So my point is there is no TECHNICAL reason NOT to integrate the HELL out of devices. There are many practical reasons why integrated devices rule.
There's also a lot of practical reasons why integrated devices suck. The interface needs of all those are radically different.
The way you hold and use a PDA, a game system, and a phone are all different. For a PDA you want a nice large screen and a comfortable input area. Make it too small, and it becomes unusable (think of the old Casio watches from the eighties).
For a game player, I want nice fat buttons and a decently large color screen. I also want to hold it comfortably using both hands. Those properties make for a miserably large and uncomfortable phone.
For a phone, you want something small and light that you can comfortably hold up to your ear for extended periods. Take an iPAQ and hold it next to your head for twenty minutes. Maybe you find it comfortable, but I sure don't. All of the integrated phone/PDA/whatever devices I've seen have either been too large and awkward to be good phones (I'm thinking of the latest offerings from RIM and Handspring), or too small to be good general-purpose PDAs (the Ericsson T68i).
Who knows, maybe someday they'll find a magic form factor that fits every purpose. Until then, I'm staying away from the integrated super-widgets.
I'm 34 years old, and the only CD I've purchased in the last 18 months was for a gift.
Agreed. What's amazing to me is how common this story is nowadays. I'm 24 and I haven't bought music in about a year and a half. All my friends are in their mid-twenties and they say the same thing. It's like somewhere in the middle of 2001, everybody just.... lost interest.
I look at the billboard charts today and I see a lot of familiar faces. Nelly, Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Kid Rock, Jennifer Lopez. All squarely targeted at the teen market. Even stalwarts like the Dave Matthews' Band and U2 lack most of the vibrancy that made them great in the past. We just acquired a great new radio station in San Diego that plays "Music that doesn't suck." They play a wide variety of fantastic music, none of it younger than two years old.
What's really frustrating to me is that I know that somewhere, great music is being made. Groups like Thievery Corporation, Ozomatli, and Los Lobos are still out there making great music. But where am I supposed to find out about it? FM Radio? MTV? Internet Radio? Napster? Every channel I used to find new music is either dying under the weight of RIAA legal action or playing the same five songs.
Especially sad is the fact that this is an old rant, heard a million times from a million different people. Zentec is right. There's a huge demand out there, but it's being totally ignored. I hope the article's right. We're due for a change.
I know there's a lot of hard-core MMORPG players here that won't be playing SWG because of this MCS vs. SCS thing (Acronym overload!). I, for one, will be playing because of Sony's decision.
One reason I've stayed away from MMORPGs in the past is because of all the chatter about "muling", "twinking", and fscked economies. I want to play an online RPG that feels like an RPG, not some twisted inventory management competition. I mean, can you imagine trying to sell multiple characters to a D&D group?
I think Sony is trying to create a MMORPG for the common man, or at least the common gamer. Flame all you want, but I think it's grand.
Err yes they should and that goes for anything technical.
I think that attitude is one of the prime obstacles of putting Linux on the desktop. Correct or not, the attitude of the common person is that computers should be as simple and painless to use as possible. People's big complaint with Windows is that it's difficult and frustrating. Linux isn't going to gain any ground by being even more difficult.
Apple has made tremendous gains by creating a full UNIX system where people never ever have to be exposed to a command line. That's what people want, and we're not going to bring Linux to the masses until we make room for the clueless newbies who don't want to ever look at a man page. Not once.
Listen, my mom is never going to be a competent sysadmin, nor should she need to be. She just wants to send pictures of the kids to her friends, write letters, and make home movies with a minimum of fuss. Insisting that she should learn "How to ask smart questions" and "Report bugs effectively" ensures that she's not going to use Linux. Ever.
One of the first things I noticed when I started working for UCSD is that wireless is a big priority. Over at UCSD Extension, we've got 802.11b coverage throughout our facilities as well as a lot of 802.11a. Some of our people don't even have dedicated desks, just laptops with wireless access.
I didn't know we had a wireless bus, though. That just rocks.
All you need to do is to have a welcome HTML screen to your WiFi network that requires that users give you their name and verifyable e-mail address before they're allowed to roam.
I foresee a lot of foo@hotmail.com accounts showing up in my logs. Really, there's no good way to track people without demanding a credit card or proof of identity.
Hell's going to get real cold before I demand a driver's license to use my school's computer labs. The same goes for the library computers and my home network.
