So you say your high school is almost all Windows because "People know how to use [Windows]."
You then go on to say that computers are like cars-- cars have the brake, gas, shifter, and steering wheel. You assert that if someone can drive one car, they can drive practically any car because they have a grasp of the concepts of its operation.
So by your own argument, anyone who knows how to use Windows should be able to effectively use a Mac or Linux (with GUI) system with a minimum of effort, because it's just a GUI with applications, operated by a mouse and keyboard-- just like Windows. Yet your position appears to be just the opposite, that Windows is what should be used/taught in schools because that's "the dominant operating system on desktops today" and that "is what will be used in whatever their future job is" (I guess none of your classmates are heading for careers in the media, then).
An education is about teaching concepts and reasoning, so the accumulated knowledge can be applied in many situations. Teaching a kid how to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office instead of teaching them how to operate a computer and basic productivity applications is to do that kid a disservice.
Example: Someone who graduated high school 10 years ago was probably taught DOS and/or Windows 3.x. By the time the class of 1993 made it out of college, however, those had been supplanted by 95 and NT, which were *completely* different-- any Windows 3.x-specific knowledge was almost completely wasted. But the basic knowledge of using a GUI and applications was still viable.
Whoever supports your Macs must not know what the hell they're doing, then. My clients, most of whom are Mac-based design departments of companies who outsource their Mac support, are mostly still running OS 9.x and still seldom have problems-- even the ones that like me to spend a full day on-site every week or two. I love those, because I get to bill 8 hours for sitting in the server room reading/. most of the day, and occasionally walking around to see if anyone needs anything.
If anyone's machine really goes crazy, which is extremely rare, assuming it's not hardware failure (also extremely rare) I just nuke the drive and reimage, and they're back up and running in about 20 minutes. Most times I just have to kill an errant preference file or run Norton on their machine.
In my vast experience, the only time Macs are problematic are when a client's Windows-centric internal IT department/"empire" decides to make them problematic-- like by only supporting Microsoft's monopoly-promoting, proprietary/proprietarized standards instead of open standards, e.g putting ActiveX shit on pages in the company's internal web site instead of Java.
Windows 95 CD with "USB support" written explicitly on the label...
Every Win95 OSR2 CD I ever saw said "With USB support" on the disc-- and I think that them printing that on the disc was the actual extent of Win95's USB support.
...that this is due to a single fire at a major ConEd substation.
So this one isn't terrorism (so they say), but I'm sure terrorists will be delighted to know that they can throw five major cities into utter chaos by taking out one substation and getting an assist from the domino effect.
Wow, very cool. If they get those perfected quickly enough, the next Indiana Jones movie won't have an embarassing "obvious glass wall between deadly cobra and Indy" goof.
Been a little while since I read it, too, but here's the gist of it:
A guy works for a large company for a period of time. When he leaves the company, his memory of the entire experience is wiped and he gets the pay he negotiated for himself prior to starting the job. He was expecting a large sum of money, but instead gets a handful of objects. He then proceeds to get into multiple situations where one of the objects is exactly what he needs to get him out of a jam, and eventually he pieces together what he was doing during the period of time that was wiped from his memory.
The 10pm news here in Philly interviewed one of the city's IT guys. He stuttered and stammered his way through the whole thing, and looked to me like a man afraid for his job as he claimed that there was "no warning and no way to be prepared for this"-- not a verbatim quote, but close enough.
I think the guy is right to be afraid for his job-- he's pretty damned incompetent to have not heard about this. This vulnerability was quite publicly announced weeks ago, and Microsoft's page with the patch is dated July 16. Even Homeland Security released a bulletin, and I'd hope that if nothing else those would get around in a city government that is supposed to maintain a level of disaster-preparedness.
Then again, this being Philadelphia, that guy likely got his job through patronage and wasn't qualified for it in the first place.
It is a concrete fact that that no MacOS based webserver has ever been hacked into in the history of the internet.
Actually, there was successful hack at least once. The server that was hacked was also running BlueWorld's "Lasso," which IIRC is an application that lets you pull data from FileMaker databases and stick it into web pages. There was a security hole in Lasso that the cracker exploited to change one of the HTML pages.
