Not at all. David's part of a performance car community that's quite the anti-thesis of "Ricing." Rather than the crowd from The Fast and the Furious, you'll find a group of people that are dedicated to increasing the performance of their vehicles by bettering the car's power and handling. Very little, if any, modifications are made to the cars that do not directly impact performance. For an example of such a tuning shop, check out the one David worked at a year ago, WORKS.
These enthusiasts partake in spirited driving, various club competitions, and open track days. They frown on any type of reckless behavior such as excessive speed, street racing, etc.
Contrast this behavior to that of a typical "Ricer," where The Fast and the Furious looks are either equally, or more imporant than acutal performace. They'd rather throw a bottle of NOS and a big exhaust on the car, slap it with a body kit, a few decals and a type R sticker, and go out cruizing the streets.
About a year ago I delt with David at length while he was working for WORKS, a tuning shop in San Francisco. We were discussing the details of the power, handling, etc. modifications that they would be making to my Mitsubishi Evolution (the car they in which they specialize). For the entire time I delt with David (before he left WORKS to pursue other things, like the book) I was consistantly impressed by his comprehensive knoweledge of both the technical and legal aspects of vehical modifications (especially impressive in good ole California thanks to strict emission standards).
His expertise and professionalism have resulted in him gaining much respect within the Evolution community, and although I have not yet had a chance to review his book, if it's anything like the conversations I've had with him, you'll be amazed by just how far car tuning has come.
Before talking with him, I didn't think it was safely possible to take a $32000 car, $7k of tuning, and end up just a hair short of a supercar*. Amazing.
Hope the book sells well.
-S...
* by which I mean a 2.0L 340hp 4WD beast that sprints from 0-60 in 4.4 seconds, skidpad tests to 1g, and through the twisties can out perform anything short of a 911 Turbo
Sorry but it's exactly the kind of attitude of surrendering your privacy for 100 quid that's the first step on a long road to pervasive surveilance.
Great. I really dislike the people of this world who would rather a quick buck than preserve their rights.
I wish those people would realize that using your right-to-contract to surrender your rights to a corporation is no different in the end than surrendering your rights to the government. The only difference is that rather than big brother being a government, it's a corporation...
No laws really prevent a corporation from controlling your life... as long as it's in the form of a contract... so the question is...
The other is that most of the P2P sharing going on on campus is using DirectConnect anyways, and thus there's no difference bandwidth-wise.
We havn't seen this kind of trend on any of our residential networks. Suffice it to say that all the network statistics from our infrastructure, as well as the statistics I've seen from other similar schools, show up with P2P as a significant source of off campus traffic.
And yes, I am a network admin at one of the top schools in the country.
It's because Apple isn't offering the schools anything. If you think Napster's taking advantage of them, you should see Apple's offer:
"Let us advertise on your campus and you can bear our bandwidth costs with an on-campus server! FREE!"
Ok, no offense, but you really don't understand the network architecture of most top universities if you're making this statement, nor do you understand Apple's distribution network. Let me enlighten you as to why Apple offering to put a on-campus server at your school was actually a pretty fucking good offer, and benifited your school more than it benifited Apple:
Basically, most schools with anything resembling a decent set of network engineers run a rediculous internal network. We're talking at least one 1000Base-T link (usually over fiber) to all the main distribution switches (usually we're talking from Cisco big iron to each distribution cabnet which houses a 10/100Base-T switch to serve the end users). On anything resembling a decent campus, this means that your overall internal-network can handle rediculous throughput (think 1000Mbit * % utilization * number of dorms).
Now, compare this virutally free bandwidth on the internal network (ie. you're infrastructure costs are fairly fixed regardless of whether your students are using 1 or 10 Mbit on the internal network) to relatively expensive leased lines with very limited bandwidth (even at top schools we're talking _max_ 100-1000Mbit leased line to the Internet and 1000-2000Mbit running to the I2--which gets eaten up really fast if many users are downloading or streaming).
So basically you're image of "greedy Apple" trying to slag their cost is at best flawed, since they are actually reducing your costs. The reason why it's an invalid argument can be seen when you understand Apple's distribution methods.