Our of curiosity, when someone does sit on your network for a few hours, uses some stolen credit cards, uses a script to hack into a few hundred systems, launches a distributed denial-of-service attack against a few government system, maybe sends out a bundle of spam, and the feds come knocking on your door, what do you plan on telling them?
I plan on telling them that I'm no more liable than the phone company is for allowing them to make phone calls. It's called the "Common Carrier" principle, and I think it applies here.
I mean, if you hold me liable for what somebody else does through my bandwidth then you'll have to lock down every public library, Starbucks, Internet cafe and airport where they let you browse the web for free or a small cash donation. Network availability is becoming ubiquitous through a variety of technologies. Regulating 802.11 doesn't prevent people from getting on the network, it just kills 802.11.
Securing the network from "bad people" isn't really an option any more than securing the phone system is. Do you want to get rid of pay phones too?
You're right, of course. Even with Altivec there's no way that even the latest G4s can compete with the monsters that AMD and Intel are putting out. When you pull out the benchmarks, Motorola's chips are lagging far behind. It would be foolish to claim otherwise, and Apple is currently grasping at straws with stacked benchmarks.
My claim is only that on Photoshop and a few other things my lowly G4 450 doesn't lag too far behind a 1.8 Ghz Celeron. That's a subjective opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. I haven't run benchmarks.
My original point was this, though: even if Altivec + Apple's Heavy Programming Investment in Altivec only nets them a 50% increase in speed on things like title renders, it will help make that chip very competitive vs. the P4/Athlon in the video editing market. My hunch is that the 970 based Macs will be right up there with the latest x86 based machines for performance. Of course, that's speculation based on conjecture based on fairy dust. The 970's best known trump card is still power consumption.
You've challenged my bullshit and kept me honest. I salute you, sir.
No. AltiVec is not a bad thing, but it simply is not a substitude for raw clock speed, either.
Hey, I'll be the first to agree with you. Raw clock speed is usually king. However, Altivec can often be applied in applications like image, sound, and video manipulation. With things like MP3 manipulation or Photoshop, my G4 is competitive with chips more than four times the clock speed. Video editing is the market that's under discussion right now, and I think Altivec will apply often enough to give Apple a nice advantage.
It's true that SIMD isn't as magical as it's often talked up to be. It sure kicks ass at a lot of the creative stuff though, and that's all that matters in most of Apple's markets.
This is ridiculous. I've been running an open AP at home for over a year now, quite on purpose. If you want my bandwidth then have at it. I'm not using it 99% of the time, so have fun. If you hack my machine (good luck!) then you now 0wn all my porn, to-do lists, and pictures from Europe. Enjoy.
I'm well aware of the ramifications of running an open AP and I do it anyways. Now this makes me a criminal? That's just insane. I'm going to be a fucking felon, just because I let somebody check their e-mail on my dime?
Alright, say I buckle and secure my home network. What are they going to do to my employer? I work at a fucking school. Providing free bandwidth is part of my job. Are they going to lock down my computer labs? Are we going to run background checks on all of our students? Are we going to have to close our doors because the public is too dangerous to be allowed near a computer?
I am pissed beyond all reason at this. Secure wi-fi is fine and dandy, but sometimes access needs to be free.
You're right, the 970 will help a lot. What's really amazing is that the 1.2 Ghz G4s are competitive at all. Altivec is so kick-ass for things like Photoshop that it allows Macs to be in the running with machines almost three times their clock speed.
Because of the superiority of Altivec, I'm not really worried about the 970 lagging behind Intel or AMD chips. Sure, SpecINT and SpecFP scores may be a little behind, but OS X + Final Cut Pro + Altivec should rock anything else on the block.
Also, remember that the 970 draws a rather low current in comparison to similar performing x86 chips. That means that Apple should be able to make laptops that can mop the floor with any x86-based portable, since they won't have to make huge performance concessions for battery life. Having desktop editing power in a 5 pound laptop is a very compelling proposition in the video market.
I'm not really worried about Apple's position. Even if they don't have the "fastest" machine on the market, they still seem primed to dominate the NLE segment. Final Cut Pro is such an attractive product (at a sweet price) that it seems masochistic to purchase anything else.
The matter is not that people don't want to pay for their products, it's a matter of making a satisfactory purchase. I cannot take a CD back if I don't like it, I can't rent a CD, and they're trying to prevent me from previewing music on places like Kazaa. Well gee. Why would I spend $18 on something I might like? Letting people read magazines didn't put publishers out of business.