The machine that was hacked was the designated target in a "hack and win $$$" contest, and this was at least four or five years ago. I don't have the time to Google further details right now.
Having said that, Mac webservers still are the most secure. I've got two machines running webservers on OS 9.1, and I always have a hearty chuckle when I look in the logs at all the Windows exploits and other non-browser remote access attempts that are being used in vain.
Not only are most of the APIs public, most of them are even in AppleScript, which allows not just developers but end users as well to take advantage.
Amen! My entire home automation system is nothing but a few Mac apps bound together with AppleScript: XTension, the software that manages the X10 modules; MacCallerID which logs incoming phone calls; WhistleBlower, which monitors the services running on my machines and alerts me if any go down; and X2Web, which works in conjunction with webserver software to allow AppleScript to be embedded in HTML and executed when a client loads the page-- and that's all with crappy old OS 9.1! Apple has done even better in OS X with making application interoperability accessible to the masses, and they've done a far better job of it than Microsoft ever could, IMHO.
But look at it this way... eventually you will be able to own the entire production run of both of these shows on DVD, and watch those when the dreck that passes for "fresh, new shows" are airing.
In Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger (the book, not the movie), they had bombs with a cellulose casing to eliminate shrapnel. They used them when they wanted to make a single-bomb surgical strike look more like a car bomb.
I don't know if we really had munitions like that at the time when that book was written, but considering Clancy's attention to detail I wouldn't discount the possibility. Either way, the idea of a shrapnel-less bomb has been kicking around for a pretty long time.
I'm a system integrator who happens to specialize in Mac support. A few of my clients are Mac-based design departments of large companies whose internal IT people can't be bothered to support the Macs.
This is fine for all involved, unless the internal people make some change to their network without telling anyone, like when one place suddenly enabled authentication on their web proxy. Or when I was setting up Outlook for a new user and discovered that they had migrated all my users to a different Exchange server than what I had been using for the previous year.
Still another place uses a Microsoft web proxy so outdated that no Mac OS X browser I've tested will work with it (including IE!). No Mac browser newer than IE 5.0 for OS 9.x will work with it. This is in the PA office, so the IT people at HQ in CT couldn't care less. They won't upgrade their proxy software, nor will they exempt the small subnet of Mac IPs from having to use it. So these people are hampered by their own company when they have to do their jobs, having to stick with an old browser that will have to be run in Classic when they upgrade to OS X.
I cringe when I have to call a company's internal IT people to find out what's going on, because as soon as the word "Mac" is mentioned, I can practically hear their brain disconnect and the drool start flowing down their chin.
Right now I'm involved in a fight at one place trying to justify upgrading the 10Mbps switch the creative group is on (not that 100Mb is prevalent anywhere else in the company) to at least 100Mbps or hopefully gigabit-- twenty people pulling job folders weighing in at tens or even hundreds of MB over a 10Mbps network seems to be perfectly acceptable to the internal guys. Honestly, if they'd give me the IP range and other details I need to configure it, I'm about ready to pay for the fucking thing out of my own pocket and install it myself.
Yeah, I did... and if he was kidding he should've put a ":-)" to indicate it. Consider what I see people do on a daily basis as part of my job, I find just about anything plausible.
This guy buys and discards a $350 drill, just to get its carrying case??? I bet when he was a kid, he ignored his toys and played with the boxes they came in.
For what the dope spent on a wasted drill, he could've got a nice Zero Halliburton aluminum case, which seems a lot more like James Bond gear than a freakin' DeWalt drill case.
According to this story Wired is running today, Diebold got 0wn3d back in March. They were given a nearly 2GB archive of the stuff that was found by a person claiming to be the hacker who got in.
If a company can't properly secure its own network, how can we possibly trust them to create a secure voting system?
A few of my clients who have completed OS X migrations use iChat with Rendezvous, for a nice, setup-free buddy list, and they love it. No more picking up the phone or hollering over cubicle walls for quick questions. Exchanging files with people is now much easier, they don't even have to bother with e-mail or dropping them on the server... just drag the file onto the intended recipient's name and drop it. Now with the video conferencing, some are prepared to use that and save themselves long (like, 10 minutes from point A to point B without leaving the building) walks back and forth between two departments.
The reactions people have gotten when we've demoed iChat for them are priceless.
