Ballmer's "Linux is cancer" pitch misfired! Great!
on
Servers with a Smile
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The article says:
"A year ago Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux a 'cancer' that would cause the death of intellectual property as we know it. Microsofties were encouraged to make that saber-rattling pitch on their corporate sales calls. But that just made IT executives angry. Peter Houston, Microsoft's head of industry strategies, says, 'became clear that we were being seen as having a polarizing and myopic view.'"
All right! Maybe there's hope.
(Now let's just hope that the same IT executives are savvy enough to see what Palladium can do to them--and don't see it just as a way of stopping college students from trading music).
Even though the aeroplane was "invented" right here in the good old U. S. of A, a lot of the technical language describing it is French.
This should remind us that there were many contributions to the development of aviation. But it is also an indication of how things stagnated in the U.S.
While the Wright Brothers were, initially, keeping their invention quiet--and later, battling over patents--on the Continent aviation was continuing on its own path. Millions of people believed Santos-Dumont was the first to fly because his flight was so public (and well-publicized). Aviation, and the (French) language of aviation captured the public consciousness...
By the first world war, it's even arguable that the U. S. had fallen behind.
I hope this is a correct perception of Apple's future direction (to become known as a consumer-friendly, DRM-free environment). However, apart from Apple's "Rip... Mix... Burn..." ads, they haven't really said anything publicly about this.
Meanwhile, I give Gateway credit for coming closer to explaining things to consumers than any other company so far (I'm referring to the commercial with what's-his-name and the singing cow... and the explicit statement beginning Gateway believes you have the right....
I'd sure like to see Apple have a similar statement out there in the open, in black-and-white (or translucent-blue-and-white if you prefer).
Now if someone could just convince AMD not to go along with Palladium...
I really appreciated the capsule history of the RIAA. Until recently, the ONLY thing I'd ever heard of the RIAA doing was to standardize the equalization curve on LP records--anyone else ever have a record player with switch-selected LP/AES/RIAA/78 settings?
Funny about certifying gold records...
It's sort of like the AMPAS, that only does two things I know of--I'm sure it does more but only two that I know of: a) Standardize the leader on films (you know, that clock-face 8-7-6-5-4-3 countdown things you used to see if the projectionist was careless) and b) run the "Academy" awards.
I wonder what things the IETF will be doing by, say, the year 2027? Giving software awards? Lobbying Congress for special privileges for the giant "Big 3" companies that run everything on the Internet? Do you suppose theres some kind of organizational law that groups that start out with legitimate, technical, engineering always degenerate into other things?
What will you do with your 20 year old TV's when they stop broadcasting analog signals on VHF and UHF, which if I'm not mistaken, is the plan?
The reason you (and I) have been able to enjoy the low costs that come with durable equipment is that the transmission standards haven't changed in fifty years.
Now, suddenly, there are as many new transmission standards are there are kinds of recordable DVD. Can you even keep track of them all? I can't.
In the United States, it doesn't seem to be possible to buy such a simple thing as a cell phone that will work anywhere. Shortly, it probably won't be possible to buy a simple TV that will pick up every local broadcast.
You'll have to have a stack of three or four converter boxes... which upgrade their firmware automatically every few months and will then mysteriously stop working, and you'll have to wait two hours on hold listening to irritating music interrupted every minute by a recorded voice apologizing for the delay...
It's not a question of steering kids toward something. It's just a question of keeping possibilities open, making sure that nothing is blocked or made inaccessible to them. Just make sure all doors are open, don't try to push them through any particular doorway.
If a girl grows up and never sees or hears about any female scientists, orchestra conductors, veterinarians, she may internalize the idea that "girls don't do that." That was a problem in the 1950's, but now now. And if you're interested in math, just let your geekish enthusiasm show. That will be enough.
That being said, I ONCE had a wonderful afternoon with my daughter. But only once. It was the only time we had fun doing a math-geekish thing together. She was much older than your daughter, seventh or eighth grade, and was given the opportunity to do a math project for extra credit and was allowed to suggest her own project. She came to me for ideas. I suggested something, she liked it, teacher approved it and approved my helping with it and supervising it.
