Isn't the lack of existing technology usually the reason one funds research?
Very true, and some of the research into translation technology sponsored by the EU is acutally quite innovative. Not only are they making progress on audio-in, audio-out, on the fly translation but some of the systems being worked on in connection with this like for example: directional loudspeakers that allow every delegate in an auditorium to listen to a speech in a different language without using headphones and without disturbing the guy in the next seat 2ft away are quite amazing. It will be interesting to see these systems mature. I know the EU is not exactly a model of efficiency any more than the US Federal govt. but not everything they do is a complete waste of money. I would be alot more worried about Deutsche Telekom being involved in this search engine than the EU.
A suprisingly little known side effect of buying a Mac is that within 48 hours your ph*llus grows two inches longer, or, if you are a female, your b**bs grow a couple of cup sizes. I wonder what happens when you buy a WinDell box or, perish the thought, a Sun Solaris system? Anybody????
At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
What the hell is news of a new satilite navigation system passing it's first tests doing in the Politics section? Competition does not hurt, the lack of it does. Doing something better than the competition and never tolerating monopoly, Isn't that in the best traditions of a modern market economy? I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should be in our interest to allow the US-Military to monopolize the satilite navigation business. Please let's not turn this into another US vs. Europe pissing contest...
Why bother using Entourage at all when only basic functions are supported.
So far I have not had any problems with Entourage vis a vi Exchange, E-mail, calendar, addresse book, invitations all works.
Where is Visio
I use Omnigraffle, they support importing and exporting of Visio files in the new format and the support has only gotten better with each version.
I can't comment on Publisher.
Any problems OS.X hasn't solved VirtualPC has done and so far I have not used it alot. It seems to me that you should invest in a Dell box and start waiting for MS Vista. This 5 year agreement means something to the 95% of corporate users who don't use every single documented feature of Exchange and Office they can find. MS Office for Mac is a perfectly adequate solution, not perfect, but it makes life alot easier for those of us who are willing to put up with the hassel of using OS.X at work and not following the rest of the herd as it stampeeds through the cactus field that is Windows and its malware problems.
Market cap or Equity Market cap, does it matter? I bet Michael Dell really hates it every time somebody brings that quote up in conversation and every body starts laughing. It must be the first thing every new employee at Dell HQ learns:"OK, iPods, PowerBooks and anything else with an Apple logo is off limits and whatever you do, don't crack that Apple shutdown joke when Mr. Dell is within earshot, the last time that happened he punched the guy who told it and cancelled our christmass bonuses!"
While we cannot remove you from our "Will Sue" list (We sue everybody on principle) we are however pleased to inform you that we have recalled the team of ex-deltaforce commandos we contracted to assassinate you a week ago.
In the hope this E-Mail finds you still alive, sincerely,
The photos show clearly where my car was and where their car was. My insurance company didn't pay a dime. I received a check from theirs.
So I don't think convergence in this respect is a bad thing.
I agree with you on this point since I had a similar experience. However, I carry an ultra small digicam for this exact purpose, and for general hobby photography since hauling my big Olympus profissional digicam around with me is tiring and most of all because my old camera equipped GSM phone kept getting confiscated by security guards when I went to a meeting at some other company during work. Another thing security goons seem to be getting panicky about these days are iPods and GSM-phones with built in sound recording softwre or dictaphones. I guess they must be worried about the empty promises their bosses make during meetings might be recorded and used against them when they try to weasel out of verbal agreements. I think I would not like a GSM/iPod hybrid half as much as a mini-PDA with iTunes installed especially if it was fully sync'able with OS.X and now that MS Office for Mac is to feature imporved syncing with mobile devices an MS Office integrated, Apple mini-PDA would be perfect for me.
It isn't the processor that gives Microsoft ninety-five percent of the market. It is a twenty-five year presence on the home and office desktop. It is the $600 Dell home-delivered with DVD burner snd flat-panel monitor that competes with a headless MacMini.
That is more like one of the things that keeps Microsoft at 95%. What got them there was a series of wily business decisions and the fact that Windows became the de facto corporate standard OS for office drones which in turn secured it a large share of the home PC market (people buy the same computers for the home what they use at work and use the software they can steal at work). Microsoft's tireless efforts to make sure as many schools as possible were kitted out with their OS probably had something to do with it as well. Another factor is that one of their two remaining serious competitors for the desktop and workstation market, Linux, is still to immature to compete with them for that market. The other one, MacOS, has always been limited to Apple hardware while Windows was always available to any PC manufacturer willing to pay so you might say that MacOS, at least today, does not even try to compete with Windows for dominance. Finally it must be admitted that Windows market share also has something to do with it along with their corporate Office solutions like Exchange and the Office suite which are not bad products and have a set of features that no single competitor has ever been able to completely reproduce and effectively market.
What we will *definitely* see are "Virtual PC"-like programs that let you run Windows alongside OS X (in a Window, or taking over the screen, etc., with a hotkey to flip back and forth, for example).
Right, this is what is really interesting from my point of view. The only reason I would want to dual boot is to be able to get maximum performance with Games. Other than that dual booting is inferior to running Windows or Linux on top of OS.X via some Virtual PC type solution since I want to be able to switch between OS'es with a single keyboard shortcut.