If you keep an eye on where the data actually comes from, or just look at Apple's distribution partners, you'll notice that the actually data is served from Akamai centers around the world. Compared to what your university is paying for bandwidth, Akamai's costs are dirt cheap, and you can be sure that given Apple's position (both being a reasonably large stakeholder in Akamai and a business partner) they get a fairly decent saving passed on to them too. So Apple is reducing your cost much more than their own, supplying (by no means cheap) hardware to your school for free, and offering a mechanism by which you can help your students (a shitload of whom have iPods) get legit music in a decent format (and no offense but anyone who trys to argue that FairPlay'd AAC's are worse than MS DRM'd WMV's needs a shovel to the head).
It looks like you can also use this in a wired fashion, where you connect this device to your wired network, and it will do the audio out as well.
Nope. Check the comparison chart on Apple's site, and you'll see that it doesn't connect to the LAN, just to the Internet.
Actually, if you look at the _top_ of the tech specs page you'll see the RJ-45 Port is labled as:
10/100 BASE-T Ethernet
Intelligent port for connecting to DSL or Cable modems or a local network.
I'm guessing this thing is essentially an IP addressable audio out / usb port.
As far as I'm concerned this is brilliant... I can't wait for them to start shipping... bye bye cables, hello audio wherever I want it.
Gotta love a great example of Government by the people, for the people. Democracy at it's finest.
*looks around*
I mean it's not like this is a corporate tool to get our tax dollars to work against us.
*cough*
I mean it kinda is, but what can we do.
*wimper*
Yeah it is, damnit, I can't believe this. How can corporations be allowed to do this!?!
*arrrggg*
God damnit this is rediculous. What happened to the Republic that once was!!!... Orwell was wrong! 1984, that's a typo man. This cannot stand! I mean what next? Will they start attacking free speech-^%
[NO CARRIER]
Today's episode brought to you by the PATRIOT Act, in conjunction with the letters F, U, C, K, E, and D.
I'm kinda surprised that we don't have a higher rating, since almost all the main areas of campus are covered, as well as roughly half the undergraduate dorms. It makes me wonder how they're doing their calculations. If it's total coverage / campus size or something silly like that then I could understand 68th (since we have a 8000+ acre campus) -- if they're using some sensible measure... then I'm confused since our wireless network is really quite good.
(and yes, I'm a student and Residential Network Admin here at Stanford)
Honestly people, is this really/. front page news? This came out on the FreeBSD mailing list 36 hrs ago, and a fixed version of OpenSSL is already available.
Yep. If I start drinking coffee again, within one week a quad shot latte won't even phase me, and I mean _not_ _at_ _all_
It's kinda crazy. About two years ago I was drinking a quad shot every morning, and didn't feel a thing. Then one morning I drank two quad shot lattes back to back. I _still_ didn't have a buzz but my hands were physically shaking.
Yeah... it was about that time that I decided I should cut back on my caffine intake. I still don't get a buzz, but if I drink too much right now I'll feel bogged down.
Yeah it's already 5:45pm on the 1st of January, but what the hell, I'll wish/. a happy new year anyway.
And look, I didn't even bitch about how/. should at least start the new year's post earlier as a nod to everyone overseas for the holidays (or god forbid our overseas constituants)
And for anyone that's interested... here is the last sunset of 2003 as viewed from Queenstown, New Zealand.
I really could have used that extra second of partying early New Years Day.
:) yes I know... shameless.
Another symptom of programming viewed as a commd.
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Outsourcing to India, worrying about receiving proper code, escrow. All seem to be symptoms of the perverted view corporations have taken when viewing source code and programming as neither science nor art, but just another commodity. The problem is, that we're not talking corn or soy beans here, we're talking about a system designed for a particular reason. Anyone that has gone through a proper programming education (not that I'm claming to have done so, I'm in the middle of my undergrad career at Stanford but am considering CS) would be horrified at this approach. But it seems that many businesses are content not with how well a chunk of code is designed, but whether or not it functioned.
Code escrow is just another deluded side of this, a result of management types thinking CS is just "coding" and disregarding the quality of their product.
Quality, Functionality, Low Price. Pick two of the three.
Thinking that you're going to get _any_ use out of the cheapest functional code once it has been taken out of context (and probably not properly documented, or readable) is lunacy.
The only down side in reading the review, is that it's highly windows-centric. The reviewer fails to point out obvious things like the fact that iTunes works seamlessly between Windows and Mac platforms (while most of the other services break completely). Besides that, it was definitely a good read.
Common guys. This is one of the strongest cases of placing undue blame that I have seen. Manufacturing isn't perfect, and it seems that the number of people having their batteries fail at 18months is the minority. Why not just blame Sony while we're at it for inconsistant manufacturing or testing of their batteries, after all that's who makes the Li-Ion battery found in the iPod line.
