IT disaster stories of residential colleges. There is more politics in the system than computing knowledge and the value of the network has almost reached nil this year.
Our system is, in theory, run by the network admins, however accomodation services failed to provide funds to pay them for the extra work of maintaining the residential network and so generally they neglect us. So when we moved in two years ago expecting to have network access in our rooms, we had to fight for three months to get the network turned on. The cabling was done, but they weren't sure what impact activating it would have.
When the network was finally turned on, there was internal access only. Another three months passed before internet access was provided through a log in system (about 90 hours are provided free per semester with no way to buy more). The system however was based on NT and LDAP, was highly overloaded and poorly maintained so it was only functional about 30% of the time.
The one use for the network has been peer-to-peer internal filesharing and email. This year however, someone has disabled email. We have been unable to find out exactly what's going on or when it will be fixed. And so the debacles continue....
A few students (myself included) have set up and are maintaining a 486 running Linux which acts as WINS server, HTTP server to provide all the information on using the network (accomodation services has provided no tech support to speak of), it hosts mailing lists of all students on the network so they can be contacted about important events and so on and so on. There has been a suggestion to make it the mail server for res students as well, though I fear the poor little box couldn't cope with that much load.
The main cause of the problems that I can see is a lack of monetary investment by accomodation services and the massive amount of politics being played - students are being cut out of the information and decision making loops, but still expected to do all the tech support and network maintenance. We are powerless and expected to work miracles. I have managed to secure a meeting with the administrative contact point for the network this afternoon and will argue our case - probably presenting the idea of an entirely student run sub-network. Has anyone got any advice as to what our best options are here?
For the record (and those who don't understand what compilation actually does), you can't just recompile the kernel to have an entire operating system be ported to a different hardware platform. You need to port the applications (in this case including Aqua, Carbon, Cocoa, Classic, QuickTime, Quartz etc, etc) as well as the kernel to make it work. To prove this to yourself: take an intel Linux installation, recompile the kernel for PPC and try and make it work on a Mac. Sure it might boot (at least to runlevel 1) but try to run anything (including ls) and it will tell you it can't execute the binary. This is why StarOffice isn't available for PPC...
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Which is precisely why I question the quality of the upgrade. Why would it hurt MicroSoft to release Win95 for free if 98, ME and XP are so wonderful? 98 was 95 with USB, ME was 98 with new icons, which leaves XP as the first major upgrade to the home user's version of Windows since 1995.
I find the entire matter odd really. Apple make OS 7.5 (and perhaps even 7.6) and lower available for free and have shown no signs of changing that. For people who have old hardware (such as the PowerPC 7200 which provides net access to our lounge room) an old OS is vital to making the system usable. I guess it's not really fair to expect a company to give away licences for anything but you have to wonder about the quality of upgrades if ending support for a 5 or 6 year old OS is going to affect a lot of people.
What do you mean? They will have been swamped by /. users almost instantly after the story was posted. This is slashcode 2.0 - it has faster response times.....
I quite like the Debian installer as well, however it suffers from the same problem that all Linux installers seem to - it doesn't consistently get X configuration right. For a server that's not a problem, for a desktop machine it is. Support for graphics cards, monitors, input devices etc in XFree86 seems to be pretty good now, but configuring it is still a nightmare. Installers (or better X) need to automatically detect the settings required and just work.
In fact, that's probably the biggest reason Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Once you get a system set up and configured right, it's fairly easy to use, particularly with KDE and GNOME these days, but if you can't get your system to that point then it's all for naught. Remember that not everyone has a local geek and Linux pretty much never comes preinstalled.
Notably though, the PowerBook G4 didn't have this problem - it's fan didn't even turn on.
What do you mean by within budget? Do you mean that each party forked out exactly the amount of cash they said they would and so you are financially within budget, or do you mean that all resource usage was in line with the plan? The reason I ask, is that most projects that claim to be on schedule and within budget are actually way over budget but the extra hours put in by the development team (remember those long nights at work) aren't logged properly so the company can say it was on budget. By working with a fixed payment plan the whole way down the line, all you do is offset the over-budget problem from the client to the developers.
