I behave differently from you and have different values. Yet still I read Slashdot. Deal with it.
The poster didn't suggest otherwise so I don't see why your being so reactionary.
The poster said:
You are a consumer. Unless you have radically altered your behavior, don't pretend otherwise.
And he was quite right. I think you are just avoiding the issue.
If you are a consumer, a producer or a purveyor of goods why deny it? It's quite innocuous to be any of these things.
Unless your _still_ anti capitialist?
Quite frankly, given the degree of inherant greed, lazyness and stupidity in the world I don't see how we can possibly be reasonably expected to use any other system.
Maarten Hekkelman doesn't like Mac OS X. He also doesn't seem to me to know much about it, nor does he seem to want to know much about it. He disliked the operating system offered on the platform on which it had developed a following, that is the simple reason why Pepper is no longer a viable option.
To justify my statements, amongst other thing, he says:
Mac OS X, however, loses on all fronts. It claims to be a Unix but it doesn't support much of the more advanced Unix features, since it is using such an old kernel.
For someone who is writing a text editor to blame the limitations of the kernel of the operating system on which it runs for lack of functionality is simply looking for excuses and is, in reality, a case of barking up the wrong tree (though he does mention a reference to a very old misfeature with regard 'piping', though there are/were very easy other ways to do the very same thing).
Though not exclusively based on FreeBSD 4.4, MacOS X 10.2 is based very heavily around a FreeBSD 4.4 core and, of course, GCC 3.1. Neither of these are 'old' by any practical definition.
Though the kernel has a certain level of maturity, the Mach layer currently acts primarily only as an abstraction layer for developers and has been very heavily hacked at since it's use in NeXT. The kernel is not 'old' nor 'krufty', despite the distinct impression given.
Maarten Hekkelman also says:
Did you ever consider dropping support for the old Mac OS, and making Pepper only for Mac OS X?
No.
I can understand not wanting to be locked in to Coca, but refusing to drop OS 9 (at the very least apart from bug fixes) was a mistake. More effort should have been spent on the Mac OS X (and Windows) versions.
Part of being a good developer is being able to make smart decisions. To keep supporting an out-dated operating system when it is clear that are other badly needed new features that need to be addressed (features needed to keep the product viable) is foolish.
Though I don't know him, the fact that he has now left development and gone to 'Database Administrator' speaks volumes to me about his ability to strategically plan product development, and his proficiency as a developer. I don't like to be critical of someone I haven't met, but that is the distinct impression I get.
I fail to see why a truly good developer would want to do this, as database administration is tedious at best and mind numbing at worse (and 1.5 TB systems are really not that interesting quite frankly, a Network Appliance Filer installation will do the job for you and is easily maintained part time by any administrator, with multiple redundant disks, multiple network connections, multiple power supplies, multiple controllers, the ability to roll back to previous versions (snapshots) and the ability to use Snap Mirror to keep a up-to-date version running off site which you can simply switch over to if the system goes FUBAR - makes it a no-brainer of a solution). I should point out, in the interest of fairness that they are not the only ones that make such a product (there are many cheaper competitors more suitable for smaller scale installations), but theirs is the best IME;-)
Another thing I find telling is that he seems to dislike and find it hard to adjust to many things in Mac OS X and to dislike them quite passionately. I personally dislike little in most operating systems, other than crashes. IMO true hackers (as-in-the-coder-sence-of-the-word) never find it difficult to adjust and I have always believed this ability it to be innate in good hackers.
For example, I have never sat in front of something like Project Builder and bemoaned it's single window behavior (as Maarten Hekkelman does in this interview), I found it quite intuitive. I found it equally intuitive to have multiple windows, I've never had a problem with either. I also have no major problems with the Dock or with the Windows taskbar.
Of course I expect *users* to get confused over this sort of thing, but not developers!
It has been discovered that using fiber to strenthen overhead power lines instead of more traditional steel is cheaper and has in fact been done already.
Because fiber is lighter than steel there is less sag on the power lines meaning the struts can be significantly further apart (which saves money). Additional value is gained because the fiber can be resold at some later date, and by using it in new power lines it means there is no additional digging.
The only expense is terminating the fiber, which is a one off cost and easily written off.
I think this is more viable because as other/.'ers have pointed out, there are just too many speed inhibiting issues with and no guarentee of decent QOS by trying to piggy back on existing infrastructure - meaning it's only suitable for light home use at best. Certainly claims to do this have been around for at least 4 years now and have yet to amount to anything beyond what can best be described as mediocre trials.:-(
This was tried by anther company Scottish Telecom (part of the Scottish Power group, and owners of Demon Internet - Sottish Telecom are now called 'Thus' following a 'Monday' style re-branding exercise, the initial literature for which amusingly misspelt 'companys' on the first page IIRC) when I was working for SOL (Scottish Telecom Internet Division). This was following on from identical work by the US company NORWEB.
The speeds at the time were ~28 kbps. They (Scottish Telecom) trailed the service by giving the equipment ('modem' + Compaq PC) to schools to gain feedback - they let the school's keep the PC's afterwards, which was nice.
They dropped the trail after they discovered the speed dropped dramatically when the grid was under strain...
e.g.
- at ~6:00pm when the street lights came on. - When kettles were boiled for Tea following the ending of TV soaps like Eastenders or Coronation Street (I kid you not)
The most amusing story relates to how Ham radio operators discovered that lamp posts in the area were acting as broadcast antennas and broadcasting users packets over the neighborhood. ST denied this emphatically, though it was true (though it's not clear that it was actually possible to get any meaningful data out of the 'interference' that was being broadcast as no-one ever seriously suggested they had done this).
It may *say* that but I don't belive it from my own, bitter experience:-)
I've had 3 x 4 pint jugs of Vodka Red Bull in a night (entirely to myself) and been up all until after noon the next day, shaking shivering and going *why?* *why?* *never again* (etc etc) entirely unable to sleep despite really *really* wanting to.
This suggest that that information is hokum, or at least is only true with small quantities of both (and that if you take large quantities of both it throws that theory entirely to hell).
All credit to Microsoft, the removed the conduit from the web site as soon as this bug came to light, and informed users of the problem while it was under investigation.
Microsoft's mac software department is pretty on the ball (though I wish Internet Explorer on OS was better threaded and had a few of the annoying display bugs fixed).
So..restricting Internet use is OK if you're restricting people you don't like?
Well yes - of course!
It's common practice to restrict crackers, hackers, DDOS attackers and even anyone who looks at you funny.
If it's your network, you can limit what routes you will route to and from.
This is how peering and even transit operations work (some trasit agreements and many peering arrangements between carriers limit what netblocks may be access via them and peers do the same too).
If you can do it to them, they can do it to you. Pretty difficult to argue otherwise.
They _already_ do it to us, as do all large large corporations an private companies and anyone with a private IP range!
People can restrict access into and out of their network, it's not a new thing.
An ISP that blocks or restricts RIAA use of the net is legitimizing the practice they purport to oppose.
Erm How? Do RIAA want to block all the traffic into their network coming from joe user?
Of couse, was using "==" to check for matches (Perl wiggs out at this). Testing for matches by treating the values as a string works fine. (i.e. by using "eq" instead of "==").
This versions works, even with ReallyBigNumbers...