Preach on, brother. I stopped buying new CDs a few years ago because I couldn't find any new music that I liked. When Napster came online, I started buying music again because I could listen to bands that people recommended, no matter how obscure they were. You ever try to find a "Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy" album in the store? How about "The Brooklyn Funk Essentials"? The only way to preview that music was through Napster, and I invariably ended up buying the CDs. Lord, I spent hundreds of dollars a year on new music I found on Napster.
Now that Napster's gone and Internet Radio is drying up, the only new music I hear is the crap they play on the radio. I haven't bought a new CD in over six months. The music industry missed a golden opportunity to keep itself alive and vital in the face of increasingly jaded consumers.
All windows 2000 boxes running AD should respond to ldap on port 389.
Ack. You're totally right. Apologies.
Back to Windows clients with LDAP. Our current CTO is looking to replace our AD with some sort of UNIX-based solution. As you said, Win2k authentication is dependent on AD unless you replace it with something like the Novell client. Paying Novell instead of Microsoft isn't really an option either. Of course, all of Microsoft's documentation is AD specific, so I'm starting to think that Windows just plain doesn't work with other directories. Is there any way to get Win2k to use regular kerberos and speak LDAP?
Unfortunately, Corel has several things going against it:
- Major (and foolish) Mac bias in the graphics/publishing market.
Huh? How do Macs fit in to Corel's decline? Corel offers all of its' major graphics programs on the Mac, they just don't sell very well. I think you have "Mac" mixed up with "Adobe".
I'd like to correct a point here, AD has a full implementation of LDAP protocol that you can use to access it (although I have not actually tested how great/bad it is). The proprietary protocol (ADSI [microsoft.com]) you speak of is merely a convenience for accessing directory services. If you don't like it use the original protocol in which it is based. You do have a choice. And in Apple's case... their using LDAP to access AD.
Actually, the original article didn't tell if the "nightmarish configuration issues" were on the client side or the AD side. Since MS doesn't enable LDAP by default, ADSI probably one of the many frustrations that this guy faced. AD just doesn't play well with others, and its' default configuration doesn't play with others at all.
Since you seem to have some experience, is there any way to get Windows clients to authenticate to an non-microsoft LDAP directory? I'm currently investigating going the other way: Using Windows clients with Open Directory.
It sounds like your real problem is getting AD to play nice with LDAP clients. The reason that Microsoft clients integrate "seamlessly" with AD is that they use some funky proprietary directory protocol, whereas everything else (Linux, Mac, etc.) speaks straight LDAP. I've found that 10.2 has pretty darn good LDAP integration, but getting it to work with Microsoft takes some accomodation on the AD side.
Remember that Macs use open protocols and tools for their Windows integration. Samba is used for the SMB stuff and LDAP for directories. Any time you're using proprietary MS protocols, you're going to run into problems. You'll run into the same situation with Linux, Novell, or anything non-MS. If your mandate is to make the Macs behave exactly like Windows, then they're setting you up for failure
That being said, you can really help yourself out by getting a 10.2 server to act as a bridge. Apple's OpenLDAP is still fairly young, but it really simplifies AD integration. With your modest requirements, you probably use an old iMac. The server software for 10.2 server is pretty cheap with educational discounts ($250 for 10 clients, $500 for unlimited), and it doesn't require much of a box. I'm using an iMac server to get a 20 station lab on AD and it works pretty well. You get some really cool deployment and workstation management tools, too.;)
I hear you about the documentation, though. I don't mind so much, because I like tinkering with things and Apple's stuff is fairly intuitive. However, when you're just starting out, Apple's "Why would you need a manual?" attitude gets pretty annoying.
Re:Ghost is worth the money
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Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 2
Also, ghost understands filesystems and not raw blocks.
Without question, this is one of the coolest features of Ghost. Without it, g4u isn't even an option for me. I work in an educational environment where we're using the same images on four different hardware configurations with a bunch of wildly different HD sizes. We're already stretching the capacity of our Ghost Servers (yep, plural. Three sites.). Needing a different image for each type of HD would require Terabytes of additional storage, not to mention increase our administrative overhead by an order of magnitude.
I've never seen a production environment where all the HDs were identical. Because it understands files, Ghost can deal with the real world in a clean and elegant manner.