There are already some alternatives for running Windows on a VPC on top of OS.X:
According to macwindows.com Microsoft has been unwilling to name a timeframe for when Virtual PC will be working on the MacIntel boxes. In other words no Microsot Virtual PC on MacIntel until this spring or even the summer. Of the other two vendors I only go a reply from iEmulator who plans to be releasing a MacIntel compatable version around the time the MacIntlel machines hit the market in February which means they look set to be the first to market. In all cases there should be a significant performance boost for these products hopefull to the pont that we get half way decen performance for Windows XP and hopefully Windows 2003 Server as well.
Has anybody heard any talk of an OS.X port from VMware?
Erm... how was this list a super Mac related list? Only the first and last items (the Sketch thing and the iPod dock) are specifically for Apple products, the other three are general use USB and video items that have to alegence to Mac or PC specifically...
Couldn't you find anything else to complain about? Who ever said this was a super Mac related list? It's a blog by some nerds about the 5 coolest products they saw at Macworld and therefore presumably will now support OS.X. If AutoCad announced that it had released an OS.X port I would consider that newsworthy even if the Windows version has been around for years.
Focusing on the exploits or not, 46 days is a long time to wait for a critical fix.
Fixes like this have to be tested and re-tested which is not exactly something you do.... Yawn.... While you wait for the expresso machine to finish filling up that paper cup. I used to work for a *NIX vendor where the usual procedure was to offer a workaround to plug up the security hole. The patch was then developed and sent off for testing from where it would sometimes return for a rework because it caused unexpected problems in some other part of the OS. If Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Apple or any of the numerous enterprise quality Linux distros out there would sling these fixes out as soon as the developers finish them you would now be griping about how unstable these systems are because of badly tested patches. I will admit my former employer usually got better turnover times per pach than 6 weeks but for 3-4 weeks to pass from the time problem being reported and until the patch had been fully tested accross all major OS versions still in widespread use and approved for release was not unusual and we only had one Server OS to worry about. I can even remember a couple of errors that took over a year to track down because they were hard to reproduce and the culprit was difficult to isolate. Of course this was a few years ago and OS'es, at least in my experience, do not tend to get simpler as time passes.
Excuse me? No Progress? Including a firewall with Windows is no progress?
Of course that is progress but the real problem with Windows is the fact that it carries a burden of bad design decision at a fundamental level made for all sorts of business and marketing reasons. Why does a process like Microsoft Internet Explorer (Which is mainly a bigger gateway for malware than Firefox because it is badly written not becaue it is a Microsoft product) have to run with admin privileges? There is a reason why that is going to change in IE7 on Vista. Come to think of it, why the hell does the normal Windows user even have to have Admin privileges for day to day work to begin with? Thousands of Linux and Mac users get along just dandy with restricted user privileges apart from the occasional annoyance of having to either log in as root or in the case of OS.X feed a nag window the root password so that the occasional installation program can touch sensitive parts of the OS. You can try to write this off as *NIX evangelism but it is hard to deny that in the ancient past this sort of shoddy design work solved complicated problems for MS quickly and cheaply and for that reason it was allowed to happen without contemplating the long term effects. Unfortunately MS has since learned the hard way that thinking ahead sometimes pays but now they are also learning that back-pedaling is hard work.
I dunno but for the extra ~$550, I could get a much faster laptop than the MacBook *or* I could get the Gateway and have the money in my pocket.
Yet again somebody makes the case for buying a Kia instead of a Benz. And before anybody is tempted to start bitching about the analogy being invalid since both the Dell and the MacBook have more or less the same 'engine' please note that if the outgoing PowerBook line is anything to judge by you get a bit more than just $550 worth of Software with the MacBook. That would include both consumer software like iMovie, iDVD, (plus a whole slew of other consumer software) and a pretty sophisticated development package. Does the Dell ship with a decent Movie editor, DVD authoring software and a full featured copy of MS Visulal Studio (according to MS that will set you back $799, upgrade: $549) as well as Windows XP? Another point is that the MacBook is likely to remain the only computer on the market able to stably triple boot OS.X Windows, and Linux which for me is a major reason to buy one although personally I probably will settle for running Windows 2003 and LINUX on some Virtual PC type setup.
The art of choosing strategically well thought out product names is a declining art these days, I need only point to "Windows Defender". While most of us nerds know that Windows is on the defensive in the malware department there is no reason to let the uninitiated masses of Windows users know about it, they think the current situation is normal.
Not that I really care about the 'stupidity' of the MacBook name and I do agree with you that it is kinda clumsy. What I care about is what this MacBook can do and how soon I can get my filthy paws on one. Now if you will excuse me I have to go and empty my piggybank....
The end-of-year vulnerability score should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since US-CERT doesn't filter out updates (so one actual vulnerability can be counted numerous times) nor does it break out individual vulnerabilities from warnings that cover multiple bugs (as in the many Mac OS X vulnerability listings).
In effect: This information is completely useless for comparing operating systems.
I have a colleague which likes almost everything coming from Apple. In the last time I have the impression that he is working, here in our company, for nothing. I told him, that would be much easier, to talk with the payroll, so that they send his salary directly to Apple.