#!/usr/bin/perl # Stupid Perl script to find Lychrel numbers. # Yeah yeah inefficent, but very quick and easy to write:-) # Iain Collins, iain_collins@mac.com
use Math::BigInt; use Strict;
my $start_number = $ARGV[0];
print "Searching For Lychrel Number, starting at: $start_number....\n";
my $forward_number = $start_number; my $reversed_number = reverse($forward_number); my $result; my $result_tmp; my $i = 0; my $count = 0;
While I've been wating for the film to start I came up with this....
The only problem is doesn't work when the numbers are _really_ large (like hundreds of characters long), I think that's an issue with one of the functions:/.
#!/usr/bin/perl # Stupid Perl script to find Lychrel numbers. # Yeah yeah inefficent, but very quick and easy to write:-) # Iain Collins, iain_collins@mac.com
use Math::BigInt; use Strict;
my $start_number = $ARGV[0];
print "Searching For Lychrel Number, starting at: $start_number....\n";
my $forward_number = $start_number; my $reversed_number = reverse($forward_number); my $result; my $result_tmp; my $i = 0; my $count = 0;
I agree with the poster of the comment you are replying to. Office life is the best thing since reclining armchairs. If you don't think office life is cushy your either don't work in an office or your just not very good at taking advantage your situation.
I do agree that yes, offices are run by moron's, but then the entire planet is crawling with moron's and they make up almost the entire population, but office are in no way like factories. There are hundreds of people in Tiwan threading shoelace's who would agree with me.
Office's are not designed to treat employese badly or to give them a hard time, they are deisgned the way thay are because they were designed by a moron who honestly thought it was a really good idea to built it that way. But this person designs offices for a living, so it was clear they were underqualified to begin with.
The key to getting the most out of office life is laziness. This must be worked at, for it is often not quick to achieve and does not always come naturally (except to us lucky few).
Office life is about coffee, free toast, surfing the web, reading email and downloading music and, if your inclined, hoarding pornography. Even meetings are good because you get to drink coffee in a quite room and bring your own reading material (I suggest ebooks on a Palm as they're less conspicuous). NB: A key tip is to schedule them over lunch time so you can order in tiny crustless triangle sandwiches at the companies expense (thus saving yourself time, money and energy buying your own lunch and from having to make do with those horrible 3 day old excuses for sandwiches that the local sandwich van will invariably bring round).
Anything else is just a distraction from YOUR personal pleasure. Remember it's YOUR time not theirs (it may be THEIR money but it's still YOUR time, for those of a skeptical disposition check your contract - at no point do employment contracts expressly forbid you from: avoiding work, shirking responsibility, pretending to work or passing the buck. If you do end up getting worked dumped on your desk, try delegating it to a cow-orker. You'd be surprised how easy this is. If you do it often enough, you'll probably get promoted.).
In all likely hood, unless your one of a small handful of 'key people' (there are only ever a small handful of 'key people' even in a office of a couple of hundred) your only there to make up the numbers in any case. It's just like real life really, about 5% of the population do all the the really useful meaningful stuff, like running things, building things or inventing things. The rest of us are just here to make up the numbers and keep the infrastructure going. The most we can hope for is not to get in the way.
Lastly, if you have any difficulty with this approach due to out moded concepts like 'guilt' (over being paid good money to surf the web, for example), remember that it's not your money your wasting, it belongs to some weasel in a suit, who, if he was standing on a high ledge as you looked on below, you'd be shouting *jump* *jump*. Put in that that perspective, all your doing is relieving him of a little cash (which will probably only cause him undue stress in the long run, so really your doing him a favour).*
* Though when his bank balance get's down to $0.00 don't let that stop you from shouting "Jump! Jump!" when the time comes. (That sort of oppertunity does come along very often and you'll kick yourself afterwards if you don't).
Systems like PHP and (here comes the -1 Flamebait mod) ASP are faster and more efficient than Perl CGI.
Perl with mod_perl is *very* fast and no slower than PHP with mod_php. Perl on it's own certainly isn't very nippy under high load, but then PHP without mod_php isnt great either, though many PHP fans don't take the time to understand the difference before determining which is better (which is understandable when you take into account that PHP is now used more than Perl by less experienced users, due to it's greater ease of use).
ASP pages (at least served by IIS) are significantly less able to cope with high load than Perl with mod_perl. IIS really strains when serving dynamic load (though it's superb at serving static content, though that's not so useful:). Of course I should say that it's entirely theoretically possible that an ASP solution under Unix might give comparable, or even better, performance but given it's such a small market share and has comparatively tiny amounts of development time (measured in developer hours) associated with it it's not realistically likely - to the extent that I don't think anyone would even claim it is. It's more of a way of giving customers ASP without having the system administrator management headache of having to run NT servers.
There seems to be a big PHP bandwagon among the hip and trendy crowd these days. That's not entirely a bad thing, because (like Perl) PHP is a GoodThing(TM) but it is a when they are just repeating what everyone else is doing (which is always a bit worrying).
The most compelling arguments are that PHP is of course easier, and so on balance PHP markup is much less prone to errors than Perl scripting.
Serious webmasters do it in Java or C anyhow, for serious speed.
Sorry, but I really dispute this. Not that serious webmaster to it in Java or C, just that it's not always very quick (I'll justify that in a minute) and that there is an implication there that 'serious webmasters' work only or even mostly in Java or C which I disagree with.
If you are writing a large scale project with many developers some find it easier to keep control over the project if it's written in Java or C (over Perl) because of Perl's flexible nature (which some see as a curse when you have a large project). I can certainly see the merits of this and am a big fan of Java.
The drawback is with C is that C code takes much, much longer to write, takes longer to modify and is more prone to errors due it's complexity. Very little CGI is written in C due to this. I think that most appropriate place for C CGI's is for particular CPU or memory intensive functions who's functionality will remain relatively static over time. This way you can rapidly build flexible CGI interfaces around a very fast C program, meaning that your servers are not tied up with that function, but that you can still easily modify and adapt the front end of your site. Perl modules written in C are typically created to be used in this sort of context.
Java is excellent in that it imposes a similar strictness to C while allowing you to still comparatively rapidly produce code that is less error prone than either C or Perl (IMO), meaning it's great for development among many developers. The drawbacks are however that it still takes longer to code a solution in Java than in Perl (though it's quicker than C) and Java does not really become an option for high load situations unless you have large Sun hardware with plenty of RAM (several Gigabytes) to throw at it - though at which point it really shines.
So 'speed' is a relative term, yes certainly code in C will execute faster than in Perl, but if it takes you a month instead of a week to write, you may have just wasted 3 weeks worth of project time (and this can doom a project or kill a startup). It's much, much quicker to write and modify code in Perl (or PHP) than in Java or C (though modifying _other_peoples_ Perl can be a different story, though I've never had any problem doing that, I can see how other people do).
I once worked out timescales for a project that went like ~2 months of Perl coding or ~4 months of Java or ~6 months of C and noted the problems/advantages of each and let my manager pick one. We went with Perl (with the option to have parts in Java or C as we came across parts of the project that would benefit), even though Perl alone might struggle with the load of the task we were doing, because it was felt that Perl would easier to maintain, given that more people in the company were comfortable with Perl, Perl meant rapid development allow us to bend with typically ever changing requirements and that Perl monkeys are easier and cheaper to find (should we all leave and minion adjustments required to the software at a later stage).