The project was to estimate the value of pi five different ways.
I had her measure the circumference and diameter of a bicycle wheel with a metric measuring tape. Then I had her drop the most spherical rubber ball we could find into a metric measuring cup, see how much water it displaced, and solve for pi in four-thirds pi R cubed. Then we did the thing of pitching a needle onto a paper ruled with horizontal lines. And I set out a worksheet for her to calculate it with two different series, the one that converges VERY SLOWLY (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7) and one that converges fairly quickly (the one with the 5's and the 239's in it).
She enjoyed doing it but was a little frustrated by the inaccuracies of first four methods. But when she got pi to six places by the third method (I had carefully laid out a worksheet with places for all the intermediate results) she was really quite pleased and excited.
As I say, it only happened once, but it was a great afternoon.
Just what is there about the words "standards" and "compatibility" they can't understand?
It's bad enough that there are so many flavors (about 8 at last count? DVD followed by "plus" or "minus" followed by "RAM" or "RW" or "R"...). Nobody can keep track of which are supposed to be compatible with each other and/or consumer DVD drives, and the ones that are supposed to be compatible sometimes aren't...
Naturally it's too much to expect "new, improved" media to work in old drives. Why, that would be like expecting a "low-noise" tape cassette to work in a two-year-old cassette recorder... or ASA 800 film to work in a two-year-old camera... or API service grade SL motor oil to work in a two-year-old car.
But at the VERY LEAST we should expect that new, improved media shouldn't DESTROY an old drive.
What are we supposed to think? Pioneer was in such a darn rush that they never even bothered to put one of the new disks in one of the old drives even once?
Ordinary civilians have no place taking joyrides in space. Not yet.
Maybe it's not quite the same a contest to ride with a test pilot on an experimental aircraft, but it's not like boarding an airliner. Or like the contest in Heinlein's (fictional) "Have Space Suit, Will Travel," which was for a trip on an established commercial tourist route.
I can still remember the Challenger disaster. What a shame. And what hubris, taking a schoolteacher along for a ride, so millions of kids could watch the Shuttle explode on TV in real time...
I hope the Hayden Planetarium still has the list I signed when I was a kid, the list of people interested in being on the first passenger trip to the Moon. But I'm not entering this Pepsi contest.
(Oh, wait, they're talking about some OTHER "PS2.")
(Am I the only one to whom that initialism evokes the memory of the behemoth of personal computers, and the marvellous Micro Channel, with powers beyond imagination waiting to be unlocked by OS/2? Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Now PS2 means a game machine... and DEC, the Dairy Equipment Corporation of Madison Wisconsin, founded in 1947, lives on today, while another company of the same name is but a memory.
Just a couple of months ago microsoft was insisting that they had nothing to do with that nasty DRM stuff: "Palladium will not require DRM, and DRM will not require Palladium. Palladium is a great complementary technology to the DRM solutions of tomorrow, but the two are separate technologies," spin, spin, blah blah blah.
All Microsoft was going to do was provide a nice NEUTRAL technology whose main use was going to be to allow you and me to set policies on our personal machines to stop spam, viruses, and international terrorists.
All that stuff about their patent on a "DRMOS" was just a misunderstanding.
And already they're selling a DRM server. Come on, Microsoft, our memories are short but they're not THAT short.
If proof were needed that Microsoft's interests are no longer aligned with those of end-users, this is it.
Why cut the headphone wires? Even if you solder them back and shrinkwrap them, it will be obvious to the record company that they've been compromised.
I think you can still buy them at Radio Shack... little suction-cup gadgets that are basically just coils. If not, just find or wind a decent-sized coil. Put it near the headphone. Quality will be very good, quite possibly better than what you hear through the headphones if they're not using good-quality headphones. For best results it may be necessary to run the output through a graphic EQ.
I thought this was interesting. In particular. It gives MS's response to the "top ten questions" (does not seem to say whose top ten questions.