Until g4u understands filesystems and supports multicast, it's not even worth considering for most scenarios.
Slashturbation. Cool. I've got a new "Word of the Day".
While this article is definitely "Slashturbation", it's not worthless. A lot of us have been saying that Free Software will gain traction in the third world because anything else is unaffordable. This provides practical evidence of that theory, and is relevant to those of us that care about IT in developing nations or pricing models in general.
Of course, it also gives us anti-M$ cheerleaders a warm fuzzy feeling too.
The Darwin kernel is based on Mach. While not a performance demon, Mach offers some very interesting advantages for Apple. Primarily, they have full rights to the code and can relicense it, whereas Linux would have bound them by the GPL. There's some technical advantages too, though.
First of all, Mach was/is developed by Avi Tevanian. Avi is a old buddy of Steve Jobs and they've been working together since the NeXT days. Any questions about architecture? Ask the guy that wrote it, he's just down the hall.
Secondly, the micro-kernelish nature of Mach makes Darwin (and OS X) a highly portable platform. With Motorola on the ropes, being able to shift platforms quickly is far more important than raw kernel speed. Darwin gives Apple hardware options, and options are a very good thing for Apple to have right now.
Lastly, there's momentum. AFAIK, their kernel crew came over from NeXT, where they'd been using Mach since the eighties. Why bother learning the ins and outs of a new architecture, when you've already got something that works? Better to extend what you've already got.
Darwin offers a pretty solid foundation for Apple. Moving to Linux would have taken a large effort for questionable gains.
I'll quickly cede the point that an "Out-of-the-box" linux install is a hell of a lot more usable than it was two years ago. "Usable" is kind of a sad benchmark for your desktop, though. After years of development, I should certainly hope that GNOME and KDE are usable. We really should be shooting for something a little higher. Open source is *barely* keeping up with Windows on the ease-of-use front, and Windows kind of sucks.
Let's bring some real-world examples into this. Say I want to connect to a remote printer on the same network segment.
On the Macintosh, I don't need to configure anything on my machine. Rendezvous automagically adds the printer to my drop-down list. It doesn't get any easier.
On Windows, I can graphically browse to the printer through "Network Neighborhood" and right click to connect it. Drivers are automatically pulled down from the server.
On Red Hat 8.0, you have to run the "Red Hat Printer Config" program, and click "New". From there, you need to select the type of printer (Local, Unix, Windows, Novell, or JetDirect). You need to name the queue, give an IP address, and possibly download additional software (if its' an SMB queue). Lord help you if you don't already have the drivers on your machine. Usable? Definitely. However, compared to the Mac it's a kludgy process.
They'll all work, but Red Hat is the most difficult to use of the three. The *BSDs are even worse. It's a similar story when dealing with mobile computing or wireless networking.
My original point was that the pseudo-closed Macintosh makes me a heck of a lot more productive than any OSS desktop ever did, and I haven't had to give up any of the power of unix. That's why so many people are jumping ship to OS X. Your arguments don't say that Linux is better, only that it'll do. In order to win on the desktop, OSS is going to have to do a lot better than that.
Zealotous Linux users are just as bad as complete MS supporters. Closed mindedness happens at both extremes.
Actually, as a long-time MS basher, I know I ceded the moral high ground long ago. You know what? I don't care.
MS has effectively declared war on my favorite technologies, and I feel obliged to retaliate. This isn't about right or wrong, or how open-minded we all are. This is about tarring and feathering MS until they get out of town or reform. This is war, Skippy, and we can all be tolerant and nice to each other when it's over.
why the enthusiasm for encouraging people to switch to OSX - a closed source operating system made by the poster-child for locking people into overpriced hardware?
Because OS X seems to deliver on all of the promises that Linux has been making for years.
While I love open-source software, I switched to a Mac because I got sick of waiting for the open source community to start making a useable desktop. Linux and the BSDs are fantastic on servers, but whenever I used either as my primary machine I found myself wrestling with the system a lot more than I wanted to. I don't want to learn the intricacies of my Xfree86 config files. I don't want to find where Red Hat hid Apache today. I just want to fire up my Dev Tools/Word Processor/Photoshop and get to work. I got away from Windows because I was sick of fighting with my machine. Why would I want to go back to that?