The R-3-27-GOVT model is the same as above, but without the 816-902 MHz gap and can be purchased via government or qualifying commercial purchase order or for export only. Not available for on-line ordering.
Two of Allen's troubled cable television investments -- Charter and Princeton, N.J.-based RCN Corp. -- have laid off more than 4,500 employees between them.
That's funny. The main reason RCN is doing poorly is because they tried to expand into the Philadelphia area and bring some competition to the market (where I currently am paying $75/mo for basic cable + HBO1, 2, & 3). They were shut out by cable-monopolist Comcast, who is backed by Microsoft courtesy of a $1B investment back in 1997.
It seems that no matter who you are, if you do anything related to technology you'll eventually find Microsoft on the side of your competition.
There is a ton of debris in space, there is no reason to bring all of that down
Actually, there is. It's a hazard to satellites and orbiting spacecraft. A few years back, one of the shuttles had a small crater made in its windshield when it was hit by an orbiting *paint chip*.
There's just so much space junk and it's moving so fast, that it's tough if not impossible to safely intercept and capture. NORAD actually tracks and catalogs every piece of it large enough to get a radar return. When a shuttle is up, they constantly monitor its path for errant debris so it can maneuver if necessary. I believe they do the same for the ISS.
some sort of safety gear is definitely needed in my opinion.
Umm, did you read the WHOLE article, or just skim through parts?
From the article: "Safety? It has jet-pilot seat belts and a racing-regulation roll cage; it weighs more than 3,000 pounds, about the same as a Toyota Camry, including 1,100 pounds of Yellow Top batteries under the floorboards as ballast, so it's not tippy on turns."
Between the roll cage and the ballast, this thing sounds safer than your average Firestone-tire-equipped Ford Explorer of a couple years ago.
How about this spin? "Notified of critical bug, MS immediately issues fix". Nah, wouldn't play to this crowd.
More like "Notified of critical bug, MS immediately issues fix which will still be unapplied two years from now on most of the affected Windows machines." Fixes for Nimda and Code Red have been around for ages, but guess what I still see assloads of in my firewall logs? Yup, Nimda and Code Red access attempts.
There are legions of ignorant people using Windows who aren't aware of the holes or the patches to fix them. They don't read new sites that cover that sort of thing in any detail, and they don't run Windows Update with any frequency and may have even disabled automatic updates because they got tired of the friggin' balloon popping up all the time.
Because of those people, if Microsoft doesn't get something right in a shipping version of Windows, the subesquent patches might as well not even exist.
"Things are brighter in the U.S. consumer notebook PC segment. Apple's unit market share rose from 0.3% to 6.8% in the two years. And its share of the market based on dollars spent rose from 0.2% to 8%."
Apple has a 6.8% share of the laptop computer market. The most recent market share numbers I could find for eveyone else show that nobody has more than 15%, so 6.8% is nothing to sneeze at. Those same numbers show Sony in fifth place, with a 7.1% market share.
I expect Apple's piece of the laptop market pie to keep getting larger. Why?
-People are getting sick of Microsoft licensing, and Windows security holes, and Windows spyware/viruses to the point where they're willing to try something different. -Apple's laptops have been feature-rich and very price competitive for the last few years, and the more polished OS X becomes, the more heads it turns. -People who want a UNIX laptop seem to prefer just buying a PowerBook/iBook instead of dicking around trying to get something other than Windows to run well on an Intel-based laptop. -The "I'd rather build my own using dirt-cheap parts" crowd doesn't count in the laptop market because you can't easily build your own laptop. -The gamer crowd doesn't count either, because the high-end Wintel laptops their games need are not cheap, and upgrading the video hardware after a while is difficult to impossible.
The playing field is just a lot more level in the laptop market, so eventually the company that makes a functional, innovative, well-supported machine (even if it is a few dollars more) will float close to the top of the market share rankings.
Slashdot Mirror
So you say your high school is almost all Windows because "People know how to use [Windows]."
You then go on to say that computers are like cars-- cars have the brake, gas, shifter, and steering wheel. You assert that if someone can drive one car, they can drive practically any car because they have a grasp of the concepts of its operation.