Blaming Apple's engineers or design staff is at most a reach, because they didn't manufacture every piece of the iPod, they spec'd out the available technologies and then put them together with some creative hardware and software to (undeniably) create the best mp3 player currently available.
Do we see people blaming Maxtor for every hard drive (and it's quite a few) that fails after 18 months, espeically since their warrenty now only covers the first 12? How about the fact that 1 out of about 10 Maxtor drives is either DOA or dies within the first month? (Yes, I'm using a small sample size of my and friends purchases of aroud 14 Maxtor hdds in the last 2 years)
If you're buying a product with a 1 year warrenty, realize that you might just have to replace it after that time, or repair it. Hell $99 for a new iPod battery? Sounds like a good deal to me. I'd gladly pay Apple $49 to make sure I don't fuck up my iPod installing a $50 battery. This is a case of Apple finding a need of their customers that managed to get some of the shorter life batteries (and eventually the other customers) and responding.
The iPod video idiots and Washington Post are the ones who have been irresponsible in this case. Taking company policy from peons in the service department (of course they're going to say you have to buy a new iPod back _before_ Apple Corporate got the battery replacement in the pipeline) is not responsible reporting, nor is reporting on company policies that have been outdated by 6 months to a year.
For the record... I happen to currently be a residential network administrator at Stanford, as well as ResComp support. I also work closely with a ex Berkley ResComp admin.
If anything, your first point is outdated. I have to deal with both Windows and Mac users on a regular basis, and if anything PC users are the ones with tweaked out (either software or hardware) computers, with 1001 different accessories making their computer less and less useful as a tool. Mac users on the other hand, usually have a core application suite (ie. Safari, Mail or Entourage, Word Proc / Graphics / Coding IDE depending on use) and no gimmicks. Sure Apple's design phase is more indepth to begin with and more asthetically pleasing, but I wouldn't call that snobbish. I'd classify it as stylish and functional.
As for your second point. I'm not even gonna touch the majority of that. Let me just say that your example may have been Apple in the Pre-OS X days, but now we don't see those problems.
The post clearly referes to the number of trouble tickets per system on campus being an order of magnitude different. I don't see how less Macs would explain a difference in ratio.
As for your third point, so do we. All machines are patched and users are recommended to patch their machines as often as possible. Even with that, the fall RPC exploit managed to infect over 6000 machines, with a maximum infection time of 10 seconds during the peak (ie. plug your machine in while running, 10 seconds later it was infected). Yep, keeping up to date sure helped there, especially since Microsoft kept sending out different patches, resulting in several custom patch packages which our coding team had to spit out, none of which were compatable.
As for my own experience with OS X users... they don't take any longer (and usually less time) than a Windows user. Another thing to note: every time I sit down at a OS X machine, I ask, what's wrong? Everytime I sit down to a Windows machine, I run Ad-Aware, find between 30 and 800 spyware objects, clean the machine repeatedly, and then try to see if the behavior has stopped, if it hasn't _then_ I start troubleshooting. Don't even start to lecture me about the ease of administrating Windows.
For those of you who seem to recall a very similar story but can't quite pin it down: your not crazy. The EFF revises their opinion on the DMCA every year, under the title "Unintended Consequences: X Years under the DMCA." I traced it back at least to 2 years ago, and there may have been articles previous.
They do make several good points, and I would go into more specifics but I really don't have time to read the new version (I read the older editions a year ago when I was investigating impacts of the DMCA for a research paper). An actual evaluation of the entire DMCA document is difficult especially due to the nature of Copyright law, Fair Use, et al, but the EFF does a good job, albeit a mildly biased one.
Do you think we care about Outlook Express? We're Unix zealots! I mean its not like most of us are checking email with OE while "surfing the web" on our Windows... erm... nevermind.