OS X is the first system since BeOS that does all the unixy stuff that I want without sacrificing aesthetics or ease-of-use. Overall the system is clean, intuitive, and I don't have to wrestle with it on a daily basis. Amazingly, it doesn't seem to sacrifice any flexibility or power for its' simplicity. When Linux makes me as productive as OS X, I'll go back in a second. Until then, you can pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers.
Does it somhow become encrypted on its way out of the database, remains scrambled on it's way over the internet, and reassembles itself into nice XML once it arrives on the recepients computer?....
Slashdot Mirror
So my point is there is no TECHNICAL reason NOT to integrate the HELL out of devices. There are many practical reasons why integrated devices rule.
There's also a lot of practical reasons why integrated devices suck. The interface needs of all those are radically different.
The way you hold and use a PDA, a game system, and a phone are all different. For a PDA you want a nice large screen and a comfortable input area. Make it too small, and it becomes unusable (think of the old Casio watches from the eighties).
For a game player, I want nice fat buttons and a decently large color screen. I also want to hold it comfortably using both hands. Those properties make for a miserably large and uncomfortable phone.
For a phone, you want something small and light that you can comfortably hold up to your ear for extended periods. Take an iPAQ and hold it next to your head for twenty minutes. Maybe you find it comfortable, but I sure don't. All of the integrated phone/PDA/whatever devices I've seen have either been too large and awkward to be good phones (I'm thinking of the latest offerings from RIM and Handspring), or too small to be good general-purpose PDAs (the Ericsson T68i).
Who knows, maybe someday they'll find a magic form factor that fits every purpose. Until then, I'm staying away from the integrated super-widgets.
I'm 34 years old, and the only CD I've purchased in the last 18 months was for a gift.
Agreed. What's amazing to me is how common this story is nowadays. I'm 24 and I haven't bought music in about a year and a half. All my friends are in their mid-twenties and they say the same thing. It's like somewhere in the middle of 2001, everybody just.... lost interest.
I look at the billboard charts today and I see a lot of familiar faces. Nelly, Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Kid Rock, Jennifer Lopez. All squarely targeted at the teen market. Even stalwarts like the Dave Matthews' Band and U2 lack most of the vibrancy that made them great in the past. We just acquired a great new radio station in San Diego that plays "Music that doesn't suck." They play a wide variety of fantastic music, none of it younger than two years old.
What's really frustrating to me is that I know that somewhere, great music is being made. Groups like Thievery Corporation, Ozomatli, and Los Lobos are still out there making great music. But where am I supposed to find out about it? FM Radio? MTV? Internet Radio? Napster? Every channel I used to find new music is either dying under the weight of RIAA legal action or playing the same five songs.
Especially sad is the fact that this is an old rant, heard a million times from a million different people. Zentec is right. There's a huge demand out there, but it's being totally ignored. I hope the article's right. We're due for a change.
All right, off the soapbox. I feel better.
I know there's a lot of hard-core MMORPG players here that won't be playing SWG because of this MCS vs. SCS thing (Acronym overload!). I, for one, will be playing because of Sony's decision.
One reason I've stayed away from MMORPGs in the past is because of all the chatter about "muling", "twinking", and fscked economies. I want to play an online RPG that feels like an RPG, not some twisted inventory management competition. I mean, can you imagine trying to sell multiple characters to a D&D group?
I think Sony is trying to create a MMORPG for the common man, or at least the common gamer. Flame all you want, but I think it's grand.
Err yes they should and that goes for anything technical.
I think that attitude is one of the prime obstacles of putting Linux on the desktop. Correct or not, the attitude of the common person is that computers should be as simple and painless to use as possible. People's big complaint with Windows is that it's difficult and frustrating. Linux isn't going to gain any ground by being even more difficult.
Apple has made tremendous gains by creating a full UNIX system where people never ever have to be exposed to a command line. That's what people want, and we're not going to bring Linux to the masses until we make room for the clueless newbies who don't want to ever look at a man page. Not once.
Listen, my mom is never going to be a competent sysadmin, nor should she need to be. She just wants to send pictures of the kids to her friends, write letters, and make home movies with a minimum of fuss. Insisting that she should learn "How to ask smart questions" and "Report bugs effectively" ensures that she's not going to use Linux. Ever.
One of the first things I noticed when I started working for UCSD is that wireless is a big priority. Over at UCSD Extension, we've got 802.11b coverage throughout our facilities as well as a lot of 802.11a. Some of our people don't even have dedicated desks, just laptops with wireless access.