So by your own argument, anyone who knows how to use Windows should be able to effectively use a Mac or Linux (with GUI) system with a minimum of effort, because it's just a GUI with applications, operated by a mouse and keyboard-- just like Windows. Yet your position appears to be just the opposite, that Windows is what should be used/taught in schools because that's "the dominant operating system on desktops today" and that "is what will be used in whatever their future job is" (I guess none of your classmates are heading for careers in the media, then).
An education is about teaching concepts and reasoning, so the accumulated knowledge can be applied in many situations. Teaching a kid how to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office instead of teaching them how to operate a computer and basic productivity applications is to do that kid a disservice.
Example: Someone who graduated high school 10 years ago was probably taught DOS and/or Windows 3.x. By the time the class of 1993 made it out of college, however, those had been supplanted by 95 and NT, which were *completely* different-- any Windows 3.x-specific knowledge was almost completely wasted. But the basic knowledge of using a GUI and applications was still viable.
~Philly
Whoever supports your Macs must not know what the hell they're doing, then. My clients, most of whom are Mac-based design departments of companies who outsource their Mac support, are mostly still running OS 9.x and still seldom have problems-- even the ones that like me to spend a full day on-site every week or two. I love those, because I get to bill 8 hours for sitting in the server room reading /. most of the day, and occasionally walking around to see if anyone needs anything.
If anyone's machine really goes crazy, which is extremely rare, assuming it's not hardware failure (also extremely rare) I just nuke the drive and reimage, and they're back up and running in about 20 minutes. Most times I just have to kill an errant preference file or run Norton on their machine.
In my vast experience, the only time Macs are problematic are when a client's Windows-centric internal IT department/"empire" decides to make them problematic-- like by only supporting Microsoft's monopoly-promoting, proprietary/proprietarized standards instead of open standards, e.g putting ActiveX shit on pages in the company's internal web site instead of Java.
~Philly
Windows 95 CD with "USB support" written explicitly on the label...
Every Win95 OSR2 CD I ever saw said "With USB support" on the disc-- and I think that them printing that on the disc was the actual extent of Win95's USB support.
~Philly
...that this is due to a single fire at a major ConEd substation.
So this one isn't terrorism (so they say), but I'm sure terrorists will be delighted to know that they can throw five major cities into utter chaos by taking out one substation and getting an assist from the domino effect.
~Philly
Wow, very cool. If they get those perfected quickly enough, the next Indiana Jones movie won't have an embarassing "obvious glass wall between deadly cobra and Indy" goof.
~Philly
Been a little while since I read it, too, but here's the gist of it:
A guy works for a large company for a period of time. When he leaves the company, his memory of the entire experience is wiped and he gets the pay he negotiated for himself prior to starting the job. He was expecting a large sum of money, but instead gets a handful of objects. He then proceeds to get into multiple situations where one of the objects is exactly what he needs to get him out of a jam, and eventually he pieces together what he was doing during the period of time that was wiped from his memory.
It's in Volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, featuring "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford."
~Philly
The 10pm news here in Philly interviewed one of the city's IT guys. He stuttered and stammered his way through the whole thing, and looked to me like a man afraid for his job as he claimed that there was "no warning and no way to be prepared for this"-- not a verbatim quote, but close enough.
I think the guy is right to be afraid for his job-- he's pretty damned incompetent to have not heard about this. This vulnerability was quite publicly announced weeks ago, and Microsoft's page with the patch is dated July 16. Even Homeland Security released a bulletin, and I'd hope that if nothing else those would get around in a city government that is supposed to maintain a level of disaster-preparedness.
Then again, this being Philadelphia, that guy likely got his job through patronage and wasn't qualified for it in the first place.
~Philly
It is a concrete fact that that no MacOS based webserver has ever been hacked into in the history of the internet.
Actually, there was successful hack at least once. The server that was hacked was also running BlueWorld's "Lasso," which IIRC is an application that lets you pull data from FileMaker databases and stick it into web pages. There was a security hole in Lasso that the cracker exploited to change one of the HTML pages.
The machine that was hacked was the designated target in a "hack and win $$$" contest, and this was at least four or five years ago. I don't have the time to Google further details right now.
Having said that, Mac webservers still are the most secure. I've got two machines running webservers on OS 9.1, and I always have a hearty chuckle when I look in the logs at all the Windows exploits and other non-browser remote access attempts that are being used in vain.