I thought these two points were VERY telling:
Q1) Since Microsoft, presumably, is simply encouraging the learning of ECMA standard C#, it should not matter whether the OS platform of the students is something other than Windows if another compliant C# platform exists and costs or other reasons U of W might have for using it make it attractive. Can Mr. Clegg assure U of W that Microsoft will not invalidate the agreement, or withdraw funding if C# is taught using Ximian Mono on Linux?
Frank Clegg (president of MS Canada): "The Microsoft Canada Co. sponsorship does require C# to be taught on a platform based on the Windows® operating system."
And question 6, which seems to me to concern academic freedom:
Q6: Your donation to the University of Waterloo in part funds curriculum development for ECE 050 and a curriculum change in ECE 150. As the curriculum change for ECE 150 did not require a change to course description it was not vetted through the Faculty Council or through the Senate Undergraduate Committee. This means that it affects the part of the curriculum usually understood to be the jurisdiction of the faculty member. Will Microsoft still provide UW with its donation if the professor for ECE 150 chooses to follow the course description without teaching C#? If it will not, how does Microsoft feel about compromising academic freedom at the university?
Frank Clegg: Funding for this curriculum initiative was decided based on the university's exploration of possibilities for sponsorship in the preparation of new curriculum material on C#. If the university decides not to teach C#, then there will not be a need to create any corresponding new material for which funding was initially allocated.
I hope the University gives these considerations due attention in their deliberations.
How long before someone takes a G4 Mac, removes the logic board from it, puts it back, and put up detailed step-by-step photos on a Web site showing what he or she has accomplished?
Amen. I was disappointed when I saw that a Mac motherboard was one of the recipe ingredients (and astonished that anyone would use the term "from scratch" to describe it).
It's like saying you made raisin bread "from scratch" because you added raisins to the bread machine mix instead of buying readymade raisin bread.
Of course, I build a six-bit binary multiplier out of relays when I was a kid... to me, using a processor on a chip is not making a computer "from scratch." And I'm sure there are people that feel that since I didn't wind the relay coils myself, _I_ was cheating...
At introduction, you are most apt to have frustrations with long delivery times, limited selection of configurations, and various teething pains because, for some reason, in the computer marketplace, ALL products are rushed out slightly before they're ready.
Also, at introduction, the only reviews you can find are from magazines that are beholden to the vendor, have received early models that may not match the production version, and are written by reviewers who barely have time to confirm that the whizzy features are THERE and haven't had time to wring them out and see whether they actually work. And will usually belong to the "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" school and won't mention a problem IF the manufacturer claims that it will be fixed in the production version.
About six months is the sweet spot.
The machine is still more or less "new." New enough that it has most of it's useful life ahead of it--where "useful life" means the new software works with both the old OS and the new OS, the new OS works with the hardware, your model is one of the ones the SQA teams are actually testing with, etc.
The machine will have been out long enough that you can read newsgroups and vendor's forum sites etc. and find out whether people are experiencing frustrations (like the Cube "cracks") and what they are.
In all likelihood, what you see on the Web site you're ordering from will actually be available, and you won't have to agonize over having to to take a high-end bundle in order to get one high-end component.
The worst of the teething pains will be over. You won't find that the box has a slightly old set of OS CD's in it and a coupon to get the up-to-date ones... the most urgent bugs will have been found and patches available for them, etc.
Since the machines will be in reasonable supply, dealers will be dealing and the "street price" will have reached some reasonable equilibrium.
Oh, and six months is _probably_ soon enough that you won't find a MAJOR new model or SIGNIFICANTLY better deal being announced IMMEDIATELY after you commit to the purchase.
One other thought. The normal pattern for a well-managed product is for the overall value to get smoothly better with time. By "overall value" I mean that at first you pay list price, then you pay list price but they throw in some extra RAM, or a good deal on a display you actually were planning to buy anyway... then maybe a small price cut... the maybe an incremental model upgrade with a new model name or number and a slightly faster processor, etc.
While the product is in that "smooth" phase, it doesn't matter enormously when you buy.