I didn't know we had a wireless bus, though. That just rocks.
All you need to do is to have a welcome HTML screen to your WiFi network that requires that users give you their name and verifyable e-mail address before they're allowed to roam.
I foresee a lot of foo@hotmail.com accounts showing up in my logs. Really, there's no good way to track people without demanding a credit card or proof of identity.
Hell's going to get real cold before I demand a driver's license to use my school's computer labs. The same goes for the library computers and my home network.
Our of curiosity, when someone does sit on your network for a few hours, uses some stolen credit cards, uses a script to hack into a few hundred systems, launches a distributed denial-of-service attack against a few government system, maybe sends out a bundle of spam, and the feds come knocking on your door, what do you plan on telling them?
I plan on telling them that I'm no more liable than the phone company is for allowing them to make phone calls. It's called the "Common Carrier" principle, and I think it applies here.
I mean, if you hold me liable for what somebody else does through my bandwidth then you'll have to lock down every public library, Starbucks, Internet cafe and airport where they let you browse the web for free or a small cash donation. Network availability is becoming ubiquitous through a variety of technologies. Regulating 802.11 doesn't prevent people from getting on the network, it just kills 802.11.
Securing the network from "bad people" isn't really an option any more than securing the phone system is. Do you want to get rid of pay phones too?
You're right, of course. Even with Altivec there's no way that even the latest G4s can compete with the monsters that AMD and Intel are putting out. When you pull out the benchmarks, Motorola's chips are lagging far behind. It would be foolish to claim otherwise, and Apple is currently grasping at straws with stacked benchmarks.
My claim is only that on Photoshop and a few other things my lowly G4 450 doesn't lag too far behind a 1.8 Ghz Celeron. That's a subjective opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. I haven't run benchmarks.
My original point was this, though: even if Altivec + Apple's Heavy Programming Investment in Altivec only nets them a 50% increase in speed on things like title renders, it will help make that chip very competitive vs. the P4/Athlon in the video editing market. My hunch is that the 970 based Macs will be right up there with the latest x86 based machines for performance. Of course, that's speculation based on conjecture based on fairy dust. The 970's best known trump card is still power consumption.
You've challenged my bullshit and kept me honest. I salute you, sir.
No. AltiVec is not a bad thing, but it simply is not a substitude for raw clock speed, either.
Hey, I'll be the first to agree with you. Raw clock speed is usually king. However, Altivec can often be applied in applications like image, sound, and video manipulation. With things like MP3 manipulation or Photoshop, my G4 is competitive with chips more than four times the clock speed. Video editing is the market that's under discussion right now, and I think Altivec will apply often enough to give Apple a nice advantage.
It's true that SIMD isn't as magical as it's often talked up to be. It sure kicks ass at a lot of the creative stuff though, and that's all that matters in most of Apple's markets.
This is ridiculous. I've been running an open AP at home for over a year now, quite on purpose. If you want my bandwidth then have at it. I'm not using it 99% of the time, so have fun. If you hack my machine (good luck!) then you now 0wn all my porn, to-do lists, and pictures from Europe. Enjoy.
I'm well aware of the ramifications of running an open AP and I do it anyways. Now this makes me a criminal? That's just insane. I'm going to be a fucking felon, just because I let somebody check their e-mail on my dime?
Alright, say I buckle and secure my home network. What are they going to do to my employer? I work at a fucking school. Providing free bandwidth is part of my job. Are they going to lock down my computer labs? Are we going to run background checks on all of our students? Are we going to have to close our doors because the public is too dangerous to be allowed near a computer?
I am pissed beyond all reason at this. Secure wi-fi is fine and dandy, but sometimes access needs to be free.
You're right, the 970 will help a lot. What's really amazing is that the 1.2 Ghz G4s are competitive at all. Altivec is so kick-ass for things like Photoshop that it allows Macs to be in the running with machines almost three times their clock speed.
Because of the superiority of Altivec, I'm not really worried about the 970 lagging behind Intel or AMD chips. Sure, SpecINT and SpecFP scores may be a little behind, but OS X + Final Cut Pro + Altivec should rock anything else on the block.
Also, remember that the 970 draws a rather low current in comparison to similar performing x86 chips. That means that Apple should be able to make laptops that can mop the floor with any x86-based portable, since they won't have to make huge performance concessions for battery life. Having desktop editing power in a 5 pound laptop is a very compelling proposition in the video market.