First, regarding the main point of my original comment (which was that Webster changed things just for the hell of it) there actually is good information backing this up, as a friend of mine at Stanford University researched the subject for a few months last year. Unfortunately I didn't actually read the research paper in the end (and hence the lack of clarity on the details). I do rember that the jest of the research indicated that Webster made many questionable changes for no substantial reason.
misterpies, The Famous Druid, et al.:
Thank you for the correction, you are of course correct that it was Henry VIII who broke away from the Catholic church. That was a grevious oversight that shouldn't have occured; and thus I learn my lesson about posting when I'm not awake;)
regarding the driving comment:
Admittedly it was a bit far fetched (I couldn't think of a better off hand example) but I will stand by the logical portion of my orignal comment, but mainly from personal experience. Spending several months a year both in and out of the US, I end up driving both manual and automatic cars in both places. To be honest driving a manual right-hand-drive car is preferable as I (as per the majority of the population) am right handed. I feel that shifting with my left hand while handling the wheel with the right is preferable as I have more control in that arrangement. With the economic comment, it was basically addressed to modern day where it doesn't really make sense (except for Detriot big iron) to produce two, mostly incompatable automobiles. Not only does it require significant investment to cross between the US/Eu markets (as it becomes cost prohibitive to produce and export a small number of cars) but also it produces issues for those that do drive the 'wrong' kind of car in the form of safety issues.
Now that we have that established, let me elaborate:
Back in the day when webster was starting out, we Americans has this little disagreement with the Brittish. You might recall that some things were changed just as a nice little #$@# off to the Commonwealth. Case in point: driving on the right side of the road (not to start a flame war, but economically and logically it doesn't make sense)
Well between Webster's desire to change the language himself, and the desire to reduce the number of letters in commonly used words (letters = money for printers) Webster started changing shit just cause he could.
At the point when Webster created his dictionary, the concept that there WAS such a thing as a "correct" spelling was just beginning to take hold.
For correct reason, see quote Robin Williams Live on Broadway 2002 in reference to a parallel situation: King James breaking away from Rome and starting the Anglican church: "Ha ha! Whose the fucking pope now!"
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. David's part of a performance car community that's quite the anti-thesis of "Ricing." Rather than the crowd from The Fast and the Furious, you'll find a group of people that are dedicated to increasing the performance of their vehicles by bettering the car's power and handling. Very little, if any, modifications are made to the cars that do not directly impact performance. For an example of such a tuning shop, check out the one David worked at a year ago, WORKS.
...
These enthusiasts partake in spirited driving, various club competitions, and open track days. They frown on any type of reckless behavior such as excessive speed, street racing, etc.
Contrast this behavior to that of a typical "Ricer," where The Fast and the Furious looks are either equally, or more imporant than acutal performace. They'd rather throw a bottle of NOS and a big exhaust on the car, slap it with a body kit, a few decals and a type R sticker, and go out cruizing the streets.
-S
Wow, didn't see this one coming on Slashdot.
...
About a year ago I delt with David at length while he was working for WORKS, a tuning shop in San Francisco. We were discussing the details of the power, handling, etc. modifications that they would be making to my Mitsubishi Evolution (the car they in which they specialize). For the entire time I delt with David (before he left WORKS to pursue other things, like the book) I was consistantly impressed by his comprehensive knoweledge of both the technical and legal aspects of vehical modifications (especially impressive in good ole California thanks to strict emission standards).
His expertise and professionalism have resulted in him gaining much respect within the Evolution community, and although I have not yet had a chance to review his book, if it's anything like the conversations I've had with him, you'll be amazed by just how far car tuning has come.
Before talking with him, I didn't think it was safely possible to take a $32000 car, $7k of tuning, and end up just a hair short of a supercar*. Amazing.
Hope the book sells well.
-S
* by which I mean a 2.0L 340hp 4WD beast that sprints from 0-60 in 4.4 seconds, skidpad tests to 1g, and through the twisties can out perform anything short of a 911 Turbo
One of the HP founders did. Memory escapes me as to whether it was Hewlett or Packard, but one of the two donated significantly more than Gates.
...
-S
And 2+2=5 ... right?
...
... as long as it's in the form of a contract ... so the question is ...
...
Sorry but it's exactly the kind of attitude of surrendering your privacy for 100 quid that's the first step on a long road to pervasive surveilance.
Great. I really dislike the people of this world who would rather a quick buck than preserve their rights.
I wish those people would realize that using your right-to-contract to surrender your rights to a corporation is no different in the end than surrendering your rights to the government. The only difference is that rather than big brother being a government, it's a corporation
No laws really prevent a corporation from controlling your life
What's your price?
-S
The other is that most of the P2P sharing going on on campus is using DirectConnect anyways, and thus there's no difference bandwidth-wise.
We havn't seen this kind of trend on any of our residential networks. Suffice it to say that all the network statistics from our infrastructure, as well as the statistics I've seen from other similar schools, show up with P2P as a significant source of off campus traffic.