I could say the same thing about most of my colleagues and their expensive jeeps. There is no way I would ever get into that much debt because of a dispensable luxury like a car I only buy used ones and drive them until they fall apart out of fright when somebody honks at me at a traffic light. Now a (Apple) computer on the other hand, hmmmm... yes, that dispensable luxury I will endulge in because:
I earn my living of *nix based computers and runnign a *nix on the desktop helps me to avoid being reminded that Windows XP even exists.
I could run Linux but OS.X runs perfectly out of the box and getting mundane crap to work is usually much less hassle.
Most of the really worth while Linux software ports easily to OS.X.
With what I save on car loan payments I can afford buying high end computers.
What about the odds that Steve Jobs will announce he is in fact the second coming of Christ?
Geeee.... if that happens we will become the astounded witnesses to a first in human history. The Bush administration would declare war and despatch a few Marine divisions to invade Apple headquarters (but only after a prologned air bombardment).
Apple will announce the release of a 3 button mouse after they realized what a hit they had with their 2 button model...
Actually the mightymouse only has one button and it looks and works just like the old single button mice. The trick is that depending on which finger you press down on the single button with you get a left or right click functionality and the trackball on top of it doubles as a third button. This is a typical Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) solution:
Fact #1: Official Apple policy is that a user only needs one mouse button. Fact #2: Unfortunately experience has shown that it is better to have more mouse buttons. Fact #3: Since we are talking aboute Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) it is not an option to back down on Fact #1.
Ergo: Design a mouse that has a single button that works like two buttons and has a trackball built in instead of a scroll-wheel giving 2d scrollingcapability. This has the dual effect of adding a little novelty to a new product and most importantly it enables Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) to save face by not having to back down on Fact #1.
It never ceases to amaze me how Apple continually seems to succeed in coming up with gadgets that sell like hotcakes but that really are only redesigns or recombinations of already existing ideas. Both the iPod and the Mighty Mouse really just combinine two old ideas into a new one. I have seen mice with builtin trackballs before but no design that was quite as elegant as the mightly mouse. Similarly the iPod is nothing new either, the inovation is really to marry an MP3 player with an obscene amount of storage space and package it in an elegant and ergonomically well designed package. Both these are, surprisingly enough, ideas that nobody had thought of even if they had been bloody obvious for years.
Evolution within a species occurs when a great crisis happens: the particular survivor with the resistant genetics to the herbicide will breed with those genes intact. I don't believe that there was any cross-pollination or contamination from the genetically modified foods -- all I see is rhetoric that makes that assumption.
That still does not mean GM crops are harmless. GM crops can and will cross pollenate with non-GM crops of the same species or even other related wild subspecies. They can also cause great harm indirectly. Take for example honey production. A bee does not care whether it is gathering nectar from a GM plant or an non-GM plant. Humans however do care and as a consequence US and Canadian honey producers have great trouble exporting their goods to the EU where they are classified as GM products even though the GM pollution of their honey was inderect and not something the manufacturer wanted. And before you start harping on about the fact that nobody cares about honey exports to the EU keep in mind that it is a larger market than the USA and Canada combined which makes it hard to ignore for any businessman with a modicum of sense. This sort of thing has happened to more people than just a few honey farmers and that includes farmers within the EU it self. There is a number of examples of some idiot planting GM crops on his land with the result that the crops of neighboring farmers failed to qualify for 'Organic' status due GM pollution (aka. cross pollenation with GM crops) which, in the EU, at least radically reduces the value of the crop since organic foods are increasingly sought after by consumers and GM crops avoided.
I'm really getting sick of the greenie environmentalists
While I deeply dislike the really radical greenies I am getting just as sick of you whining neocons and quite frankly I don't know which faction is worse. According to the right wing we are supposed to believe that pollution and global warming (assuming the day will ever arrive when you people are prepared to admit it can even happen) is not affecting the earth in any way shape or form, that strip mining and oil drilling in nature reserves does no harm to the environment, that due to the unchanging nature of god's devine creation extinction cannot happen and that those WMD's really are there in Iraq... somewhere.... They just haven't been found yet... I mean if the GWB says so they must be there... Right?
My other half prefers organic food, and it definitely hits her pocket book (about 400% more expensive)
While crafting a good and sneaky troll it should be kept in mind that the easiest way to screw it up is hugely exaggerating the obvious. I regularly purchase organic food and while I will admint that it is more expensive than the factory made crud, is certainly not 400% more expensive.
So the CGD disk is an encrypted pseudo disk driver. It sits on top of another partition and acts as a new virtual disk to the rest of the operating system. But what of those of us that have to use windows, or Mac OS X? This seems like it's only compatible with *nix OSes.
OS.X ships with something called Filevaut, accessable from 'System Preferences'. Filevault migrates your home directory onto an encrypted image using a 128-bit AES key which, AFAIK is pretty secure, at least the NSA sponsored OS.X security guide I read recently recommended using it. This image gets mounted onto your Home directory when you log in and cannot be accessed unless you either know the login password or somehow manage to crack the encryption on the image file. This is useful for mobile professionals and the on the fly encryption works surprisingly well unless you are working with say, Photoshop files that weigh in in the hundreds of megabytes. For day to day stuff this works quite well. Just for example, I keep my iTunes collection on a filevault image and it does not seem to kill performance even with resource hogs like MS Word and Excel running.