I'm not really worried about Apple's position. Even if they don't have the "fastest" machine on the market, they still seem primed to dominate the NLE segment. Final Cut Pro is such an attractive product (at a sweet price) that it seems masochistic to purchase anything else.
Preach on, brother. I stopped buying new CDs a few years ago because I couldn't find any new music that I liked. When Napster came online, I started buying music again because I could listen to bands that people recommended, no matter how obscure they were. You ever try to find a "Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy" album in the store? How about "The Brooklyn Funk Essentials"? The only way to preview that music was through Napster, and I invariably ended up buying the CDs. Lord, I spent hundreds of dollars a year on new music I found on Napster.
Now that Napster's gone and Internet Radio is drying up, the only new music I hear is the crap they play on the radio. I haven't bought a new CD in over six months. The music industry missed a golden opportunity to keep itself alive and vital in the face of increasingly jaded consumers.
Hell must be a cold, cold, cold place by now. At this rate, I expect my quantum computer to arrive by Christmas.
All windows 2000 boxes running AD should respond to ldap on port 389.
Ack. You're totally right. Apologies.
Back to Windows clients with LDAP. Our current CTO is looking to replace our AD with some sort of UNIX-based solution. As you said, Win2k authentication is dependent on AD unless you replace it with something like the Novell client. Paying Novell instead of Microsoft isn't really an option either. Of course, all of Microsoft's documentation is AD specific, so I'm starting to think that Windows just plain doesn't work with other directories. Is there any way to get Win2k to use regular kerberos and speak LDAP?
Unfortunately, Corel has several things going against it:
- Major (and foolish) Mac bias in the graphics/publishing market.
Huh? How do Macs fit in to Corel's decline? Corel offers all of its' major graphics programs on the Mac, they just don't sell very well. I think you have "Mac" mixed up with "Adobe".
I'd like to correct a point here, AD has a full implementation of LDAP protocol that you can use to access it (although I have not actually tested how great/bad it is). The proprietary protocol (ADSI [microsoft.com]) you speak of is merely a convenience for accessing directory services. If you don't like it use the original protocol in which it is based. You do have a choice. And in Apple's case... their using LDAP to access AD.
Actually, the original article didn't tell if the "nightmarish configuration issues" were on the client side or the AD side. Since MS doesn't enable LDAP by default, ADSI probably one of the many frustrations that this guy faced. AD just doesn't play well with others, and its' default configuration doesn't play with others at all.
Since you seem to have some experience, is there any way to get Windows clients to authenticate to an non-microsoft LDAP directory? I'm currently investigating going the other way: Using Windows clients with Open Directory.
It sounds like your real problem is getting AD to play nice with LDAP clients. The reason that Microsoft clients integrate "seamlessly" with AD is that they use some funky proprietary directory protocol, whereas everything else (Linux, Mac, etc.) speaks straight LDAP. I've found that 10.2 has pretty darn good LDAP integration, but getting it to work with Microsoft takes some accomodation on the AD side.
Remember that Macs use open protocols and tools for their Windows integration. Samba is used for the SMB stuff and LDAP for directories. Any time you're using proprietary MS protocols, you're going to run into problems. You'll run into the same situation with Linux, Novell, or anything non-MS. If your mandate is to make the Macs behave exactly like Windows, then they're setting you up for failure
That being said, you can really help yourself out by getting a 10.2 server to act as a bridge. Apple's OpenLDAP is still fairly young, but it really simplifies AD integration. With your modest requirements, you probably use an old iMac. The server software for 10.2 server is pretty cheap with educational discounts ($250 for 10 clients, $500 for unlimited), and it doesn't require much of a box. I'm using an iMac server to get a 20 station lab on AD and it works pretty well. You get some really cool deployment and workstation management tools, too. ;)
I hear you about the documentation, though. I don't mind so much, because I like tinkering with things and Apple's stuff is fairly intuitive. However, when you're just starting out, Apple's "Why would you need a manual?" attitude gets pretty annoying.
Without question, this is one of the coolest features of Ghost. Without it, g4u isn't even an option for me. I work in an educational environment where we're using the same images on four different hardware configurations with a bunch of wildly different HD sizes. We're already stretching the capacity of our Ghost Servers (yep, plural. Three sites.). Needing a different image for each type of HD would require Terabytes of additional storage, not to mention increase our administrative overhead by an order of magnitude.