As I final note I'd say that PHP certainly is quite appropriate in many situations and I don't dislike it at all, but for those with a strong Unix bent, unless they have good Perl already they might be better off doing at least a couple of projects in Perl, as Perl becomes a key 'life skill' due the fact that it can be used to write extremely useful scripts that do very complex things very quickly, so learning it is very useful.
First, what do I do when someone submits a patch that violates my 'mission'?
Step 1 is to reconsider your mission. When person A and person B disagree, person A is only right 50% of the time on average.
I subscribe to the view that, from any one persons perspective, most people are idiots and that even the people that are not normally idiots, are idiots a significant percentage of the time. I include myself in that, so it's entirely possible I'm being an idiot right now, but I suspect it's just a subjective matter of perspective. It's just occured to me their could be perspective distortion which could *make* people appear to be idiots even if they are not, but that's off topic and it complicates things for me so I'm going to ignore that.
Anyway, IMO - unless it's obviously a good idea, or unless the someone points out a good reason why it's a good idea then the idea should be ignored, because there is an overwhelming chance that they are idiots and their idea is idiotic.
I think constantly adding features and/or constantly questioning your goals can lead to bloat, unwarrented forking, delays and feeping creaturism.
If it's a good idea but not what you had in mind then forking would be a good thing, and you might want to plolitely suggest that (and offer to link to it, as a peace offering to demonstrate your not just being an asshole).
So I'm not disagreeing with you much, but I do think people deserve more contempt at their stupidity.
I know a number of lunatics that like to add patches for things that nobody but them wants, and then get all stroppy when they don't get applied, and as a result have always thought it better to ask if it was wanted or even already being worked on before creating a patch (unless it's for you in which case you are unlikely to care and can always make the patch avalible on your web site).
Thanks for the comments, not copied or pasted I promise:-)
i'm sure that gentoo can easily check against updates for apache/sendmail/php/mysql/qmail/etc.
Hmm cool, that's sounds interesting, I'll look into that.
Re; BSD
Ack, I think the BSD ports system is very good (particularly the way it automatically fetches source dependancies and complies them). This solves quite a lot of the problems I belive exist when you don't have package management. It's note quite package management and I prefer Solaris or Linux to BSD for the most part.
It's pretty popular and I think most BSD users are more experienced than Linux users (just because BSD get's less media attention and has less prevolence on the desktop) which also helps to negate some of the negative aspects of having to perform manual upgrades.
I don't have any hard figures to hand, but I don't think *BSD is more common than Linux - Linux get's a lot of media attention as a poster child (BSD is more of a grumpy uncle shaking it's fists at the young Linux upstarts, which pretty much reflects the BSD [middle age men, with long beards] vrs. Linux [young 'hip' geeks in their teens/mid twenties] users & developers:-) [HHOS!;)]
On one hand, Hotmail and Yahoo! rely heavily on FreeBSD (the most common of the BSD's) but then other site's like Google use Linux.
Most organisations have nothing like the quality of engineers at Hotmail, Yahoo! or Google though, and I think most installations would suffer if they didn't have 'easier' to manage systems like Red Hat or Solaris with simple package management and easy upgradeability (simply due to the fact that many Unix engineers or consultants are not as professionaly competant as they probably should be).
As it happens we run FreeBSD for our product in house and I am trying to switch to slowly it to Linux quitely so I can run L.I.D.S (lids.org) or PitBull LX because until Trusted BSD reaches maturity it's simply not able to be as secure technically.
if it's good for the market leader of OSes on production servers, a source based package management portage system is good enough for my little desktop
Well it's not the market leader, but it's still popular in the Unix world even if I don't like it as a production system, but yep, it's definately good enough for you desktop (and your right, if your compiling software it will be faster than a generic binary, but of course packages can be source too that way you get the best of both worlds !:-).
also, i heard somewhere that the package management system used by gentoo can be easily modified to support binaries, and that a few people are working on getting it stable, so if that's true what reasons still exist for using debian instead of gentoo...?
Hard to say, I guess, realistically, the only thing (given that your using it on a desktop) is that it would be an easier life for you if used Debian due it's popularity - installing a wide range of packages is very simple and easy with apt-get (I like it so much I even use fink, which is 'apt-get' for Mac OS X).
On the other hand, if you want the latest and greatest of anything, you'll probably end up having compile things anway, so I guess it depends what your preferences is. One thing is that you can learn a lot more about how to solve problems by compiling things yourself. Though it's good to have knowledge of both Debian and Red Hat package management for a commercial environment.
one more thing... i found it funny that you pointed at slack's age of 6 months when you're defending debian. they haven't released a new verison while i've even been using linux.
Ah because difference being the updates to tree's (e.g. security, unstable) are daily/or as needed:-) Even though the 'release' version number doesn't change updates through package management are constantly meaning an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' can update every single program on your system to the newest release, which is just unbeliveably cool:-)
Quartz Extreme is nothing like Direct X. They are 'chalk and cheese', to use an English expression.
Open GL is far more comparable to Direct X than Quartz Extreme is is. Direct X is about speeding up graphics performace, primarily in games and 3D applications (much like Open GL).
Quartz Extreme is about the entire Windowing environment and drawing *everything* in Open GL, Direct X does not do this - having Direct X installed does not mean that your Windows, Icons, Desktop and all your applications are displayed using hardware acceleration.
Yes, but effectivelty no packet management a very bad way to mange most commercial installations (as Slackware fans don't seem to realise).
(Disclaimer this post is not entirely directed at you, just an appropriate place to put this, and they are comments I thought were worth making:-)
Most Slackware users I know don't, for example, know much about others systems (e.g. HURD, BSD or Solaris) or more about running a professional system (e.g. running SNMP, tools like HP OpenView, RiverSoft, implimenting Madatory Access Controls, Access Control Lists or Capabilties)
I don't want to get into flame war, but I'm using that to try and illustrate that most of the maintainers of the the few 'production' Slackware based systems I've personally met are amoung the least professional (in my experience) and fall more into the 'quick hack' category and fail to realise why package management is so very important. Additionaly, Slackware has previously contained very serious exploitable holes for over 6 months at a time, but due to it's 'Slack' nature, they were not fixed (despite patched code being avalible in every other distribution) - the idea of a 6 month old distribution with many known holes being installed and no quick upgrade path (via packagemanagement or even service packs) makes me think that many of the holes will never get patched and so the systems will continue to be unpatched and easily exploitable.
I'd certainly say that serious professional production system often require custom complied and installed applications (such as Apache, Exim or Bind), jails configured, ACL's setup, MAC's applied, and an appropriate kernel built or tweaked for inteded use (depending on the OS), but:
(a) these can be easily turned into packages meaning they can be more easily rolled out accross large installations, even automatically using your own Debian package server and a cron job on each system, for example & (b) most of the software on a system (small utilites like tar, dd, cron and libraries) do not need to be complied manualy on every machine.
The key benifits of package management, as featured in unix operating systems like Debian, Red Hat, Solaris and Mac OS X, are:
- Stability.
By using prebuilt know-to-work binanies designed for a given platform that have very specific dependancies you are running a known good configuration (by any practicle definition).
- Security.