And yes, I am a network admin at one of the top schools in the country.
It's because Apple isn't offering the schools anything. If you think Napster's taking advantage of them, you should see Apple's offer:
"Let us advertise on your campus and you can bear our bandwidth costs with an on-campus server! FREE!"
Ok, no offense, but you really don't understand the network architecture of most top universities if you're making this statement, nor do you understand Apple's distribution network. Let me enlighten you as to why Apple offering to put a on-campus server at your school was actually a pretty fucking good offer, and benifited your school more than it benifited Apple:
Basically, most schools with anything resembling a decent set of network engineers run a rediculous internal network. We're talking at least one 1000Base-T link (usually over fiber) to all the main distribution switches (usually we're talking from Cisco big iron to each distribution cabnet which houses a 10/100Base-T switch to serve the end users). On anything resembling a decent campus, this means that your overall internal-network can handle rediculous throughput (think 1000Mbit * % utilization * number of dorms).
Now, compare this virutally free bandwidth on the internal network (ie. you're infrastructure costs are fairly fixed regardless of whether your students are using 1 or 10 Mbit on the internal network) to relatively expensive leased lines with very limited bandwidth (even at top schools we're talking _max_ 100-1000Mbit leased line to the Internet and 1000-2000Mbit running to the I2--which gets eaten up really fast if many users are downloading or streaming).
So basically you're image of "greedy Apple" trying to slag their cost is at best flawed, since they are actually reducing your costs. The reason why it's an invalid argument can be seen when you understand Apple's distribution methods.
If you keep an eye on where the data actually comes from, or just look at Apple's distribution partners, you'll notice that the actually data is served from Akamai centers around the world. Compared to what your university is paying for bandwidth, Akamai's costs are dirt cheap, and you can be sure that given Apple's position (both being a reasonably large stakeholder in Akamai and a business partner) they get a fairly decent saving passed on to them too. So Apple is reducing your cost much more than their own, supplying (by no means cheap) hardware to your school for free, and offering a mechanism by which you can help your students (a shitload of whom have iPods) get legit music in a decent format (and no offense but anyone who trys to argue that FairPlay'd AAC's are worse than MS DRM'd WMV's needs a shovel to the head).
Yeah, those bastards!
It looks like you can also use this in a wired fashion, where you connect this device to your wired network, and it will do the audio out as well.
... I can't wait for them to start shipping ... bye bye cables, hello audio wherever I want it.
...
Nope. Check the comparison chart on Apple's site, and you'll see that it doesn't connect to the LAN, just to the Internet.
Actually, if you look at the _top_ of the tech specs page you'll see the RJ-45 Port is labled as:
10/100 BASE-T Ethernet
Intelligent port for connecting to DSL or Cable modems or a local network.
I'm guessing this thing is essentially an IP addressable audio out / usb port.
As far as I'm concerned this is brilliant
-S
You're new here, arn't you?
...
-S
Gotta love a great example of Government by the people, for the people. Democracy at it's finest.
... Orwell was wrong! 1984, that's a typo man. This cannot stand! I mean what next? Will they start attacking free speech-^%
*looks around*
I mean it's not like this is a corporate tool to get our tax dollars to work against us.
*cough*
I mean it kinda is, but what can we do.
*wimper*
Yeah it is, damnit, I can't believe this. How can corporations be allowed to do this!?!
*arrrggg*
God damnit this is rediculous. What happened to the Republic that once was!!!
[NO CARRIER]
Today's episode brought to you by the PATRIOT Act, in conjunction with the letters F, U, C, K, E, and D.
http://www.stanford.edu/~jstockdl/tmp/usbwifi.orco n.net.nz/
...
Mirrored as much as I could of the images before the server was smoked.
-S
and we use exclusively Cisco and 3 Com gear.
... then I'm confused since our wireless network is really quite good.
...
I'm kinda surprised that we don't have a higher rating, since almost all the main areas of campus are covered, as well as roughly half the undergraduate dorms. It makes me wonder how they're doing their calculations. If it's total coverage / campus size or something silly like that then I could understand 68th (since we have a 8000+ acre campus) -- if they're using some sensible measure
(and yes, I'm a student and Residential Network Admin here at Stanford)
-S
News at 11
/. front page news? This came out on the FreeBSD mailing list 36 hrs ago, and a fixed version of OpenSSL is already available.