Conversely, a SUDDEN, SIGNIFICANT drop in price (or increase in overall value) is usually a signal that a firesale is in progress to clear out old inventory. IF THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT, that's a good time to buy. But, the likelihood that you'll feel some remorse when you see the new model is high. And it's also the point at which the "useful life" of your machine has decreased noticeably.
If you WANT a firesale bargain, one strategy is to be poised to be immediately after the new models are introduced--because a) you'll at least know exactly what you're missing out on, and b) you can USUALLY find the old models, usually at the best prices they'll ever have, at least for a short while after the new models come out.
If they proceed Caerphilly they could lead the world, unless someone Welshes on the deal. Can you install a new Cardiff your PC doesn't have the Newport you need for the service? When you speak Welsh over VOIP is it clear, or just Mumbles?
Ironically, it was Apple that pushed QuarkXpress in the first place. When Aldus decided to port PageMaker to the PC, Apple got annoyed at them, and because the then-new QuarkXpress was Mac-only, they threw their considerable marketing weight behind it.
Perhaps if Quark had been a cross-platform developer, they might have been more nimble about porting to OS X.
I think it's a mistake to worry TOO much about how your college education will look to employers and/or grad schools. Your education is for YOU. You are fortunate enough to have four years to spend in college--use them.
You might as well study what's interesting to YOU, because at least you know (or will find out!) what's interesting to YOU. Whereas advice about what's interesting or valuable to others is about as reliable as stock market tips.
People I know who have trained for specific occupations "because the nation needs" teachers or scientists or nurses or whatever have almost uniformly found that by the time they were finished there was a glut of teachers or scientists or nurses.
I remember the darned premeds when I was a teaching assistant in zoology. They were so annoying--and they were ALL spending so much time and effort trying to game the system. Instead of simply taking the courses the med schools said they wanted, and using the rest of their time on subjects of interest to themselves, they were all big on taking courses that med schools supposedly "liked to see" without saying so. It was all BS. (Well, at any rate, it was not MD). Oh, and some informal checking later on with people I knew IN med school revealed that they HADN'T taken all these "like-to-see" courses.
Life will focus you soon enough on some fairly narrow area of concentration. Take whatever time you've got to mess around in an unstructured way, while you've got it.
Oh,yes, and this is also your chance to try out the campus radio station, or the drama club, or the outing club... these sorts of things are college opportunities that don't have any close equivalents in "the real world."
Oh, and some restrained, moderate attention to bridge, billiards, sex, partying, and computer hacking can also be very worthwhile.
I'm finding this a little hard to believe. It just doesn't pass the "modem light" test.
My wife and I have two computers that feed into a Linksys router that feed into a DSL modem, which is on my desk where I can see the data light.
She basically is a "magazine reader" Web user. She doesn't download files as such, she reads articles and Web-based bicycle forums and Yahoo and such. When she's logged on, I can easily see her activity; basically whenever she follows a link, I see the light light up in a few brief bursts for a second or so. I think most of the traffic is dozens of little images from the new page (and the banners and pop-behind ads).
On the othe hand, if she's off and I'm on and Limewire is running and I'm not "doing anything", I see little or no visible activity from the modem light. No visible evidence at all of all that P2P traffic the article says is taking place. I only see the light go on when a download is actually in progress, and the duration and duty cycle of the visible activity are a very close match for the size of the file and the average transfer speed.
The moon belongs to everyone, The best things in life are three. The stars belong to everyone, They gleam there for you and me. The flowers in spring, the robins that sing, The moonbeams that shine, they're yours, they're mine. And love can come to everyone, The best things in life are three.
Of course, Trinitarians could say "And God belongs to everyone The best things in life are Three."
Slashdot Mirror
The article says:
"A year ago Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux a 'cancer' that would cause the death of intellectual property as we know it. Microsofties were encouraged to make that saber-rattling pitch on their corporate sales calls. But that just made IT executives angry. Peter Houston, Microsoft's head of industry strategies, says, 'became clear that we were being seen as having a polarizing and myopic view.'"
All right! Maybe there's hope.