Worse yet these kinds of activities often lead to incorrect figures being used as the basis for estimation of the next project and so the budget just gets further out.
Even if this doesn't happen in your company, it shows that your company is not within budget because of fixed price payments. Though, it is very likely the reason you have gained extra business as the client is assured of the price and if you do go over budget, they get a bargain.
This is particularly interesting as it is quite rare on the net for the early to not wind up with the worm. A read an interview with the creators of Hotmail who said that the reason Hotmail was worth so much was because it was the first. Though there are now hundreds of free web-based mail providers, hotmail is by far and away the biggest because it was the first.
Largely, the same thing happened with search engines. I'm not as sure of the history but I would imagine Yahoo was in on the search engine idea very early in the game and that's how it became the biggest, but now google is leaving it for dead. It's nice to see that a quality product can come from behind in market share and take over - it doesn't happen too often in computing.
This is precisely why you won't get either quality hardware or good tech support - people insist on buying the cheapest crap they can find. If you walk into you local discount importer store and buy a garden rake, you'll get it for the cheapest price in town and it will come with a high failure rate and no warranty, but hey it was cheap so you don't care. So why is it that people expect quality and good tech support from dirt cheap computers? It's just not economically feasible.
If you raise your margins so that you can provide decent support, then you lose sales massively. The market is almost entirely price bound. There is no equivalent of BMW or other names that "mean quality" that people are willing to pay for (despite what Apple would desperately hope for).
This is where I disagree. There is a market for higher priced, well supported, quality computers. The fact that Apple has continued to survive and is currently performing better than most if not all computer manufacturers attests to that.
Sooner or later the general public will wake up to the fact that computers should just work and not break down constantly or crash. The /. crowd have been claiming this for some time on the software side - sooner or later people will realise Windows is crap and switch to Linux, but the same process will happen with hardware. When computers really become commodities they won't be upgraded every year so quality will become far more important. Most people buy crap because they figure that it will be out of date in a year anyway and they'd be best off buying another cheap replacement (or because they don't know enough to realise it's crap).
The fact is, you probably don't need to upgrade your computer every year. The only thing that requires the ridiculous amount of processing power in modern computers is games and even they rely more on graphics cards than CPU these days.
How long will it be before we wake up and realise that we just don't need the cutting edge?
It's probably also worth noting that QuickTime can use mp3 as it's sound encoding format. QuickTime itself isn't actually a codec, it's just like avi in that it stores a collection of tracks which are individually encoded. So the quality of QuickTime is entirely dependant on which codecs you choose and the options you give to those codecs.
The problem here isn't so much that they're saying that computer crime is illegal - more that the punishment is ridiculously severe. When deciding on a punishment, you have to decide what the aim of punishment is and how best to achieve that aim. In this case however, the law makers seem to have the aim of getting votes and the best method is to be tough on terrorism of any kind. It pulls at the heart strings of the nation so of course it gets votes.
Besides the political goals though, there are two main aims people have for utilising jail terms as punishment. The first is to remove the villian from society so that we can all forget about them and feel safe again - the death penalty is much more effective at achieving this aim so why not just use it? Some countries take this approach and it works, there is almost zero crime because people know if they commit a crime they are either executed or deported. The problem with this approach is twofold, firstly it expects everyone to lead a near perfect life and never make a mistake (think of how many teenagers commit once off offences to look cool and later learn from their mistakes and go on to be useful to society. The other problem is that eventually you punish the wrong guy and there's no way to set him free again.
The other aim for imprisonment is to teach people a lesson so they can rejoin society and live happily with everyone else again. Countries such as the US and Australia (and many others) with long jail terms don't acheive this goal at all well. The revolving door prison system is well known - most offenders wind up committing more crimes and going back into the system. However, countries which use shorter jail terms tend to have much lower crime rates. Instead of being locked up for 20 years and becoming bitter against society, you spend one or two years in a correctional facility where you are taught skills to help you survive in the world, go through drug rehabilitation if needed and work with councellors to deal with a disturbed past that may be haunting you. After that you have a much better chance of coming back out into society and not only abiding by the law, but also contributing to the community. If you think the cost of this approach is just too great, think about the cost of keeping people in prison for those extra 18 years and you'll find it works out a lot cheaper. It is not a 100% effective measure, some people will recommit and you need to have ways to deal with that - either through different methods of punishment or by longer imprisonments. It does however give criminals a chance to learn from their errors and adopt new skills to remove the temptation to recommit. After all, isn't that what punishment is all about?