Using packages insures that patches are always applied in the correct order and it's easy to see which updates have been applied and which have not, by simply listing the installed packages compared with a list from the vendor. This way, thanks to the aid of the vendor (e.g. Sun or Apple, or Debian) you can rely on their knowledge and experience to help keep you secure and up-to-date against known issues.
Additionally, you can do fingerprinting and watermarking to detect modified files.
- Efficiency.
Manually compiling updates on each server, satisfiying dependancies is long and tedious work, even if you only have 20-30 machines.
By having a package management system you can updated them all simply by making a package avalible in a single location and having them all grab it automatically, making upgrades take minutes, rather than hours or days.
-Ease.
By using a 'standard' system like Red Hat, Debian, Solaris or even Mac OS X, it's easy for any other administrator to know where programs and configuration files will be and to see what uprades you've performed and to manage the system.
Through increased efficiency this translates into direct cost savings too (another benifit).
Now of course entirely different rules apply if it's a system for a *personal* desktop!:-) In the instance of a personal desktop in your own home it's entirely personal preference, BUT problems do arise when people who only really know one distribution well and don't understand suffer from Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about package managment and so opt for or advocate something like Slackware, which, IMO does not belong in most commercial organizations for the above reasons.
To say it's a 'waste' of nice hardware and software is to discount the ease of administration and monitoring of the system.
It's considerably less effort to maintain a Mac OS X server than it is to setup and maintain Solaris, BSD, Linux and the associated monitoring tools (Big Brother, Cricket, configuring SNMP support, RiverSoft, etc) and the functionality is identical (for the most part, sure you don't get ACL's or MAC's under Mac OS X (as you do with Trusted Solaris, Pit Bull or LIDS) but certainly more BSD & Linux software compiles on Mac OS X than does on say Solaris or on AIX).
Firstly, the use of expensive and tested hardware in a commercial environment should not be discounted easily. Most professional organisations choose on expensive name brand equipment such as IBM, Dell, Compaq and Sun even when they could get much cheaper 3rd party Intel or Sparc systems, simply for the name brand reliabilty.
The benifit of tested hardware combined with a complimentary operating system designed specifically for that platform multiplies the attactiveness of the solution (witness the corporate reliance on Sun & Solaris, HP & HPUX, IBM & AIX and to a lesser extent Compaq & True 64).
Secondly (and more importantly) the quality, flexiblity and ease of use of Apple's server software is what makes it appealing to me (and I'm not inclinded to credit a product that doesn't deserve it). I can run my own Java or Perl software on it without modification, I can also run my own or 3rd party open source C programs with little or modification and running the majority of software (Apache, Samba, FTP, SHH, etc) is entirely GUI based and a *click* *click* no brainer - much more straight forward than even Windows 2000). The slick real time monitoring tools (something like Big Brother but much slicker and designed specifically for the hardware and OS) and the remote access software (which is much like VNC) make spotting faults and dealing with problems very easy indeed.
For example (albeit an unrepresentative one, but illustrative none the less) I would much rather maintain 100 Mac OS X servers than 10 BSD, Linux or Solaris boxes. Actually with NetInfo and Apple Events for remote batch control of servers I'd rather set up and manage 1000 Mac OS X servers than even 100 BSD servers (and I've managed over 3000 horribly configured insecure P.O.S. AMD Linux boxes with Red Hat at once:).
Because the 10.1 upgrade was only and upgrade CD (and did a full install anyway) I felt it was it a pain the ass to install and meant I had two CD's, rather than one, to take care of (when they could have had a simple exchange program. Yes, better than Microsoft, but not as good as say, Sun.:)
Re: Windows 98 & USB support actually you can get USB support in Windows 98 initial release and even Windows 95 both via a free download from Microsoft (though most devices *said* Windows 98 was required for USB support most actually worked fine in an appropriately upgraded Windows 95).
Your right about MS being expensive for upgrades. A Windows 98 CD was about 120 UKP and the upgrade was about 70 UKP, so I bought the upgrade (hey I had just bought my first place and was earning only 12K UKP a year in my first 'proper' job:). Now I didn't have Windows 95 or 3.1 CD and needed to do a fresh install on my brand new x86 games boxen but I was feeling weasely.
The 'required specs' for the upgrade effectively said Windows 3.1 or newer required, or something to that effect. Now as I said I didn't have Windows 95 or 3.1 CD's, but I did have a licensed SoftPC running 3.1 on my Mac, so I called Microsoft tech support, they agreed that was legally within the term's of the license for the CD and without any argument gave me a full license (non upgrade key) for the CD over the phone- meaning that I could now do upgrades as well as clean installs with it. Mmm technicalites.
Sure I agree with your sentiments, but not too so accurate (excusuable as your not a Mac OS X user:).
It was awful of Apple not to give away 10.1 upgrade for free (even 20 USD was way to much!), that really was a 'bug fix' release, IMO. I am still mad about that. There were not a lot of neat features in it, mostly just fixes and a badly needed speed boost. That was fairly greedy and seemed petty.
I don't mind paying for 10.2 though, the update is massive (not as big a deal as say ME to XP, but a big deal none the less). Say comparable to NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 in terms of scale (as in NT 4.0 'worked', but Windows 2000 works well:).
The Quartz Extreme, improved Windows file sharing (no more kludgy samba command line faffing, whoo hoo, mmm gui:-) along with a faster Finder and better mail client (and less important stuff to me like iChat, iCal, new Address Book which is still cool none the less etc) make it worth while and reasonable IMO.
If they do this once a year I can live with it (which appears to be the plan). Veering off topic, the total shutoff of mac.com email has got be really pissed though. The should have at least kept forwarding avalible for a longer period and they could very well have warned people about this 6 months ago (though I guess they are counting on people having to pay to keep it on line at the last minute so as to avoid loosing email as a point of revenue).
I'm actually sucker enough to buy it as the email account has been *really* fast and reliable and I hate changing my address all the time so I will probably pay for it, I don't have a credit card but I'm worried I won't be able to pay for it before it get's shutoff because stuff like this sometimes takes a couple of months to show up in the UK (even in London).
I haven't really give a monkeys about iDisk (nice idea, not enough space and I can do this on my own BSD/Linux server anyway), but with 100 MB storage, a speed bump and an interated backup utility it's suddenly more appealing.
Slashdot Mirror
I behave differently from you and have different values. Yet still I read Slashdot. Deal with it.
The poster didn't suggest otherwise so I don't see why your being so reactionary.
The poster said:
You are a consumer. Unless you have radically altered your behavior, don't pretend otherwise.
And he was quite right. I think you are just avoiding the issue.
If you are a consumer, a producer or a purveyor of goods why deny it? It's quite innocuous to be any of these things.
Unless your _still_ anti capitialist?
Quite frankly, given the degree of inherant greed, lazyness and stupidity in the world I don't see how we can possibly be reasonably expected to use any other system.
It's an innocuous descriptive term for something you are are some point.
It's quite likely you are or have been also a producer of a consumable good or a purveyor of one at some point.
If you have a problem with that, I suggest have a chat to your shrink about it.
Do you consume products then?
If you do it is correct to call you a consumer.
Maarten Hekkelman doesn't like Mac OS X. He also doesn't seem to me to know much about it, nor does he seem to want to know much about it. He disliked the operating system offered on the platform on which it had developed a following, that is the simple reason why Pepper is no longer a viable option.