If you only want a small secure area rather than encrypting the entire Home directory like you do with Filevault you can also create stand alone *.dmg images with the 'Disk Utility'. These have the same 128-bit AES encryption as Filevault. Fire up/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, select File->New->Blank Disk Image... Once created this can be accessed by double clicking it and feeding it the password.
Well, we kinda were the reason they became extinct...
True, but not for the most commonly cited reason which is hunting. The Dodo was probably not hunted into extinction by humans since contemporary accounts indicate that grilled Dodo tasted like sh*t. The most probable reason for the Dodo's demise is that it was driven to extinction by feral animals like pigs who were introduced by human settlers. These new animals destroyed it's nests outcompeted it for food but the last nail in it's coffin may have been habitat distruction due to human activity.
C# was invented for one reason: locking sytems into a windows deployment. There are some attempts to port C#, but those efforts don't have 10% of the current momentum that java has from a large community of both corporations and volunteer open source contributors.
... but I hope that the C#/.Net porting effort gains momentum. Firstly because it will might acutally make at least some applications applications targeted at Microsoft Windows and implemented in C# portable to other OS'es which in turn will hurt the Microsoft monopoly. Secondly I hope.NET will take off on non Microsoft platforms because despite all it's advantages Java needs competition. Thirdly C# really isn't all that crappy a language to write in, especially if you resist the temptation of using Microsofts development tools although don't mind using their compiler. Of course if the Open source community would come up with a third non proprietary cross platform development environment to truly compete with.NET and Java in the way the LINUX/Apache combo competes with (and hurts the sales of) the Windows 2003/Microsoft IIS....
Java on the other hand is a cross platform environment supported by multiple competing vendors. That will leave you more nimble to develop and deploy on a wide variety of systems. There are great JVM's available from Sun, BEA, IBM and others. There are several great commercial and open source implementations of java servlet containers. Can C# really say the samr thing?
I agree, Java is the only truly cross platfrom alternative despite the fact that C#/.NET is being implemented on non Microsoft platforms, Java will remain the only really usable cross platform alternative for some time to come. That being said there are still white patches in the standard Java class libraries; like RS232 support for example which, surprise, surprise, is still widely used. The last time I looked this was only implemented for Sun and Linux but not Windows, OS.X and other OS'es (you had to install a special third party implementation of the standard RS232 interface from Sun). Although I like C# better than Java for a number of reasons I still wouldn't rely upon C# for cross platform application development which is something I see as an essential capability to have for any future software product that can afford it performance wise. I would only start implementing something in C/C++ if I really needed close control over memory usage, the ability to do heavy duty performance tuning etc. For anything else it really just pays (money wise) to throw hardware at the problem and develop in Java or C#. But since the.NET implementations for the various OS'es will be developed by different parties (Microsoft, Nowell/Ximian etc...) rather than a being largely developed and/or coordinated by one party (Sun) like Java plus I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to use dirty tricks to make sure that.NET will always be more stable on Windows than other platforms.
In general I fully agree with you but in this instance I think you're a little off the mark. There's no way the Beagle 2 team will be able to determine exactly what went wrong just by analyzing images. All an image -- however high the resolution -- is going to do is confirm that yes, it did crash or yes, it landed properly but failed to communicate. To determine the why and how of their failure would require a mission to investigate the crash site.
I'm not so sure about that. The fact that Beagle has been found at all has already told the designer that it didn't burn up on in the atmosphere and if it was found in more or less the the right place the designer can also conclude that most likely there was nothing wrong with the navigation. If they ever manage to get any close-up photos of Beagle of sufficiently high resolution they can perhaps also determine whether it was damaged on landing, perhaps, due to a failiure of the landing mechanism. If Beagle is structurally intact one would conclude that it is most likely something went wrong with the electronics. While none of this will pinpoint the exact faliure it will still help to rule out at least some causes of faliure and confirm which aspects of the design were sound and which probably weren't which will in turn help with the design of Beagle II if such a mission ever sees the light of day.
Keep believing that because you do something a certain way, anyone who doesn't is inferior. It's not true, of course, and your belief will never make it so, but please continue it. It amuses me to see the superiority complex of those who are dogmatically locked into "One True Way." It's almost like conversing with an Intelligent Design proponent.
This has nothing to do with the 'One True Way', essentially it has alot to do with money and time. It also has something to do with what happens when you run out of options with the GUI interface. Of course you can also run out of options with command line utilities. The difference is that when this happens developing new GUI tools to do your specialized job is much more inefficient than knocking up a commandline utility to do the same task and they also tend to be more flexible. You can quickly develop and maintain a commandline utility written in C#, Visual basic or even as a simple Windows shellscript that does the grunt work you require just as well as any GUI utility without you having to spend extra time on creating the idiot proof GUI. Just for example quite a number of recent additions to the suite of IIS administration and migration tools are command line utilities and the reason for that is probably that Microsoft can churn those out alot faster and at a lower cost than any GUI based counterpart. The fact that experienced and well educated system administrators on Unix or Windows systems tend to regard GUI utilities as nice to look at and occasionally useful but mostly just as a dispensable luxury has nothing to do with arrogance.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the lack of existing technology usually the reason one funds research?