I tend to go to a lot of Apple seminars and follow the Mac world pretty well and I would be exceptionally surprised if Apple was laying off employees at this stage. They are really working hard to get OS 10.1 out the door on time and make sure it's really polished. I have certainly seen no indication that they are slowing down at all. I would say if there are any lay offs they'd be in marketing/management positions rather than the research and development areas.
I can't understand is how Apple can stay in business when their computers cost a hell of a lot more than the Intel based PCs?
There have been a large number of studies which suggest that the total cost of ownership of owning a Mac is significantly less than owning a Windows based PC. Admitedly, people and business' don't tend to notice these things, and go for the immediate lower price. Apple stay in business by actually making a profit on their systems rather than trying to continuously undercut the competition - note how many PC manufacturers are going out of business.
The number of units you ship is far less important than whether or not you make enough profit to cover your development, production, management and other costs. Apple's pricing does this, Gateway Australia's pricing didn't (hence they've gone out of business). Apple has made a profit for something like 11 out of the last 12 quarters which is better than most PC manufacturers.
Apple also has a very dedicated (fanatic) installed user base which helps a lot. Mostly though they have innovation. They put firewire and USB in their computers, they popularise wireless networking and "Apple ignited the desktop publishing revolution" (to take their marketing speel).
was pricing laptops a couple weeks ago, and for the money it would have cost me to buy a moderately loaded iMac, I could have gotten a Thinkpad for roughly half the cost, comparably equipped.
This surprises me, though it obviously depends largely on what you want from your laptop. I went out pricing laptops about 6 months ago (long time in IT I know) and found that Apple's laptops were far and away better value than the PCs. Not that they were cheaper, but they were clearly sturdier, more feature packed and most significantly had better screens and battery life. The cheap PC laptop world makes a lot of sacrifices in functionality. Either they have ridiculously small screens or poor quality screens and two or three hour battery life was normal. Then you tended to give up a CDROM to make the laptop smaller and many PC laptops (nowhere near as many these days though) don't have ethernet as standard. Then there's the lact of dual head ability (most do video mirroring) or a lack of video output options (note that the iBook does not do dual head either, which is why I type this on a Titanium PowerBook). Now, for some people these trade offs are worth the cost savings - for some people they aren't even trade offs, but just remove unwanted features. For many people (including me) these features are invaluable.
The final big advantage that I find with Apple is the OS. Mac OS X is a joy to use (I look forward to the reported responsiveness improvements of 10.1 naturally), there are rough edges and it is not perfect but the combination of UNIX and a solid, simple, clean, user friendly GUI is an absolute God send. I can happily use vim to hack away my perl scripts, test them with apache and postgresql and follow the design document which was written in Word. The lack of responsiveness that is currently in OS X is more than made up for by the fact that I don't have to reboot between Linux and MacOS anymore (for the record I don't remember the last time I booted into OS 9).
The morale: sometimes paying more in the short term is worthwhile in the long run, but it all depends on what you want to do.
Except that a TV tuner card is useless without fast SCSI hard drives and since you'll want them to be big, that makes a DV camera highly comparable in price considering the other functionality and benefits it has. Not to mention the fact that you avoid the problem of dropping frames which is so prevalent with TV tuner cards.
Censorship is anything that stops you from saying what you want to say or hearing what you want to hear - or at least, that seems to be the attitude of most people who complain about censorship. All the same, it is rather silly to ban songs because of a terrorist incident. Life must go on or the terrorists win and most songs on the list really aren't so inappropriate that they could be said to be inciting terrorism.
What interests me is that there are a heap of Linux users complaining that OSX has no apps when OSX runs almost any app that runs on Linux as well as those that run on OS X natively, those from NeXtStep and at a stretch classic Mac OS. Personally my favorite OS X app is vi though the Gimp isn't far behind. Go figure.