;-)
To justify my statements, amongst other thing, he says:
Mac OS X, however, loses on all fronts. It claims to be a Unix but it doesn't support much of the more advanced Unix features, since it is using such an old kernel.
For someone who is writing a text editor to blame the limitations of the kernel of the operating system on which it runs for lack of functionality is simply looking for excuses and is, in reality, a case of barking up the wrong tree (though he does mention a reference to a very old misfeature with regard 'piping', though there are/were very easy other ways to do the very same thing).
Though not exclusively based on FreeBSD 4.4, MacOS X 10.2 is based very heavily around a FreeBSD 4.4 core and, of course, GCC 3.1. Neither of these are 'old' by any practical definition.
Though the kernel has a certain level of maturity, the Mach layer currently acts primarily only as an abstraction layer for developers and has been very heavily hacked at since it's use in NeXT. The kernel is not 'old' nor 'krufty', despite the distinct impression given.
Maarten Hekkelman also says:
Did you ever consider dropping support for the old Mac OS, and making Pepper only for Mac OS X?
No.
I can understand not wanting to be locked in to Coca, but refusing to drop OS 9 (at the very least apart from bug fixes) was a mistake. More effort should have been spent on the Mac OS X (and Windows) versions.
Part of being a good developer is being able to make smart decisions. To keep supporting an out-dated operating system when it is clear that are other badly needed new features that need to be addressed (features needed to keep the product viable) is foolish.
Though I don't know him, the fact that he has now left development and gone to 'Database Administrator' speaks volumes to me about his ability to strategically plan product development, and his proficiency as a developer. I don't like to be critical of someone I haven't met, but that is the distinct impression I get.
I fail to see why a truly good developer would want to do this, as database administration is tedious at best and mind numbing at worse (and 1.5 TB systems are really not that interesting quite frankly, a Network Appliance Filer installation will do the job for you and is easily maintained part time by any administrator, with multiple redundant disks, multiple network connections, multiple power supplies, multiple controllers, the ability to roll back to previous versions (snapshots) and the ability to use Snap Mirror to keep a up-to-date version running off site which you can simply switch over to if the system goes FUBAR - makes it a no-brainer of a solution). I should point out, in the interest of fairness that they are not the only ones that make such a product (there are many cheaper competitors more suitable for smaller scale installations), but theirs is the best IME
Another thing I find telling is that he seems to dislike and find it hard to adjust to many things in Mac OS X and to dislike them quite passionately. I personally dislike little in most operating systems, other than crashes. IMO true hackers (as-in-the-coder-sence-of-the-word) never find it difficult to adjust and I have always believed this ability it to be innate in good hackers.
For example, I have never sat in front of something like Project Builder and bemoaned it's single window behavior (as Maarten Hekkelman does in this interview), I found it quite intuitive. I found it equally intuitive to have multiple windows, I've never had a problem with either. I also have no major problems with the Dock or with the Windows taskbar.
Of course I expect *users* to get confused over this sort of thing, but not developers!
Something you may find interesting:
/.'ers have pointed out, there are just too many speed inhibiting issues with and no guarentee of decent QOS by trying to piggy back on existing infrastructure - meaning it's only suitable for light home use at best. Certainly claims to do this have been around for at least 4 years now and have yet to amount to anything beyond what can best be described as mediocre trials. :-(
It has been discovered that using fiber to strenthen overhead power lines instead of more traditional steel is cheaper and has in fact been done already.
Because fiber is lighter than steel there is less sag on the power lines meaning the struts can be significantly further apart (which saves money). Additional value is gained because the fiber can be resold at some later date, and by using it in new power lines it means there is no additional digging.
The only expense is terminating the fiber, which is a one off cost and easily written off.
I think this is more viable because as other
This was tried by anther company Scottish Telecom (part of the Scottish Power group, and owners of Demon Internet - Sottish Telecom are now called 'Thus' following a 'Monday' style re-branding exercise, the initial literature for which amusingly misspelt 'companys' on the first page IIRC) when I was working for SOL (Scottish Telecom Internet Division). This was following on from identical work by the US company NORWEB.
The speeds at the time were ~28 kbps. They (Scottish Telecom) trailed the service by giving the equipment ('modem' + Compaq PC) to schools to gain feedback - they let the school's keep the PC's afterwards, which was nice.
They dropped the trail after they discovered the speed dropped dramatically when the grid was under strain...
e.g.
- at ~6:00pm when the street lights came on.
- When kettles were boiled for Tea following the ending of TV soaps like Eastenders or Coronation Street (I kid you not)
The most amusing story relates to how Ham radio operators discovered that lamp posts in the area were acting as broadcast antennas and broadcasting users packets over the neighborhood. ST denied this emphatically, though it was true (though it's not clear that it was actually possible to get any meaningful data out of the 'interference' that was being broadcast as no-one ever seriously suggested they had done this).
It may *say* that but I don't belive it from my own, bitter experience :-)
I've had 3 x 4 pint jugs of Vodka Red Bull in a night (entirely to myself) and been up all until after noon the next day, shaking shivering and going *why?* *why?* *never again* (etc etc) entirely unable to sleep despite really *really* wanting to.
This suggest that that information is hokum, or at least is only true with small quantities of both (and that if you take large quantities of both it throws that theory entirely to hell).
Yes I went to install it on a another PowerBook yesterday afternoon and couldn't find it!
*Confused*
Hmm, all it says now is "Coming late August".
Weird. It's possible I was wrong but I was sure it was back (it was even mentioned on a couple of web sites last week).
Yet another comment about Apple in danger of going out of business any minute now - news at 11!
All credit to Microsoft, the removed the conduit from the web site as soon as this bug came to light, and informed users of the problem while it was under investigation.
It was bug fixed and re-releaseled this month at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/.
Microsoft's mac software department is pretty on the ball (though I wish Internet Explorer on OS was better threaded and had a few of the annoying display bugs fixed).
So..restricting Internet use is OK if you're restricting people you don't like?
Well yes - of course!
It's common practice to restrict crackers, hackers, DDOS attackers and even anyone who looks at you funny.
If it's your network, you can limit what routes you will route to and from.
This is how peering and even transit operations work (some trasit agreements and many peering arrangements between carriers limit what netblocks may be access via them and peers do the same too).
If you can do it to them, they can do it to you. Pretty difficult to argue otherwise.
They _already_ do it to us, as do all large large corporations an private companies and anyone with a private IP range!
People can restrict access into and out of their network, it's not a new thing.
An ISP that blocks or restricts RIAA use of the net is legitimizing the practice they purport to oppose.
Erm How? Do RIAA want to block all the traffic into their network coming from joe user?
We *wish*!
Of couse, was using "==" to check for matches (Perl wiggs out at this). Testing for matches by treating the values as a string works fine. (i.e. by using "eq" instead of "==").
:-)
This versions works, even with ReallyBigNumbers...
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Stupid Perl script to find Lychrel numbers.