(Now let's just hope that the same IT executives are savvy enough to see what Palladium can do to them--and don't see it just as a way of stopping college students from trading music).
Apple should come out with a Mac that has a shiny metal finish and a tiny little bit of palladium in the alloy and call it a "Palladium Mac."
(Now that cold fusion has fizzled, the price of palladium should be dropping, right?)
Even though the aeroplane was "invented" right here in the good old U. S. of A, a lot of the technical language describing it is French.
This should remind us that there were many contributions to the development of aviation. But it is also an indication of how things stagnated in the U.S.
While the Wright Brothers were, initially, keeping their invention quiet--and later, battling over patents--on the Continent aviation was continuing on its own path. Millions of people believed Santos-Dumont was the first to fly because his flight was so public (and well-publicized). Aviation, and the (French) language of aviation captured the public consciousness...
By the first world war, it's even arguable that the U. S. had fallen behind.
I hope this is a correct perception of Apple's future direction (to become known as a consumer-friendly, DRM-free environment). However, apart from Apple's "Rip... Mix... Burn..." ads, they haven't really said anything publicly about this.
Meanwhile, I give Gateway credit for coming closer to explaining things to consumers than any other company so far (I'm referring to the commercial with what's-his-name and the singing cow... and the explicit statement beginning Gateway believes you have the right....
I'd sure like to see Apple have a similar statement out there in the open, in black-and-white (or translucent-blue-and-white if you prefer).
Now if someone could just convince AMD not to go along with Palladium...
I really appreciated the capsule history of the RIAA. Until recently, the ONLY thing I'd ever heard of the RIAA doing was to standardize the equalization curve on LP records--anyone else ever have a record player with switch-selected LP/AES/RIAA/78 settings?
Funny about certifying gold records...
It's sort of like the AMPAS, that only does two things I know of--I'm sure it does more but only two that I know of: a) Standardize the leader on films (you know, that clock-face 8-7-6-5-4-3 countdown things you used to see if the projectionist was careless) and b) run the "Academy" awards.
I wonder what things the IETF will be doing by, say, the year 2027? Giving software awards? Lobbying Congress for special privileges for the giant "Big 3" companies that run everything on the Internet? Do you suppose theres some kind of organizational law that groups that start out with legitimate, technical, engineering always degenerate into other things?
What will you do with your 20 year old TV's when they stop broadcasting analog signals on VHF and UHF, which if I'm not mistaken, is the plan?
The reason you (and I) have been able to enjoy the low costs that come with durable equipment is that the transmission standards haven't changed in fifty years.
Now, suddenly, there are as many new transmission standards are there are kinds of recordable DVD. Can you even keep track of them all? I can't.
In the United States, it doesn't seem to be possible to buy such a simple thing as a cell phone that will work anywhere. Shortly, it probably won't be possible to buy a simple TV that will pick up every local broadcast.
You'll have to have a stack of three or four converter boxes... which upgrade their firmware automatically every few months and will then mysteriously stop working, and you'll have to wait two hours on hold listening to irritating music interrupted every minute by a recorded voice apologizing for the delay...
It's not a question of steering kids toward something. It's just a question of keeping possibilities open, making sure that nothing is blocked or made inaccessible to them. Just make sure all doors are open, don't try to push them through any particular doorway.
If a girl grows up and never sees or hears about any female scientists, orchestra conductors, veterinarians, she may internalize the idea that "girls don't do that." That was a problem in the 1950's, but now now. And if you're interested in math, just let your geekish enthusiasm show. That will be enough.
That being said, I ONCE had a wonderful afternoon with my daughter. But only once. It was the only time we had fun doing a math-geekish thing together. She was much older than your daughter, seventh or eighth grade, and was given the opportunity to do a math project for extra credit and was allowed to suggest her own project. She came to me for ideas. I suggested something, she liked it, teacher approved it and approved my helping with it and supervising it.
The project was to estimate the value of pi five different ways.