I've never seen a production environment where all the HDs were identical. Because it understands files, Ghost can deal with the real world in a clean and elegant manner.
Until g4u understands filesystems and supports multicast, it's not even worth considering for most scenarios.
Slashturbation. Cool. I've got a new "Word of the Day".
While this article is definitely "Slashturbation", it's not worthless. A lot of us have been saying that Free Software will gain traction in the third world because anything else is unaffordable. This provides practical evidence of that theory, and is relevant to those of us that care about IT in developing nations or pricing models in general.
Of course, it also gives us anti-M$ cheerleaders a warm fuzzy feeling too.
I can't wait to see how this turns out. I think this is the first time I've anxiously anticipated a Microsoft anything.
The Darwin kernel is based on Mach. While not a performance demon, Mach offers some very interesting advantages for Apple. Primarily, they have full rights to the code and can relicense it, whereas Linux would have bound them by the GPL. There's some technical advantages too, though.
First of all, Mach was/is developed by Avi Tevanian. Avi is a old buddy of Steve Jobs and they've been working together since the NeXT days. Any questions about architecture? Ask the guy that wrote it, he's just down the hall.
Secondly, the micro-kernelish nature of Mach makes Darwin (and OS X) a highly portable platform. With Motorola on the ropes, being able to shift platforms quickly is far more important than raw kernel speed. Darwin gives Apple hardware options, and options are a very good thing for Apple to have right now.
Lastly, there's momentum. AFAIK, their kernel crew came over from NeXT, where they'd been using Mach since the eighties. Why bother learning the ins and outs of a new architecture, when you've already got something that works? Better to extend what you've already got.
Darwin offers a pretty solid foundation for Apple. Moving to Linux would have taken a large effort for questionable gains.
I'll quickly cede the point that an "Out-of-the-box" linux install is a hell of a lot more usable than it was two years ago. "Usable" is kind of a sad benchmark for your desktop, though. After years of development, I should certainly hope that GNOME and KDE are usable. We really should be shooting for something a little higher. Open source is *barely* keeping up with Windows on the ease-of-use front, and Windows kind of sucks.
Let's bring some real-world examples into this. Say I want to connect to a remote printer on the same network segment.
They'll all work, but Red Hat is the most difficult to use of the three. The *BSDs are even worse. It's a similar story when dealing with mobile computing or wireless networking.
My original point was that the pseudo-closed Macintosh makes me a heck of a lot more productive than any OSS desktop ever did, and I haven't had to give up any of the power of unix. That's why so many people are jumping ship to OS X. Your arguments don't say that Linux is better, only that it'll do. In order to win on the desktop, OSS is going to have to do a lot better than that.
Zealotous Linux users are just as bad as complete MS supporters. Closed mindedness happens at both extremes.
Actually, as a long-time MS basher, I know I ceded the moral high ground long ago. You know what? I don't care.
MS has effectively declared war on my favorite technologies, and I feel obliged to retaliate. This isn't about right or wrong, or how open-minded we all are. This is about tarring and feathering MS until they get out of town or reform. This is war, Skippy, and we can all be tolerant and nice to each other when it's over.
why the enthusiasm for encouraging people to switch to OSX - a closed source operating system made by the poster-child for locking people into overpriced hardware?
Because OS X seems to deliver on all of the promises that Linux has been making for years.
While I love open-source software, I switched to a Mac because I got sick of waiting for the open source community to start making a useable desktop. Linux and the BSDs are fantastic on servers, but whenever I used either as my primary machine I found myself wrestling with the system a lot more than I wanted to. I don't want to learn the intricacies of my Xfree86 config files. I don't want to find where Red Hat hid Apache today. I just want to fire up my Dev Tools/Word Processor/Photoshop and get to work. I got away from Windows because I was sick of fighting with my machine. Why would I want to go back to that?
OS X is the first system since BeOS that does all the unixy stuff that I want without sacrificing aesthetics or ease-of-use. Overall the system is clean, intuitive, and I don't have to wrestle with it on a daily basis. Amazingly, it doesn't seem to sacrifice any flexibility or power for its' simplicity. When Linux makes me as productive as OS X, I'll go back in a second. Until then, you can pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers.
Does it somhow become encrypted on its way out of the database, remains scrambled on it's way over the internet, and reassembles itself into nice XML once it arrives on the recepients computer?....
I think you just described Palladium.