# Yeah yeah inefficent, but very quick and easy to write
# Iain Collins, iain_collins@mac.com
use Math::BigInt;
use Strict;
my $start_number = $ARGV[0];
print "Searching For Lychrel Number, starting at: $start_number....\n";
my $forward_number = $start_number;
my $reversed_number = reverse($forward_number);
my $result;
my $result_tmp;
my $i = 0;
my $count = 0;
while ($i == 0) {
my $n = Math::BigInt->new($forward_number);
$count++;
$result = $n->badd($reversed_number);
$result =~ s/\+//g;
$forward_number =~ s/\+//g;
$reversed_number =~ s/\+//g;
print "$count: $forward_number + $reversed_number = $result\n";
$result_tmp = reverse($result);
if ($result_tmp eq $result) {
print "Palendrome Found?\n";
$i++;
}
$forward_number = $result;
$reversed_number = reverse($forward_number);
}
While I've been wating for the film to start I came up with this....
:/.
:-)
The only problem is doesn't work when the numbers are _really_ large (like hundreds of characters long), I think that's an issue with one of the functions
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Stupid Perl script to find Lychrel numbers.
# Yeah yeah inefficent, but very quick and easy to write
# Iain Collins, iain_collins@mac.com
use Math::BigInt;
use Strict;
my $start_number = $ARGV[0];
print "Searching For Lychrel Number, starting at: $start_number....\n";
my $forward_number = $start_number;
my $reversed_number = reverse($forward_number);
my $result;
my $result_tmp;
my $i = 0;
my $count = 0;
while ($i == 0) {
my $n = Math::BigInt->new($forward_number);
$count++;
$result = $n->badd($reversed_number);
$result =~ s/\+//g;
$forward_number =~ s/\+//g;
$reversed_number =~ s/\+//g;
print "$count: $forward_number + $reversed_number = $result\n";
$result_tmp = reverse($result);
if ($result_tmp == $result) {
print "Palendrome Found?\n";
$i++;
}
$forward_number = $result;
$reversed_number = reverse($forward_number);
}
Hmm, I don't see how the cat isn't going to call in just because the seat is down, or how it's any more likely it won't fall in.
:-)
Related story:
My mum has a cat that can both drink from *and* urinate it the toliet (I have seen it do both, but not at the same time).
Somehow I think I would be more impressed if it only ever did one of these things
Gak! I wish it was possible to edit posts for spelling. :)
I agree with the poster of the comment you are replying to. Office life is the best thing since reclining armchairs. If you don't think office life is cushy your either don't work in an office or your just not very good at taking advantage your situation.
I do agree that yes, offices are run by moron's, but then the entire planet is crawling with moron's and they make up almost the entire population, but office are in no way like factories. There are hundreds of people in Tiwan threading shoelace's who would agree with me.
Office's are not designed to treat employese badly or to give them a hard time, they are deisgned the way thay are because they were designed by a moron who honestly thought it was a really good idea to built it that way. But this person designs offices for a living, so it was clear they were underqualified to begin with.
The key to getting the most out of office life is laziness. This must be worked at, for it is often not quick to achieve and does not always come naturally (except to us lucky few).
Office life is about coffee, free toast, surfing the web, reading email and downloading music and, if your inclined, hoarding pornography. Even meetings are good because you get to drink coffee in a quite room and bring your own reading material (I suggest ebooks on a Palm as they're less conspicuous). NB: A key tip is to schedule them over lunch time so you can order in tiny crustless triangle sandwiches at the companies expense (thus saving yourself time, money and energy buying your own lunch and from having to make do with those horrible 3 day old excuses for sandwiches that the local sandwich van will invariably bring round).
Anything else is just a distraction from YOUR personal pleasure. Remember it's YOUR time not theirs (it may be THEIR money but it's still YOUR time, for those of a skeptical disposition check your contract - at no point do employment contracts expressly forbid you from: avoiding work, shirking responsibility, pretending to work or passing the buck. If you do end up getting worked dumped on your desk, try delegating it to a cow-orker. You'd be surprised how easy this is. If you do it often enough, you'll probably get promoted.).
In all likely hood, unless your one of a small handful of 'key people' (there are only ever a small handful of 'key people' even in a office of a couple of hundred) your only there to make up the numbers in any case. It's just like real life really, about 5% of the population do all the the really useful meaningful stuff, like running things, building things or inventing things. The rest of us are just here to make up the numbers and keep the infrastructure going. The most we can hope for is not to get in the way.
Lastly, if you have any difficulty with this approach due to out moded concepts like 'guilt' (over being paid good money to surf the web, for example), remember that it's not your money your wasting, it belongs to some weasel in a suit, who, if he was standing on a high ledge as you looked on below, you'd be shouting *jump* *jump*. Put in that that perspective, all your doing is relieving him of a little cash (which will probably only cause him undue stress in the long run, so really your doing him a favour).*
* Though when his bank balance get's down to $0.00 don't let that stop you from shouting "Jump! Jump!" when the time comes. (That sort of oppertunity does come along very often and you'll kick yourself afterwards if you don't).
Systems like PHP and (here comes the -1 Flamebait mod) ASP are faster and more efficient than Perl CGI.
:). Of course I should say that it's entirely theoretically possible that an ASP solution under Unix might give comparable, or even better, performance but given it's such a small market share and has comparatively tiny amounts of development time (measured in developer hours) associated with it it's not realistically likely - to the extent that I don't think anyone would even claim it is. It's more of a way of giving customers ASP without having the system administrator management headache of having to run NT servers.
Perl with mod_perl is *very* fast and no slower than PHP with mod_php. Perl on it's own certainly isn't very nippy under high load, but then PHP without mod_php isnt great either, though many PHP fans don't take the time to understand the difference before determining which is better (which is understandable when you take into account that PHP is now used more than Perl by less experienced users, due to it's greater ease of use).
ASP pages (at least served by IIS) are significantly less able to cope with high load than Perl with mod_perl. IIS really strains when serving dynamic load (though it's superb at serving static content, though that's not so useful
There seems to be a big PHP bandwagon among the hip and trendy crowd these days. That's not entirely a bad thing, because (like Perl) PHP is a GoodThing(TM) but it is a when they are just repeating what everyone else is doing (which is always a bit worrying).
The most compelling arguments are that PHP is of course easier, and so on balance PHP markup is much less prone to errors than Perl scripting.
Serious webmasters do it in Java or C anyhow, for serious speed.
Sorry, but I really dispute this. Not that serious webmaster to it in Java or C, just that it's not always very quick (I'll justify that in a minute) and that there is an implication there that 'serious webmasters' work only or even mostly in Java or C which I disagree with.
If you are writing a large scale project with many developers some find it easier to keep control over the project if it's written in Java or C (over Perl) because of Perl's flexible nature (which some see as a curse when you have a large project). I can certainly see the merits of this and am a big fan of Java.
The drawback is with C is that C code takes much, much longer to write, takes longer to modify and is more prone to errors due it's complexity. Very little CGI is written in C due to this. I think that most appropriate place for C CGI's is for particular CPU or memory intensive functions who's functionality will remain relatively static over time. This way you can rapidly build flexible CGI interfaces around a very fast C program, meaning that your servers are not tied up with that function, but that you can still easily modify and adapt the front end of your site. Perl modules written in C are typically created to be used in this sort of context.
Java is excellent in that it imposes a similar strictness to C while allowing you to still comparatively rapidly produce code that is less error prone than either C or Perl (IMO), meaning it's great for development among many developers. The drawbacks are however that it still takes longer to code a solution in Java than in Perl (though it's quicker than C) and Java does not really become an option for high load situations unless you have large Sun hardware with plenty of RAM (several Gigabytes) to throw at it - though at which point it really shines.