Extra NICs? SCSI adapter? TV tuner? SCSI adapter - use firewire, TV tuner - DV camera does the job *much* better. Extra NIC you can't do easily, but seriously, how often do you need two? For a firewall/router/NAT box sure, but you're better off using a P100 or Mac LC instead of something as powerful as an iMac. The only other thing you'd want PCI for is for a second video card and that could be done through firewire if you really wanted (though I don't think such a product exists).
Just seems like common sense to me.
Sure, in theory, but how practical is it to fork the kernel? There's a difference between having the ability to do something and being allowed to do it. Also note, that just because you don't have the ability to maintain a kernel by yourself means that you should not be considered for the future of Linux, however, largely that is the possible situation. In any case, this is really heading way off topic, the point was to look at possible ways of improving the opensource model, not to say that Linus is a control freak. Next time I'll pick a less "religious" topic.
Agreed, and I really should have been more careful as I was in my original post to stress that not all free software projects work like that, however many do. It would seem that KDE works very much like FreeCard with which I have experience - it works on a concensus basis. It's not nessecarily a problem except for on occasions like this and instead of just blaming one of the other participant I thought it may be worth actually looking at some ways to prevent it happening.
But that's really not the point. I guess it's moving away from the event in question, but I was rather referring to the iron grip that Linus has around Linux and that most maintainers seem to have around their respective comments. Someone commented earlier (and I paraphrase) "that RMS would be screwed if Linus sold the rights to Linux". Now I don't know the legality of such a move, but it does sum up quite nicely how much Linux depends on Linus. Is it an operating system that we all own or is it Linus' OS that we all use and contribute to? Does it matter? Probably not, if it's a good OS, use it.
The problem with consensus is that you usually spend an awful lot of time talking and very little coding (as you found out).
Ah but once the talking was over with by goodness did we code rapidly. We were all agreed and focused on one goal and if the vacation period had lasted long enough to get a working product out the door we may well have made it all work. Not saying it's the best way to do it, but I think it had a lot of potential and it certainly avoids debacles like the topic of this story.
Now, I'm not trying to paint all maintainers as power hungry freaks by any means, but it is interesting to note that free software is not really a team of developers working together to create great software. Rather, it is a large group of developers submitting code to one central person who collates it and releases it. Is this a bad thing? Not nessecarily. When it works well and everyone is happy it's a good thing, but when more than one person want to be the lead maintainer or when noone wants to be the lead maintainer it very definitely is a bad thing.
How many projects do you know have been abandoned because their lead developer no longer has time for them - even when the software was extremely promising? How many pieces of software are actually created from scratch as an opensource effort rather than being initially created by one person and then released to the public.
How many patches are submitted because they are not taking the project in the right direction - even when they were technically competent and very useful? Naturally, software can't go in every direction or you wind up with emacs but it shows that even in free software, we go where others want us to because forking (despite being allowed) is just not a feasible option, as was pointed out in this message.
So, is there a better way of doing it? I'm not sure. I am part of the FreeCard Project which has no defined leader and is run based on consensus. We've had some very long debates about different things but eventually we come to a decision that everyone is happy about. Sadly, very little work is being done on the project these days because we never really gained enough developers to support the project and there were just too many jobs going undone - such as updating the web site. We haven't given up yet (and help is welcome) but it certainly shows that a concensus based approach doesn't solve all the problems.
The other option that I see is a "rapid forking development" whereby everyone maintains a version of the product and generally chaos reigns. It would certainly have some interesting properties but would require a massive amount of duplicated effort and be way too confusing to end users.
So the big question remains - what other options are there that avoid this "control bottleneck" that is so common in free software (whether or not it causes problems)?
Note how easily you exchanged the word instruction and the word cycle and by doing so fail your computer architecture 101 class. The idea of RISC is to do less per instruction, correct, but that does not imply less per cycle. 1 instruction is not nessecarily the same as 1 cycle. So in fact it is entirely true that the G4 does less per instruction and more per cycle than the P4.
Now back to your regular, uninformed flame war.