I had her measure the circumference and diameter of a bicycle wheel with a metric measuring tape. Then I had her drop the most spherical rubber ball we could find into a metric measuring cup, see how much water it displaced, and solve for pi in four-thirds pi R cubed. Then we did the thing of pitching a needle onto a paper ruled with horizontal lines. And I set out a worksheet for her to calculate it with two different series, the one that converges VERY SLOWLY (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7) and one that converges fairly quickly (the one with the 5's and the 239's in it).
She enjoyed doing it but was a little frustrated by the inaccuracies of first four methods. But when she got pi to six places by the third method (I had carefully laid out a worksheet with places for all the intermediate results) she was really quite pleased and excited.
As I say, it only happened once, but it was a great afternoon.
(Sigh...)
"Type 2" DVD-RAM is in a cartridge.
"Type 1" DVD-RAM has the same form factor as a normal DVD.
Forgot about that one, didn't they?
My, how quickly they forget.
And if it DID burn DVD-RAM, I'd ask whether it can handle both Type 1 and Type 2 DVD-RAM. (Don't ask...)
Just what is there about the words "standards" and "compatibility" they can't understand?
It's bad enough that there are so many flavors (about 8 at last count? DVD followed by "plus" or "minus" followed by "RAM" or "RW" or "R"...). Nobody can keep track of which are supposed to be compatible with each other and/or consumer DVD drives, and the ones that are supposed to be compatible sometimes aren't...
Naturally it's too much to expect "new, improved" media to work in old drives. Why, that would be like expecting a "low-noise" tape cassette to work in a two-year-old cassette recorder... or ASA 800 film to work in a two-year-old camera... or API service grade SL motor oil to work in a two-year-old car.
But at the VERY LEAST we should expect that new, improved media shouldn't DESTROY an old drive.
What are we supposed to think? Pioneer was in such a darn rush that they never even bothered to put one of the new disks in one of the old drives even once?
Ordinary civilians have no place taking joyrides in space. Not yet.
Maybe it's not quite the same a contest to ride with a test pilot on an experimental aircraft, but it's not like boarding an airliner. Or like the contest in Heinlein's (fictional) "Have Space Suit, Will Travel," which was for a trip on an established commercial tourist route.
I can still remember the Challenger disaster. What a shame. And what hubris, taking a schoolteacher along for a ride, so millions of kids could watch the Shuttle explode on TV in real time...
I hope the Hayden Planetarium still has the list I signed when I was a kid, the list of people interested in being on the first passenger trip to the Moon. But I'm not entering this Pepsi contest.
(Oh, wait, they're talking about some OTHER "PS2.")
(Am I the only one to whom that initialism evokes the memory of the behemoth of personal computers, and the marvellous Micro Channel, with powers beyond imagination waiting to be unlocked by OS/2? Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Now PS2 means a game machine... and DEC, the Dairy Equipment Corporation of Madison Wisconsin, founded in 1947, lives on today, while another company of the same name is but a memory.
Just a couple of months ago microsoft was insisting that they had nothing to do with that nasty DRM stuff: "Palladium will not require DRM, and DRM will not require Palladium. Palladium is a great complementary technology to the DRM solutions of tomorrow, but the two are separate technologies," spin, spin, blah blah blah.
All Microsoft was going to do was provide a nice NEUTRAL technology whose main use was going to be to allow you and me to set policies on our personal machines to stop spam, viruses, and international terrorists.
All that stuff about their patent on a "DRMOS" was just a misunderstanding.
And already they're selling a DRM server. Come on, Microsoft, our memories are short but they're not THAT short.
If proof were needed that Microsoft's interests are no longer aligned with those of end-users, this is it.
Why cut the headphone wires? Even if you solder them back and shrinkwrap them, it will be obvious to the record company that they've been compromised.
I think you can still buy them at Radio Shack... little suction-cup gadgets that are basically just coils. If not, just find or wind a decent-sized coil. Put it near the headphone. Quality will be very good, quite possibly better than what you hear through the headphones if they're not using good-quality headphones. For best results it may be necessary to run the output through a graphic EQ.
I thought this was interesting. In particular. It gives MS's response to the "top ten questions" (does not seem to say whose top ten questions.