Honestly people, is this really
CVSup; make buildworld && make installworld
Problem solved.
Yep. If I start drinking coffee again, within one week a quad shot latte won't even phase me, and I mean _not_ _at_ _all_
... it was about that time that I decided I should cut back on my caffine intake. I still don't get a buzz, but if I drink too much right now I'll feel bogged down.
...
It's kinda crazy. About two years ago I was drinking a quad shot every morning, and didn't feel a thing. Then one morning I drank two quad shot lattes back to back. I _still_ didn't have a buzz but my hands were physically shaking.
Yeah
To each their own I guess.
-S
Yeah it's already 5:45pm on the 1st of January, but what the hell, I'll wish /. a happy new year anyway.
/. should at least start the new year's post earlier as a nod to everyone overseas for the holidays (or god forbid our overseas constituants)
... here is the last sunset of 2003 as viewed from Queenstown, New Zealand.
...
And look, I didn't even bitch about how
And for anyone that's interested
Have a great year everyone.
-S
I really could have used that extra second of partying early New Years Day.
:) yes I know ... shameless.
Outsourcing to India, worrying about receiving proper code, escrow. All seem to be symptoms of the perverted view corporations have taken when viewing source code and programming as neither science nor art, but just another commodity. The problem is, that we're not talking corn or soy beans here, we're talking about a system designed for a particular reason. Anyone that has gone through a proper programming education (not that I'm claming to have done so, I'm in the middle of my undergrad career at Stanford but am considering CS) would be horrified at this approach. But it seems that many businesses are content not with how well a chunk of code is designed, but whether or not it functioned.
Code escrow is just another deluded side of this, a result of management types thinking CS is just "coding" and disregarding the quality of their product.
Quality, Functionality, Low Price. Pick two of the three.
Thinking that you're going to get _any_ use out of the cheapest functional code once it has been taken out of context (and probably not properly documented, or readable) is lunacy.
The only down side in reading the review, is that it's highly windows-centric. The reviewer fails to point out obvious things like the fact that iTunes works seamlessly between Windows and Mac platforms (while most of the other services break completely). Besides that, it was definitely a good read.
Common guys. This is one of the strongest cases of placing undue blame that I have seen. Manufacturing isn't perfect, and it seems that the number of people having their batteries fail at 18months is the minority. Why not just blame Sony while we're at it for inconsistant manufacturing or testing of their batteries, after all that's who makes the Li-Ion battery found in the iPod line.
Blaming Apple's engineers or design staff is at most a reach, because they didn't manufacture every piece of the iPod, they spec'd out the available technologies and then put them together with some creative hardware and software to (undeniably) create the best mp3 player currently available.
Do we see people blaming Maxtor for every hard drive (and it's quite a few) that fails after 18 months, espeically since their warrenty now only covers the first 12? How about the fact that 1 out of about 10 Maxtor drives is either DOA or dies within the first month? (Yes, I'm using a small sample size of my and friends purchases of aroud 14 Maxtor hdds in the last 2 years)
If you're buying a product with a 1 year warrenty, realize that you might just have to replace it after that time, or repair it. Hell $99 for a new iPod battery? Sounds like a good deal to me. I'd gladly pay Apple $49 to make sure I don't fuck up my iPod installing a $50 battery. This is a case of Apple finding a need of their customers that managed to get some of the shorter life batteries (and eventually the other customers) and responding.
The iPod video idiots and Washington Post are the ones who have been irresponsible in this case. Taking company policy from peons in the service department (of course they're going to say you have to buy a new iPod back _before_ Apple Corporate got the battery replacement in the pipeline) is not responsible reporting, nor is reporting on company policies that have been outdated by 6 months to a year.
For the record ... I happen to currently be a residential network administrator at Stanford, as well as ResComp support. I also work closely with a ex Berkley ResComp admin.
... they don't take any longer (and usually less time) than a Windows user. Another thing to note: every time I sit down at a OS X machine, I ask, what's wrong? Everytime I sit down to a
If anything, your first point is outdated. I have to deal with both Windows and Mac users on a regular basis, and if anything PC users are the ones with tweaked out (either software or hardware) computers, with 1001 different accessories making their computer less and less useful as a tool. Mac users on the other hand, usually have a core application suite (ie. Safari, Mail or Entourage, Word Proc / Graphics / Coding IDE depending on use) and no gimmicks. Sure Apple's design phase is more indepth to begin with and more asthetically pleasing, but I wouldn't call that snobbish. I'd classify it as stylish and functional.