Very true, and some of the research into translation technology sponsored by the EU is acutally quite innovative. Not only are they making progress on audio-in, audio-out, on the fly translation but some of the systems being worked on in connection with this like for example: directional loudspeakers that allow every delegate in an auditorium to listen to a speech in a different language without using headphones and without disturbing the guy in the next seat 2ft away are quite amazing. It will be interesting to see these systems mature. I know the EU is not exactly a model of efficiency any more than the US Federal govt. but not everything they do is a complete waste of money. I would be alot more worried about Deutsche Telekom being involved in this search engine than the EU.
...better built...
A suprisingly little known side effect of buying a Mac is that within 48 hours your ph*llus grows two inches longer, or, if you are a female, your b**bs grow a couple of cup sizes. I wonder what happens when you buy a WinDell box or, perish the thought, a Sun Solaris system? Anybody????
At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
What the hell is news of a new satilite navigation system passing it's first tests doing in the Politics section? Competition does not hurt, the lack of it does. Doing something better than the competition and never tolerating monopoly, Isn't that in the best traditions of a modern market economy? I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should be in our interest to allow the US-Military to monopolize the satilite navigation business. Please let's not turn this into another US vs. Europe pissing contest...
Why bother using Entourage at all when only basic functions are supported.
So far I have not had any problems with Entourage vis a vi Exchange, E-mail, calendar, addresse book, invitations all works.
Where is Visio
I use Omnigraffle, they support importing and exporting of Visio files in the new format and the support has only gotten better with each version.
I can't comment on Publisher.
Any problems OS.X hasn't solved VirtualPC has done and so far I have not used it alot. It seems to me that you should invest in a Dell box and start waiting for MS Vista. This 5 year agreement means something to the 95% of corporate users who don't use every single documented feature of Exchange and Office they can find. MS Office for Mac is a perfectly adequate solution, not perfect, but it makes life alot easier for those of us who are willing to put up with the hassel of using OS.X at work and not following the rest of the herd as it stampeeds through the cactus field that is Windows and its malware problems.
... and give the money to the shareholders
Market cap or Equity Market cap, does it matter? I bet Michael Dell really hates it every time somebody brings that quote up in conversation and every body starts laughing. It must be the first thing every new employee at Dell HQ learns:"OK, iPods, PowerBooks and anything else with an Apple logo is off limits and whatever you do, don't crack that Apple shutdown joke when Mr. Dell is within earshot, the last time that happened he punched the guy who told it and cancelled our christmass bonuses!"
Dear Me,
While we cannot remove you from our "Will Sue" list (We sue everybody on principle) we are however pleased to inform you that we have recalled the team of ex-deltaforce commandos we contracted to assassinate you a week ago.
In the hope this E-Mail finds you still alive, sincerely,
RIAA
The photos show clearly where my car was and where their car was. My insurance company didn't pay a dime. I received a check from theirs.
So I don't think convergence in this respect is a bad thing.
I agree with you on this point since I had a similar experience. However, I carry an ultra small digicam for this exact purpose, and for general hobby photography since hauling my big Olympus profissional digicam around with me is tiring and most of all because my old camera equipped GSM phone kept getting confiscated by security guards when I went to a meeting at some other company during work. Another thing security goons seem to be getting panicky about these days are iPods and GSM-phones with built in sound recording softwre or dictaphones. I guess they must be worried about the empty promises their bosses make during meetings might be recorded and used against them when they try to weasel out of verbal agreements. I think I would not like a GSM/iPod hybrid half as much as a mini-PDA with iTunes installed especially if it was fully sync'able with OS.X and now that MS Office for Mac is to feature imporved syncing with mobile devices an MS Office integrated, Apple mini-PDA would be perfect for me.
It isn't the processor that gives Microsoft ninety-five percent of the market. It is a twenty-five year presence on the home and office desktop. It is the $600 Dell home-delivered with DVD burner snd flat-panel monitor that competes with a headless MacMini.
That is more like one of the things that keeps Microsoft at 95%. What got them there was a series of wily business decisions and the fact that Windows became the de facto corporate standard OS for office drones which in turn secured it a large share of the home PC market (people buy the same computers for the home what they use at work and use the software they can steal at work). Microsoft's tireless efforts to make sure as many schools as possible were kitted out with their OS probably had something to do with it as well. Another factor is that one of their two remaining serious competitors for the desktop and workstation market, Linux, is still to immature to compete with them for that market. The other one, MacOS, has always been limited to Apple hardware while Windows was always available to any PC manufacturer willing to pay so you might say that MacOS, at least today, does not even try to compete with Windows for dominance. Finally it must be admitted that Windows market share also has something to do with it along with their corporate Office solutions like Exchange and the Office suite which are not bad products and have a set of features that no single competitor has ever been able to completely reproduce and effectively market.