I thought these two points were VERY telling:
Q1) Since Microsoft, presumably, is simply encouraging the learning of ECMA standard C#, it should not matter whether the OS platform of the students is something other than Windows if another compliant C# platform exists and costs or other reasons U of W might have for using it make it attractive. Can Mr. Clegg assure U of W that Microsoft will not invalidate the agreement, or withdraw funding if C# is taught using Ximian Mono on Linux?
Frank Clegg (president of MS Canada): "The Microsoft Canada Co. sponsorship does require C# to be taught on a platform based on the Windows® operating system."
And question 6, which seems to me to concern academic freedom:
Q6: Your donation to the University of Waterloo in part funds curriculum development for ECE 050 and a curriculum change in ECE 150. As the curriculum change for ECE 150 did not require a change to course description it was not vetted through the Faculty Council or through the Senate Undergraduate Committee. This means that it affects the part of the curriculum usually understood to be the jurisdiction of the faculty member. Will Microsoft still provide UW with its donation if the professor for ECE 150 chooses to follow the course description without teaching C#? If it will not, how does Microsoft feel about compromising academic freedom at the university?
Frank Clegg: Funding for this curriculum initiative was decided based on the university's exploration of possibilities for sponsorship in the preparation of new curriculum material on C#. If the university decides not to teach C#, then there will not be a need to create any corresponding new material for which funding was initially allocated.
I hope the University gives these considerations due attention in their deliberations.
Wow, this is so exciting... first a PC board in a Mac case, now a Mac board in a PC case.
How long before someone takes a G4 Mac, removes the logic board from it, puts it back, and put up detailed step-by-step photos on a Web site showing what he or she has accomplished?
Amen. I was disappointed when I saw that a Mac motherboard was one of the recipe ingredients (and astonished that anyone would use the term "from scratch" to describe it).
It's like saying you made raisin bread "from scratch" because you added raisins to the bread machine mix instead of buying readymade raisin bread.
Of course, I build a six-bit binary multiplier out of relays when I was a kid... to me, using a processor on a chip is not making a computer "from scratch." And I'm sure there are people that feel that since I didn't wind the relay coils myself, _I_ was cheating...
(... the top-secret
x86 version of OS X)...
Just my personal opinion.
At introduction, you are most apt to have frustrations with long delivery times, limited selection of configurations, and various teething pains because, for some reason, in the computer marketplace, ALL products are rushed out slightly before they're ready.
Also, at introduction, the only reviews you can find are from magazines that are beholden to the vendor, have received early models that may not match the production version, and are written by reviewers who barely have time to confirm that the whizzy features are THERE and haven't had time to wring them out and see whether they actually work. And will usually belong to the "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" school and won't mention a problem IF the manufacturer claims that it will be fixed in the production version.
About six months is the sweet spot.
The machine is still more or less "new." New enough that it has most of it's useful life ahead of it--where "useful life" means the new software works with both the old OS and the new OS, the new OS works with the hardware, your model is one of the ones the SQA teams are actually testing with, etc.
The machine will have been out long enough that you can read newsgroups and vendor's forum sites etc. and find out whether people are experiencing frustrations (like the Cube "cracks") and what they are.
In all likelihood, what you see on the Web site you're ordering from will actually be available, and you won't have to agonize over having to to take a high-end bundle in order to get one high-end component.
The worst of the teething pains will be over. You won't find that the box has a slightly old set of OS CD's in it and a coupon to get the up-to-date ones... the most urgent bugs will have been found and patches available for them, etc.
Since the machines will be in reasonable supply, dealers will be dealing and the "street price" will have reached some reasonable equilibrium.
Oh, and six months is _probably_ soon enough that you won't find a MAJOR new model or SIGNIFICANTLY better deal being announced IMMEDIATELY after you commit to the purchase.
One other thought. The normal pattern for a well-managed product is for the overall value to get smoothly better with time. By "overall value" I mean that at first you pay list price, then you pay list price but they throw in some extra RAM, or a good deal on a display you actually were planning to buy anyway... then maybe a small price cut... the maybe an incremental model upgrade with a new model name or number and a slightly faster processor, etc.