~Philly
Not only are most of the APIs public, most of them are even in AppleScript, which allows not just developers but end users as well to take advantage.
Amen! My entire home automation system is nothing but a few Mac apps bound together with AppleScript: XTension, the software that manages the X10 modules; MacCallerID which logs incoming phone calls; WhistleBlower, which monitors the services running on my machines and alerts me if any go down; and X2Web, which works in conjunction with webserver software to allow AppleScript to be embedded in HTML and executed when a client loads the page-- and that's all with crappy old OS 9.1! Apple has done even better in OS X with making application interoperability accessible to the masses, and they've done a far better job of it than Microsoft ever could, IMHO.
~Philly
...will the DVDs of later season Futurama episodes have the last 20 minutes of a football game, followed by the last 10 minutes of the episode?
But look at it this way... eventually you will be able to own the entire production run of both of these shows on DVD, and watch those when the dreck that passes for "fresh, new shows" are airing.
~Philly
In Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger (the book, not the movie), they had bombs with a cellulose casing to eliminate shrapnel. They used them when they wanted to make a single-bomb surgical strike look more like a car bomb.
I don't know if we really had munitions like that at the time when that book was written, but considering Clancy's attention to detail I wouldn't discount the possibility. Either way, the idea of a shrapnel-less bomb has been kicking around for a pretty long time.
~Philly
I'm a system integrator who happens to specialize in Mac support. A few of my clients are Mac-based design departments of large companies whose internal IT people can't be bothered to support the Macs.
This is fine for all involved, unless the internal people make some change to their network without telling anyone, like when one place suddenly enabled authentication on their web proxy. Or when I was setting up Outlook for a new user and discovered that they had migrated all my users to a different Exchange server than what I had been using for the previous year.
Still another place uses a Microsoft web proxy so outdated that no Mac OS X browser I've tested will work with it (including IE!). No Mac browser newer than IE 5.0 for OS 9.x will work with it. This is in the PA office, so the IT people at HQ in CT couldn't care less. They won't upgrade their proxy software, nor will they exempt the small subnet of Mac IPs from having to use it. So these people are hampered by their own company when they have to do their jobs, having to stick with an old browser that will have to be run in Classic when they upgrade to OS X.
I cringe when I have to call a company's internal IT people to find out what's going on, because as soon as the word "Mac" is mentioned, I can practically hear their brain disconnect and the drool start flowing down their chin.
Right now I'm involved in a fight at one place trying to justify upgrading the 10Mbps switch the creative group is on (not that 100Mb is prevalent anywhere else in the company) to at least 100Mbps or hopefully gigabit-- twenty people pulling job folders weighing in at tens or even hundreds of MB over a 10Mbps network seems to be perfectly acceptable to the internal guys. Honestly, if they'd give me the IP range and other details I need to configure it, I'm about ready to pay for the fucking thing out of my own pocket and install it myself.
~Philly
Yeah, I did... and if he was kidding he should've put a ":-)" to indicate it. Consider what I see people do on a daily basis as part of my job, I find just about anything plausible.
~Philly
This guy buys and discards a $350 drill, just to get its carrying case??? I bet when he was a kid, he ignored his toys and played with the boxes they came in.
For what the dope spent on a wasted drill, he could've got a nice Zero Halliburton aluminum case, which seems a lot more like James Bond gear than a freakin' DeWalt drill case.
~Philly
How long before I get a trackball embedded in my mouse?
Depends on how fast you can click this link and order this mouse.
~Philly
According to this story Wired is running today, Diebold got 0wn3d back in March. They were given a nearly 2GB archive of the stuff that was found by a person claiming to be the hacker who got in.
If a company can't properly secure its own network, how can we possibly trust them to create a secure voting system?
~Philly
A few of my clients who have completed OS X migrations use iChat with Rendezvous, for a nice, setup-free buddy list, and they love it. No more picking up the phone or hollering over cubicle walls for quick questions. Exchanging files with people is now much easier, they don't even have to bother with e-mail or dropping them on the server... just drag the file onto the intended recipient's name and drop it. Now with the video conferencing, some are prepared to use that and save themselves long (like, 10 minutes from point A to point B without leaving the building) walks back and forth between two departments.