What we will *definitely* see are "Virtual PC"-like programs that let you run Windows alongside OS X (in a Window, or taking over the screen, etc., with a hotkey to flip back and forth, for example).
Right, this is what is really interesting from my point of view. The only reason I would want to dual boot is to be able to get maximum performance with Games. Other than that dual booting is inferior to running Windows or Linux on top of OS.X via some Virtual PC type solution since I want to be able to switch between OS'es with a single keyboard shortcut.
There are already some alternatives for running Windows on a VPC on top of OS.X:
Microsoft Virtual PC
GuestPC
iEmulator
According to macwindows.com Microsoft has been unwilling to name a timeframe for when Virtual PC will be working on the MacIntel boxes. In other words no Microsot Virtual PC on MacIntel until this spring or even the summer. Of the other two vendors I only go a reply from iEmulator who plans to be releasing a MacIntel compatable version around the time the MacIntlel machines hit the market in February which means they look set to be the first to market. In all cases there should be a significant performance boost for these products hopefull to the pont that we get half way decen performance for Windows XP and hopefully Windows 2003 Server as well.
Has anybody heard any talk of an OS.X port from VMware?
Erm... how was this list a super Mac related list? Only the first and last items (the Sketch thing and the iPod dock) are specifically for Apple products, the other three are general use USB and video items that have to alegence to Mac or PC specifically...
Couldn't you find anything else to complain about? Who ever said this was a super Mac related list? It's a blog by some nerds about the 5 coolest products they saw at Macworld and therefore presumably will now support OS.X. If AutoCad announced that it had released an OS.X port I would consider that newsworthy even if the Windows version has been around for years.
Focusing on the exploits or not, 46 days is a long time to wait for a critical fix.
.... Yawn.... While you wait for the expresso machine to finish filling up that paper cup. I used to work for a *NIX vendor where the usual procedure was to offer a workaround to plug up the security hole. The patch was then developed and sent off for testing from where it would sometimes return for a rework because it caused unexpected problems in some other part of the OS. If Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Apple or any of the numerous enterprise quality Linux distros out there would sling these fixes out as soon as the developers finish them you would now be griping about how unstable these systems are because of badly tested patches. I will admit my former employer usually got better turnover times per pach than 6 weeks but for 3-4 weeks to pass from the time problem being reported and until the patch had been fully tested accross all major OS versions still in widespread use and approved for release was not unusual and we only had one Server OS to worry about. I can even remember a couple of errors that took over a year to track down because they were hard to reproduce and the culprit was difficult to isolate. Of course this was a few years ago and OS'es, at least in my experience, do not tend to get simpler as time passes.
Fixes like this have to be tested and re-tested which is not exactly something you do
Excuse me? No Progress? Including a firewall with Windows is no progress?
Of course that is progress but the real problem with Windows is the fact that it carries a burden of bad design decision at a fundamental level made for all sorts of business and marketing reasons. Why does a process like Microsoft Internet Explorer (Which is mainly a bigger gateway for malware than Firefox because it is badly written not becaue it is a Microsoft product) have to run with admin privileges? There is a reason why that is going to change in IE7 on Vista. Come to think of it, why the hell does the normal Windows user even have to have Admin privileges for day to day work to begin with? Thousands of Linux and Mac users get along just dandy with restricted user privileges apart from the occasional annoyance of having to either log in as root or in the case of OS.X feed a nag window the root password so that the occasional installation program can touch sensitive parts of the OS. You can try to write this off as *NIX evangelism but it is hard to deny that in the ancient past this sort of shoddy design work solved complicated problems for MS quickly and cheaply and for that reason it was allowed to happen without contemplating the long term effects. Unfortunately MS has since learned the hard way that thinking ahead sometimes pays but now they are also learning that back-pedaling is hard work.
I dunno but for the extra ~$550, I could get a much faster laptop than the MacBook *or* I could get the Gateway and have the money in my pocket.
Yet again somebody makes the case for buying a Kia instead of a Benz. And before anybody is tempted to start bitching about the analogy being invalid since both the Dell and the MacBook have more or less the same 'engine' please note that if the outgoing PowerBook line is anything to judge by you get a bit more than just $550 worth of Software with the MacBook. That would include both consumer software like iMovie, iDVD, (plus a whole slew of other consumer software) and a pretty sophisticated development package. Does the Dell ship with a decent Movie editor, DVD authoring software and a full featured copy of MS Visulal Studio (according to MS that will set you back $799, upgrade: $549) as well as Windows XP? Another point is that the MacBook is likely to remain the only computer on the market able to stably triple boot OS.X Windows, and Linux which for me is a major reason to buy one although personally I probably will settle for running Windows 2003 and LINUX on some Virtual PC type setup.
Macbook sounds offensive and computer illiterate.
What do you guys think?
The art of choosing strategically well thought out product names is a declining art these days, I need only point to "Windows Defender". While most of us nerds know that Windows is on the defensive in the malware department there is no reason to let the uninitiated masses of Windows users know about it, they think the current situation is normal.
Not that I really care about the 'stupidity' of the MacBook name and I do agree with you that it is kinda clumsy. What I care about is what this MacBook can do and how soon I can get my filthy paws on one. Now if you will excuse me I have to go and empty my piggybank....