While the product is in that "smooth" phase, it doesn't matter enormously when you buy.
Conversely, a SUDDEN, SIGNIFICANT drop in price (or increase in overall value) is usually a signal that a firesale is in progress to clear out old inventory. IF THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT, that's a good time to buy. But, the likelihood that you'll feel some remorse when you see the new model is high. And it's also the point at which the "useful life" of your machine has decreased noticeably.
If you WANT a firesale bargain, one strategy is to be poised to be immediately after the new models are introduced--because a) you'll at least know exactly what you're missing out on, and b) you can USUALLY find the old models, usually at the best prices they'll ever have, at least for a short while after the new models come out.
If they proceed Caerphilly they could lead the world, unless someone Welshes on the deal. Can you install a new Cardiff your PC doesn't have the Newport you need for the service? When you speak Welsh over VOIP is it clear, or just Mumbles?
Ironically, it was Apple that pushed QuarkXpress in the first place. When Aldus decided to port PageMaker to the PC, Apple got annoyed at them, and because the then-new QuarkXpress was Mac-only, they threw their considerable marketing weight behind it.
Perhaps if Quark had been a cross-platform developer, they might have been more nimble about porting to OS X.
I think it's a mistake to worry TOO much about how your college education will look to employers and/or grad schools. Your education is for YOU. You are fortunate enough to have four years to spend in college--use them.
You might as well study what's interesting to YOU, because at least you know (or will find out!) what's interesting to YOU. Whereas advice about what's interesting or valuable to others is about as reliable as stock market tips.
People I know who have trained for specific occupations "because the nation needs" teachers or scientists or nurses or whatever have almost uniformly found that by the time they were finished there was a glut of teachers or scientists or nurses.
I remember the darned premeds when I was a teaching assistant in zoology. They were so annoying--and they were ALL spending so much time and effort trying to game the system. Instead of simply taking the courses the med schools said they wanted, and using the rest of their time on subjects of interest to themselves, they were all big on taking courses that med schools supposedly "liked to see" without saying so. It was all BS. (Well, at any rate, it was not MD). Oh, and some informal checking later on with people I knew IN med school revealed that they HADN'T taken all these "like-to-see" courses.
Life will focus you soon enough on some fairly narrow area of concentration. Take whatever time you've got to mess around in an unstructured way, while you've got it.
Oh,yes, and this is also your chance to try out the campus radio station, or the drama club, or the outing club... these sorts of things are college opportunities that don't have any close equivalents in "the real world."
Oh, and some restrained, moderate attention to bridge, billiards, sex, partying, and computer hacking can also be very worthwhile.
I'm finding this a little hard to believe. It just doesn't pass the "modem light" test.
My wife and I have two computers that feed into a Linksys router that feed into a DSL modem, which is on my desk where I can see the data light.
She basically is a "magazine reader" Web user. She doesn't download files as such, she reads articles and Web-based bicycle forums and Yahoo and such. When she's logged on, I can easily see her activity; basically whenever she follows a link, I see the light light up in a few brief bursts for a second or so. I think most of the traffic is dozens of little images from the new page (and the banners and pop-behind ads).
On the othe hand, if she's off and I'm on and Limewire is running and I'm not "doing anything", I see little or no visible activity from the modem light. No visible evidence at all of all that P2P traffic the article says is taking place. I only see the light go on when a download is actually in progress, and the duration and duty cycle of the visible activity are a very close match for the size of the file and the average transfer speed.
OK, all together now:
B.G. DeSylva, 1927, from _Good News_, (modified)
The moon belongs to everyone,
The best things in life are three.
The stars belong to everyone,
They gleam there for you and me.
The flowers in spring, the robins that sing,
The moonbeams that shine, they're yours, they're mine.
And love can come to everyone,
The best things in life are three.
Of course, Trinitarians could say
"And God belongs to everyone
The best things in life are Three."
... it turns out that Macs aren't year-2003 compliant.