As for your second point. I'm not even gonna touch the majority of that. Let me just say that your example may have been Apple in the Pre-OS X days, but now we don't see those problems.
The post clearly referes to the number of trouble tickets per system on campus being an order of magnitude different. I don't see how less Macs would explain a difference in ratio.
As for your third point, so do we. All machines are patched and users are recommended to patch their machines as often as possible. Even with that, the fall RPC exploit managed to infect over 6000 machines, with a maximum infection time of 10 seconds during the peak (ie. plug your machine in while running, 10 seconds later it was infected). Yep, keeping up to date sure helped there, especially since Microsoft kept sending out different patches, resulting in several custom patch packages which our coding team had to spit out, none of which were compatable.
As for my own experience with OS X users
Windows machine, I run Ad-Aware, find between 30 and 800 spyware objects, clean the machine repeatedly, and then try to see if the behavior has stopped, if it hasn't _then_ I start troubleshooting. Don't even start to lecture me about the ease of administrating Windows.
For those of you who seem to recall a very similar story but can't quite pin it down: your not crazy. The EFF revises their opinion on the DMCA every year, under the title "Unintended Consequences: X Years under the DMCA." I traced it back at least to 2 years ago, and there may have been articles previous.
They do make several good points, and I would go into more specifics but I really don't have time to read the new version (I read the older editions a year ago when I was investigating impacts of the DMCA for a research paper). An actual evaluation of the entire DMCA document is difficult especially due to the nature of Copyright law, Fair Use, et al, but the EFF does a good job, albeit a mildly biased one.
On a related note for those of you that have 30 seconds: support the EFF's newest petition -> "Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA!" Its a useful free alternative to being even more useful and donating to the cause.
We'll give you our women ...
/.) ... nevermind
... why do I even try anymore ... (mopes away)
(looks around and realizes this is
But we will give you our money!!!
(looks around and sees gooey reminants of IT bubble)
Do you think we care about Outlook Express? We're Unix zealots! I mean its not like most of us are checking email with OE while "surfing the web" on our Windows... erm... nevermind.
First, regarding the main point of my original comment (which was that Webster changed things just for the hell of it) there actually is good information backing this up, as a friend of mine at Stanford University researched the subject for a few months last year. Unfortunately I didn't actually read the research paper in the end (and hence the lack of clarity on the details). I do rember that the jest of the research indicated that Webster made many questionable changes for no substantial reason.
;)
misterpies, The Famous Druid, et al.:
Thank you for the correction, you are of course correct that it was Henry VIII who broke away from the Catholic church. That was a grevious oversight that shouldn't have occured; and thus I learn my lesson about posting when I'm not awake
regarding the driving comment:
Admittedly it was a bit far fetched (I couldn't think of a better off hand example) but I will stand by the logical portion of my orignal comment, but mainly from personal experience. Spending several months a year both in and out of the US, I end up driving both manual and automatic cars in both places. To be honest driving a manual right-hand-drive car is preferable as I (as per the majority of the population) am right handed. I feel that shifting with my left hand while handling the wheel with the right is preferable as I have more control in that arrangement. With the economic comment, it was basically addressed to modern day where it doesn't really make sense (except for Detriot big iron) to produce two, mostly incompatable automobiles. Not only does it require significant investment to cross between the US/Eu markets (as it becomes cost prohibitive to produce and export a small number of cars) but also it produces issues for those that do drive the 'wrong' kind of car in the form of safety issues.
Now that we have that established, let me elaborate:
Back in the day when webster was starting out, we Americans has this little disagreement with the Brittish. You might recall that some things were changed just as a nice little #$@# off to the Commonwealth. Case in point: driving on the right side of the road (not to start a flame war, but economically and logically it doesn't make sense)
Well between Webster's desire to change the language himself, and the desire to reduce the number of letters in commonly used words (letters = money for printers) Webster started changing shit just cause he could.
At the point when Webster created his dictionary, the concept that there WAS such a thing as a "correct" spelling was just beginning to take hold.
For correct reason, see quote Robin Williams Live on Broadway 2002 in reference to a parallel situation: King James breaking away from Rome and starting the Anglican church:
"Ha ha! Whose the fucking pope now!"
Its free as in beer not free as in speech ... erm ... or ... speech not beer ... or ...
I confused myself.