The end-of-year vulnerability score should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since US-CERT doesn't filter out updates (so one actual vulnerability can be counted numerous times) nor does it break out individual vulnerabilities from warnings that cover multiple bugs (as in the many Mac OS X vulnerability listings).
In effect: This information is completely useless for comparing operating systems.
In the last time I have the impression that he is working, here in our company, for nothing.
I told him, that would be much easier, to talk with the payroll, so that they send his salary directly to Apple.
I could say the same thing about most of my colleagues and their expensive jeeps. There is no way I would ever get into that much debt because of a dispensable luxury like a car I only buy used ones and drive them until they fall apart out of fright when somebody honks at me at a traffic light. Now a (Apple) computer on the other hand, hmmmm... yes, that dispensable luxury I will endulge in because:
What about the odds that Steve Jobs will announce he is in fact the second coming of Christ?
Geeee.... if that happens we will become the astounded witnesses to a first in human history. The Bush administration would declare war and despatch a few Marine divisions to invade Apple headquarters (but only after a prologned air bombardment).
Apple will announce the release of a 3 button mouse after they realized what a hit they had with their 2 button model...
Actually the mightymouse only has one button and it looks and works just like the old single button mice. The trick is that depending on which finger you press down on the single button with you get a left or right click functionality and the trackball on top of it doubles as a third button. This is a typical Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) solution:
Fact #1: Official Apple policy is that a user only needs one mouse button.
Fact #2: Unfortunately experience has shown that it is better to have more mouse buttons.
Fact #3: Since we are talking aboute Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) it is not an option to back down on Fact #1.
Ergo: Design a mouse that has a single button that works like two buttons and has a trackball built in instead of a scroll-wheel giving 2d scrollingcapability. This has the dual effect of adding a little novelty to a new product and most importantly it enables Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) to save face by not having to back down on Fact #1.
It never ceases to amaze me how Apple continually seems to succeed in coming up with gadgets that sell like hotcakes but that really are only redesigns or recombinations of already existing ideas. Both the iPod and the Mighty Mouse really just combinine two old ideas into a new one. I have seen mice with builtin trackballs before but no design that was quite as elegant as the mightly mouse. Similarly the iPod is nothing new either, the inovation is really to marry an MP3 player with an obscene amount of storage space and package it in an elegant and ergonomically well designed package. Both these are, surprisingly enough, ideas that nobody had thought of even if they had been bloody obvious for years.
Evolution within a species occurs when a great crisis happens: the particular survivor with the resistant genetics to the herbicide will breed with those genes intact. I don't believe that there was any cross-pollination or contamination from the genetically modified foods -- all I see is rhetoric that makes that assumption.
That still does not mean GM crops are harmless. GM crops can and will cross pollenate with non-GM crops of the same species or even other related wild subspecies. They can also cause great harm indirectly. Take for example honey production. A bee does not care whether it is gathering nectar from a GM plant or an non-GM plant. Humans however do care and as a consequence US and Canadian honey producers have great trouble exporting their goods to the EU where they are classified as GM products even though the GM pollution of their honey was inderect and not something the manufacturer wanted. And before you start harping on about the fact that nobody cares about honey exports to the EU keep in mind that it is a larger market than the USA and Canada combined which makes it hard to ignore for any businessman with a modicum of sense. This sort of thing has happened to more people than just a few honey farmers and that includes farmers within the EU it self. There is a number of examples of some idiot planting GM crops on his land with the result that the crops of neighboring farmers failed to qualify for 'Organic' status due GM pollution (aka. cross pollenation with GM crops) which, in the EU, at least radically reduces the value of the crop since organic foods are increasingly sought after by consumers and GM crops avoided.
I'm really getting sick of the greenie environmentalists
While I deeply dislike the really radical greenies I am getting just as sick of you whining neocons and quite frankly I don't know which faction is worse. According to the right wing we are supposed to believe that pollution and global warming (assuming the day will ever arrive when you people are prepared to admit it can even happen) is not affecting the earth in any way shape or form, that strip mining and oil drilling in nature reserves does no harm to the environment, that due to the unchanging nature of god's devine creation extinction cannot happen and that those WMD's really are there in Iraq... somewhere.... They just haven't been found yet... I mean if the GWB says so they must be there... Right?
My other half prefers organic food, and it definitely hits her pocket book (about 400% more expensive)
While crafting a good and sneaky troll it should be kept in mind that the easiest way to screw it up is hugely exaggerating the obvious. I regularly purchase organic food and while I will admint that it is more expensive than the factory made crud, is certainly not 400% more expensive.
So the CGD disk is an encrypted pseudo disk driver. It sits on top of another partition and acts as a new virtual disk to the rest of the operating system. But what of those of us that have to use windows, or Mac OS X? This seems like it's only compatible with *nix OSes.
/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, select File->New->Blank Disk Image... Once created this can be accessed by double clicking it and feeding it the password.