So 'speed' is a relative term, yes certainly code in C will execute faster than in Perl, but if it takes you a month instead of a week to write, you may have just wasted 3 weeks worth of project time (and this can doom a project or kill a startup). It's much, much quicker to write and modify code in Perl (or PHP) than in Java or C (though modifying _other_peoples_ Perl can be a different story, though I've never had any problem doing that, I can see how other people do).
I once worked out timescales for a project that went like ~2 months of Perl coding or ~4 months of Java or ~6 months of C and noted the problems/advantages of each and let my manager pick one. We went with Perl (with the option to have parts in Java or C as we came across parts of the project that would benefit), even though Perl alone might struggle with the load of the task we were doing, because it was felt that Perl would easier to maintain, given that more people in the company were comfortable with Perl, Perl meant rapid development allow us to bend with typically ever changing requirements and that Perl monkeys are easier and cheaper to find (should we all leave and minion adjustments required to the software at a later stage).
As I final note I'd say that PHP certainly is quite appropriate in many situations and I don't dislike it at all, but for those with a strong Unix bent, unless they have good Perl already they might be better off doing at least a couple of projects in Perl, as Perl becomes a key 'life skill' due the fact that it can be used to write extremely useful scripts that do very complex things very quickly, so learning it is very useful.
First, what do I do when someone submits a patch that violates my 'mission'?
Step 1 is to reconsider your mission. When person A and person B disagree, person A is only right 50% of the time on average.
I subscribe to the view that, from any one persons perspective, most people are idiots and that even the people that are not normally idiots, are idiots a significant percentage of the time. I include myself in that, so it's entirely possible I'm being an idiot right now, but I suspect it's just a subjective matter of perspective. It's just occured to me their could be perspective distortion which could *make* people appear to be idiots even if they are not, but that's off topic and it complicates things for me so I'm going to ignore that.
Anyway, IMO - unless it's obviously a good idea, or unless the someone points out a good reason why it's a good idea then the idea should be ignored, because there is an overwhelming chance that they are idiots and their idea is idiotic.
I think constantly adding features and/or constantly questioning your goals can lead to bloat, unwarrented forking, delays and feeping creaturism.
If it's a good idea but not what you had in mind then forking would be a good thing, and you might want to plolitely suggest that (and offer to link to it, as a peace offering to demonstrate your not just being an asshole).
So I'm not disagreeing with you much, but I do think people deserve more contempt at their stupidity.
I know a number of lunatics that like to add patches for things that nobody but them wants, and then get all stroppy when they don't get applied, and as a result have always thought it better to ask if it was wanted or even already being worked on before creating a patch (unless it's for you in which case you are unlikely to care and can always make the patch avalible on your web site).
Thanks for the comments, not copied or pasted I promise :-)
:-) [HHOS!;)]
:-).
:-) Even though the 'release' version number doesn't change updates through package management are constantly meaning an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' can update every single program on your system to the newest release, which is just unbeliveably cool :-)
i'm sure that gentoo can easily check against updates for apache/sendmail/php/mysql/qmail/etc.
Hmm cool, that's sounds interesting, I'll look into that.
Re; BSD
Ack, I think the BSD ports system is very good (particularly the way it automatically fetches source dependancies and complies them). This solves quite a lot of the problems I belive exist when you don't have package management. It's note quite package management and I prefer Solaris or Linux to BSD for the most part.
It's pretty popular and I think most BSD users are more experienced than Linux users (just because BSD get's less media attention and has less prevolence on the desktop) which also helps to negate some of the negative aspects of having to perform manual upgrades.
I don't have any hard figures to hand, but I don't think *BSD is more common than Linux - Linux get's a lot of media attention as a poster child (BSD is more of a grumpy uncle shaking it's fists at the young Linux upstarts, which pretty much reflects the BSD [middle age men, with long beards] vrs. Linux [young 'hip' geeks in their teens/mid twenties] users & developers
On one hand, Hotmail and Yahoo! rely heavily on FreeBSD (the most common of the BSD's) but then other site's like Google use Linux.
Most organisations have nothing like the quality of engineers at Hotmail, Yahoo! or Google though, and I think most installations would suffer if they didn't have 'easier' to manage systems like Red Hat or Solaris with simple package management and easy upgradeability (simply due to the fact that many Unix engineers or consultants are not as professionaly competant as they probably should be).
As it happens we run FreeBSD for our product in house and I am trying to switch to slowly it to Linux quitely so I can run L.I.D.S (lids.org) or PitBull LX because until Trusted BSD reaches maturity it's simply not able to be as secure technically.
if it's good for the market leader of OSes on production servers, a source based package management portage system is good enough for my little desktop
Well it's not the market leader, but it's still popular in the Unix world even if I don't like it as a production system, but yep, it's definately good enough for you desktop (and your right, if your compiling software it will be faster than a generic binary, but of course packages can be source too that way you get the best of both worlds !
also, i heard somewhere that the package management system used by gentoo can be easily modified to support binaries, and that a few people are working on getting it stable, so if that's true what reasons still exist for using debian instead of gentoo...?
Hard to say, I guess, realistically, the only thing (given that your using it on a desktop) is that it would be an easier life for you if used Debian due it's popularity - installing a wide range of packages is very simple and easy with apt-get (I like it so much I even use fink, which is 'apt-get' for Mac OS X).
On the other hand, if you want the latest and greatest of anything, you'll probably end up having compile things anway, so I guess it depends what your preferences is. One thing is that you can learn a lot more about how to solve problems by compiling things yourself. Though it's good to have knowledge of both Debian and Red Hat package management for a commercial environment.
one more thing... i found it funny that you pointed at slack's age of 6 months when you're defending debian. they haven't released a new verison while i've even been using linux.
Ah because difference being the updates to tree's (e.g. security, unstable) are daily/or as needed
Quartz Extreme is nothing like Direct X. They are 'chalk and cheese', to use an English expression.
Open GL is far more comparable to Direct X than Quartz Extreme is is. Direct X is about speeding up graphics performace, primarily in games and 3D applications (much like Open GL).
Quartz Extreme is about the entire Windowing environment and drawing *everything* in Open GL, Direct X does not do this - having Direct X installed does not mean that your Windows, Icons, Desktop and all your applications are displayed using hardware acceleration.
Yes, but effectivelty no packet management a very bad way to mange most commercial installations (as Slackware fans don't seem to realise).
:-)
:-) In the instance of a personal desktop in your own home it's entirely personal preference, BUT problems do arise when people who only really know one distribution well and don't understand suffer from Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about package managment and so opt for or advocate something like Slackware, which, IMO does not belong in most commercial organizations for the above reasons.
(Disclaimer this post is not entirely directed at you, just an appropriate place to put this, and they are comments I thought were worth making
Most Slackware users I know don't, for example, know much about others systems (e.g. HURD, BSD or Solaris) or more about running a professional system (e.g. running SNMP, tools like HP OpenView, RiverSoft, implimenting Madatory Access Controls, Access Control Lists or Capabilties)
I don't want to get into flame war, but I'm using that to try and illustrate that most of the maintainers of the the few 'production' Slackware based systems I've personally met are amoung the least professional (in my experience) and fall more into the 'quick hack' category and fail to realise why package management is so very important. Additionaly, Slackware has previously contained very serious exploitable holes for over 6 months at a time, but due to it's 'Slack' nature, they were not fixed (despite patched code being avalible in every other distribution) - the idea of a 6 month old distribution with many known holes being installed and no quick upgrade path (via packagemanagement or even service packs) makes me think that many of the holes will never get patched and so the systems will continue to be unpatched and easily exploitable.