Let me shed a little light on how you can pick up concepts that you hilighted were missing and that can be learned from Java:
- Pointers - Java actually has support for pointers and you need to understand them to be able to use Java. The catch is that Java doesn't call them pointers. Java calls them references. eg:
- Memory Allocation - Java uses memory and as such memory allocation is important to understand. Again, it's simpler than in C, but it does exist. Where you declare a variable affects how it's memory is allocated and you have to be careful that all references to Objects are "released" when they're no longer required to avoid memory leaks. Avoiding recursive references to Objects requires some advanced memory management techniques at times.
- Linking object files - Seriously, how hard is that to understand? Java uses the same idea again though, classes link to each other. The difference is when the links are made, C does it at compile time, Java does it at runtime.
Basically, Java doesn't make you think about these concepts like C does, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. Anyone at university should be working to understand things, not just pass the course. If your university only teaches you one language, go out and learn some others in your spare time! If you're not excited about learning IT concepts and want to do it, you need to find a new career because you'll be left behind.Object obj = new Object();
will return a reference, or pointer to an object. If you pass it as a parameter to a function any changes made to the object will affect the calling method. It's the same deal in C, but Java doesn't use the difficult syntax.
The IT world moves rapidly, if you need someone to teach you everything you'll go nowhere fast. If you think for yourself and seek understanding not knowledge, you'll go a long way in this business.
Adrian Sutton
adrian_sutton@users.sourceforge.net
And if you were skeptical about my turning down jobs, here's my currently accepted ones:
IT with Advanced Studies Student
Griffith University
Software Engineer
Software Quality Institute
Systems Analyst and Software Engineer
Griffith University
Contracted Software Engineer
ElementalPower
VFS seems to be more flexible than the plug in architecture planned for ReiserFS since it gives you the ability to override any call to the file system.
It's worth noting too that I don't know where VFS came from, it may not have been an Apple invention in Darwin but I don't see it in the NetBSD source code, so maybe it is.
In my residences at Griffith University Australia we have one of the great IT disaster stories of residential colleges. There is more politics in the system than computing knowledge and the value of the network has almost reached nil this year.
Our system is, in theory, run by the network admins, however accomodation services failed to provide funds to pay them for the extra work of maintaining the residential network and so generally they neglect us. So when we moved in two years ago expecting to have network access in our rooms, we had to fight for three months to get the network turned on. The cabling was done, but they weren't sure what impact activating it would have.
When the network was finally turned on, there was internal access only. Another three months passed before internet access was provided through a log in system (about 90 hours are provided free per semester with no way to buy more). The system however was based on NT and LDAP, was highly overloaded and poorly maintained so it was only functional about 30% of the time.
The one use for the network has been peer-to-peer internal filesharing and email. This year however, someone has disabled email. We have been unable to find out exactly what's going on or when it will be fixed. And so the debacles continue....
A few students (myself included) have set up and are maintaining a 486 running Linux which acts as WINS server, HTTP server to provide all the information on using the network (accomodation services has provided no tech support to speak of), it hosts mailing lists of all students on the network so they can be contacted about important events and so on and so on. There has been a suggestion to make it the mail server for res students as well, though I fear the poor little box couldn't cope with that much load.
The main cause of the problems that I can see is a lack of monetary investment by accomodation services and the massive amount of politics being played - students are being cut out of the information and decision making loops, but still expected to do all the tech support and network maintenance. We are powerless and expected to work miracles. I have managed to secure a meeting with the administrative contact point for the network this afternoon and will argue our case - probably presenting the idea of an entirely student run sub-network. Has anyone got any advice as to what our best options are here?
The situation is fast becoming desperate....
Adrian Sutton.
For the record (and those who don't understand what compilation actually does), you can't just recompile the kernel to have an entire operating system be ported to a different hardware platform. You need to port the applications (in this case including Aqua, Carbon, Cocoa, Classic, QuickTime, Quartz etc, etc) as well as the kernel to make it work. To prove this to yourself: take an intel Linux installation, recompile the kernel for PPC and try and make it work on a Mac. Sure it might boot (at least to runlevel 1) but try to run anything (including ls) and it will tell you it can't execute the binary. This is why StarOffice isn't available for PPC...
Just thought I'd point that out.
Adrian Sutton