The reactions people have gotten when we've demoed iChat for them are priceless.
~Philly
$539.95, but:
The R-3-27-GOVT model is the same as above, but without the 816-902 MHz gap and can be purchased via government or qualifying commercial purchase order or for export only. Not available for on-line ordering.
From the article:
Two of Allen's troubled cable television investments -- Charter and Princeton, N.J.-based RCN Corp. -- have laid off more than 4,500 employees between them.
That's funny. The main reason RCN is doing poorly is because they tried to expand into the Philadelphia area and bring some competition to the market (where I currently am paying $75/mo for basic cable + HBO1, 2, & 3). They were shut out by cable-monopolist Comcast, who is backed by Microsoft courtesy of a $1B investment back in 1997.
It seems that no matter who you are, if you do anything related to technology you'll eventually find Microsoft on the side of your competition.
There is a ton of debris in space, there is no reason to bring all of that down
Actually, there is. It's a hazard to satellites and orbiting spacecraft. A few years back, one of the shuttles had a small crater made in its windshield when it was hit by an orbiting *paint chip*.
There's just so much space junk and it's moving so fast, that it's tough if not impossible to safely intercept and capture. NORAD actually tracks and catalogs every piece of it large enough to get a radar return. When a shuttle is up, they constantly monitor its path for errant debris so it can maneuver if necessary. I believe they do the same for the ISS.
~Philly
some sort of safety gear is definitely needed in my opinion.
Umm, did you read the WHOLE article, or just skim through parts?
From the article:
"Safety? It has jet-pilot seat belts and a racing-regulation roll cage; it weighs more than 3,000 pounds, about the same as a Toyota Camry, including 1,100 pounds of Yellow Top batteries under the floorboards as ballast, so it's not tippy on turns."
Between the roll cage and the ballast, this thing sounds safer than your average Firestone-tire-equipped Ford Explorer of a couple years ago.
~Philly
How about this spin? "Notified of critical bug, MS immediately issues fix". Nah, wouldn't play to this crowd.
More like "Notified of critical bug, MS immediately issues fix which will still be unapplied two years from now on most of the affected Windows machines." Fixes for Nimda and Code Red have been around for ages, but guess what I still see assloads of in my firewall logs? Yup, Nimda and Code Red access attempts.
There are legions of ignorant people using Windows who aren't aware of the holes or the patches to fix them. They don't read new sites that cover that sort of thing in any detail, and they don't run Windows Update with any frequency and may have even disabled automatic updates because they got tired of the friggin' balloon popping up all the time.
Because of those people, if Microsoft doesn't get something right in a shipping version of Windows, the subesquent patches might as well not even exist.
~Philly
From Investor's Business Daily, July 15:
"Things are brighter in the U.S. consumer notebook PC segment. Apple's unit market share rose from 0.3% to 6.8% in the two years. And its share of the market based on dollars spent rose from 0.2% to 8%."
Apple has a 6.8% share of the laptop computer market. The most recent market share numbers I could find for eveyone else show that nobody has more than 15%, so 6.8% is nothing to sneeze at. Those same numbers show Sony in fifth place, with a 7.1% market share.
I expect Apple's piece of the laptop market pie to keep getting larger. Why?
-People are getting sick of Microsoft licensing, and Windows security holes, and Windows spyware/viruses to the point where they're willing to try something different.
-Apple's laptops have been feature-rich and very price competitive for the last few years, and the more polished OS X becomes, the more heads it turns.
-People who want a UNIX laptop seem to prefer just buying a PowerBook/iBook instead of dicking around trying to get something other than Windows to run well on an Intel-based laptop.
-The "I'd rather build my own using dirt-cheap parts" crowd doesn't count in the laptop market because you can't easily build your own laptop.
-The gamer crowd doesn't count either, because the high-end Wintel laptops their games need are not cheap, and upgrading the video hardware after a while is difficult to impossible.
The playing field is just a lot more level in the laptop market, so eventually the company that makes a functional, innovative, well-supported machine (even if it is a few dollars more) will float close to the top of the market share rankings.
~Philly
In 1997, Microsoft invested $1B in Comcast.
With that kind of money talking, Comcast could give a shit about TiVo, shareholder or not.
~Philly