I'd certainly say that serious professional production system often require custom complied and installed applications (such as Apache, Exim or Bind), jails configured, ACL's setup, MAC's applied, and an appropriate kernel built or tweaked for inteded use (depending on the OS), but:
(a) these can be easily turned into packages meaning they can be more easily rolled out accross large installations, even automatically using your own Debian package server and a cron job on each system, for example
&
(b) most of the software on a system (small utilites like tar, dd, cron and libraries) do not need to be complied manualy on every machine.
The key benifits of package management, as featured in unix operating systems like Debian, Red Hat, Solaris and Mac OS X, are:
- Stability.
By using prebuilt know-to-work binanies designed for a given platform that have very specific dependancies you are running a known good configuration (by any practicle definition).
- Security.
Using packages insures that patches are always applied in the correct order and it's easy to see which updates have been applied and which have not, by simply listing the installed packages compared with a list from the vendor. This way, thanks to the aid of the vendor (e.g. Sun or Apple, or Debian) you can rely on their knowledge and experience to help keep you secure and up-to-date against known issues.
Additionally, you can do fingerprinting and watermarking to detect modified files.
- Efficiency.
Manually compiling updates on each server, satisfiying dependancies is long and tedious work, even if you only have 20-30 machines.
By having a package management system you can updated them all simply by making a package avalible in a single location and having them all grab it automatically, making upgrades take minutes, rather than hours or days.
-Ease.
By using a 'standard' system like Red Hat, Debian, Solaris or even Mac OS X, it's easy for any other administrator to know where programs and configuration files will be and to see what uprades you've performed and to manage the system.
Through increased efficiency this translates into direct cost savings too (another benifit).
Now of course entirely different rules apply if it's a system for a *personal* desktop!
To say it's a 'waste' of nice hardware and software is to discount the ease of administration and monitoring of the system.
:).
It's considerably less effort to maintain a Mac OS X server than it is to setup and maintain Solaris, BSD, Linux and the associated monitoring tools (Big Brother, Cricket, configuring SNMP support, RiverSoft, etc) and the functionality is identical (for the most part, sure you don't get ACL's or MAC's under Mac OS X (as you do with Trusted Solaris, Pit Bull or LIDS) but certainly more BSD & Linux software compiles on Mac OS X than does on say Solaris or on AIX).
Firstly, the use of expensive and tested hardware in a commercial environment should not be discounted easily. Most professional organisations choose on expensive name brand equipment such as IBM, Dell, Compaq and Sun even when they could get much cheaper 3rd party Intel or Sparc systems, simply for the name brand reliabilty.
The benifit of tested hardware combined with a complimentary operating system designed specifically for that platform multiplies the attactiveness of the solution (witness the corporate reliance on Sun & Solaris, HP & HPUX, IBM & AIX and to a lesser extent Compaq & True 64).
Secondly (and more importantly) the quality, flexiblity and ease of use of Apple's server software is what makes it appealing to me (and I'm not inclinded to credit a product that doesn't deserve it). I can run my own Java or Perl software on it without modification, I can also run my own or 3rd party open source C programs with little or modification and running the majority of software (Apache, Samba, FTP, SHH, etc) is entirely GUI based and a *click* *click* no brainer - much more straight forward than even Windows 2000). The slick real time monitoring tools (something like Big Brother but much slicker and designed specifically for the hardware and OS) and the remote access software (which is much like VNC) make spotting faults and dealing with problems very easy indeed.
For example (albeit an unrepresentative one, but illustrative none the less) I would much rather maintain 100 Mac OS X servers than 10 BSD, Linux or Solaris boxes. Actually with NetInfo and Apple Events for remote batch control of servers I'd rather set up and manage 1000 Mac OS X servers than even 100 BSD servers (and I've managed over 3000 horribly configured insecure P.O.S. AMD Linux boxes with Red Hat at once
Only if you drag all your apps onto the dock. In which case things can get just a tab crowded
:-)
Ah, then you just need to buy more widescreen cinema displays
Because the 10.1 upgrade was only and upgrade CD (and did a full install anyway) I felt it was it a pain the ass to install and meant I had two CD's, rather than one, to take care of (when they could have had a simple exchange program. Yes, better than Microsoft, but not as good as say, Sun. :)
Re: Windows 98 & USB support actually you can get USB support in Windows 98 initial release and even Windows 95 both via a free download from Microsoft (though most devices *said* Windows 98 was required for USB support most actually worked fine in an appropriately upgraded Windows 95).
Your right about MS being expensive for upgrades. A Windows 98 CD was about 120 UKP and the upgrade was about 70 UKP, so I bought the upgrade (hey I had just bought my first place and was earning only 12K UKP a year in my first 'proper' job:). Now I didn't have Windows 95 or 3.1 CD and needed to do a fresh install on my brand new x86 games boxen but I was feeling weasely.
The 'required specs' for the upgrade effectively said Windows 3.1 or newer required, or something to that effect. Now as I said I didn't have Windows 95 or 3.1 CD's, but I did have a licensed SoftPC running 3.1 on my Mac, so I called Microsoft tech support, they agreed that was legally within the term's of the license for the CD and without any argument gave me a full license (non upgrade key) for the CD over the phone- meaning that I could now do upgrades as well as clean installs with it. Mmm technicalites.
Sure I agree with your sentiments, but not too so accurate (excusuable as your not a Mac OS X user :).
:).
:-) along with a faster Finder and better mail client (and less important stuff to me like iChat, iCal, new Address Book which is still cool none the less etc) make it worth while and reasonable IMO.
It was awful of Apple not to give away 10.1 upgrade for free (even 20 USD was way to much!), that really was a 'bug fix' release, IMO. I am still mad about that. There were not a lot of neat features in it, mostly just fixes and a badly needed speed boost. That was fairly greedy and seemed petty.
I don't mind paying for 10.2 though, the update is massive (not as big a deal as say ME to XP, but a big deal none the less). Say comparable to NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 in terms of scale (as in NT 4.0 'worked', but Windows 2000 works well
The Quartz Extreme, improved Windows file sharing (no more kludgy samba command line faffing, whoo hoo, mmm gui
If they do this once a year I can live with it (which appears to be the plan). Veering off topic, the total shutoff of mac.com email has got be really pissed though. The should have at least kept forwarding avalible for a longer period and they could very well have warned people about this 6 months ago (though I guess they are counting on people having to pay to keep it on line at the last minute so as to avoid loosing email as a point of revenue).
I'm actually sucker enough to buy it as the email account has been *really* fast and reliable and I hate changing my address all the time so I will probably pay for it, I don't have a credit card but I'm worried I won't be able to pay for it before it get's shutoff because stuff like this sometimes takes a couple of months to show up in the UK (even in London).
I haven't really give a monkeys about iDisk (nice idea, not enough space and I can do this on my own BSD/Linux server anyway), but with 100 MB storage, a speed bump and an interated backup utility it's suddenly more appealing.