OS.X ships with something called Filevaut, accessable from 'System Preferences'. Filevault migrates your home directory onto an encrypted image using a 128-bit AES key which, AFAIK is pretty secure, at least the NSA sponsored OS.X security guide I read recently recommended using it. This image gets mounted onto your Home directory when you log in and cannot be accessed unless you either know the login password or somehow manage to crack the encryption on the image file. This is useful for mobile professionals and the on the fly encryption works surprisingly well unless you are working with say, Photoshop files that weigh in in the hundreds of megabytes. For day to day stuff this works quite well. Just for example, I keep my iTunes collection on a filevault image and it does not seem to kill performance even with resource hogs like MS Word and Excel running.
If you only want a small secure area rather than encrypting the entire Home directory like you do with Filevault you can also create stand alone *.dmg images with the 'Disk Utility'. These have the same 128-bit AES encryption as Filevault. Fire up
Well, we kinda were the reason they became extinct...
True, but not for the most commonly cited reason which is hunting. The Dodo was probably not hunted into extinction by humans since contemporary accounts indicate that grilled Dodo tasted like sh*t. The most probable reason for the Dodo's demise is that it was driven to extinction by feral animals like pigs who were introduced by human settlers. These new animals destroyed it's nests outcompeted it for food but the last nail in it's coffin may have been habitat distruction due to human activity.
C# was invented for one reason: locking sytems into a windows deployment. There are some attempts to port C#, but those efforts don't have 10% of the current momentum that java has from a large community of both corporations and volunteer open source contributors.
... but I hope that the C#/.Net porting effort gains momentum. Firstly because it will might acutally make at least some applications applications targeted at Microsoft Windows and implemented in C# portable to other OS'es which in turn will hurt the Microsoft monopoly. Secondly I hope .NET will take off on non Microsoft platforms because despite all it's advantages Java needs competition. Thirdly C# really isn't all that crappy a language to write in, especially if you resist the temptation of using Microsofts development tools although don't mind using their compiler. Of course if the Open source community would come up with a third non proprietary cross platform development environment to truly compete with .NET and Java in the way the LINUX/Apache combo competes with (and hurts the sales of) the Windows 2003/Microsoft IIS....
Java on the other hand is a cross platform environment supported by multiple competing vendors. That will leave you more nimble to develop and deploy on a wide variety of systems. There are great JVM's available from Sun, BEA, IBM and others. There are several great commercial and open source implementations of java servlet containers. Can C# really say the samr thing?
.NET implementations for the various OS'es will be developed by different parties (Microsoft, Nowell/Ximian etc...) rather than a being largely developed and/or coordinated by one party (Sun) like Java plus I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to use dirty tricks to make sure that .NET will always be more stable on Windows than other platforms.
I agree, Java is the only truly cross platfrom alternative despite the fact that C#/.NET is being implemented on non Microsoft platforms, Java will remain the only really usable cross platform alternative for some time to come. That being said there are still white patches in the standard Java class libraries; like RS232 support for example which, surprise, surprise, is still widely used. The last time I looked this was only implemented for Sun and Linux but not Windows, OS.X and other OS'es (you had to install a special third party implementation of the standard RS232 interface from Sun). Although I like C# better than Java for a number of reasons I still wouldn't rely upon C# for cross platform application development which is something I see as an essential capability to have for any future software product that can afford it performance wise. I would only start implementing something in C/C++ if I really needed close control over memory usage, the ability to do heavy duty performance tuning etc. For anything else it really just pays (money wise) to throw hardware at the problem and develop in Java or C#. But since the
In general I fully agree with you but in this instance I think you're a little off the mark. There's no way the Beagle 2 team will be able to determine exactly what went wrong just by analyzing images. All an image -- however high the resolution -- is going to do is confirm that yes, it did crash or yes, it landed properly but failed to communicate. To determine the why and how of their failure would require a mission to investigate the crash site.
I'm not so sure about that. The fact that Beagle has been found at all has already told the designer that it didn't burn up on in the atmosphere and if it was found in more or less the the right place the designer can also conclude that most likely there was nothing wrong with the navigation. If they ever manage to get any close-up photos of Beagle of sufficiently high resolution they can perhaps also determine whether it was damaged on landing, perhaps, due to a failiure of the landing mechanism. If Beagle is structurally intact one would conclude that it is most likely something went wrong with the electronics. While none of this will pinpoint the exact faliure it will still help to rule out at least some causes of faliure and confirm which aspects of the design were sound and which probably weren't which will in turn help with the design of Beagle II if such a mission ever sees the light of day.
Keep believing that because you do something a certain way, anyone who doesn't is inferior. It's not true, of course, and your belief will never make it so, but please continue it. It amuses me to see the superiority complex of those who are dogmatically locked into "One True Way." It's almost like conversing with an Intelligent Design proponent.
This has nothing to do with the 'One True Way', essentially it has alot to do with money and time. It also has something to do with what happens when you run out of options with the GUI interface. Of course you can also run out of options with command line utilities. The difference is that when this happens developing new GUI tools to do your specialized job is much more inefficient than knocking up a commandline utility to do the same task and they also tend to be more flexible. You can quickly develop and maintain a commandline utility written in C#, Visual basic or even as a simple Windows shellscript that does the grunt work you require just as well as any GUI utility without you having to spend extra time on creating the idiot proof GUI. Just for example quite a number of recent additions to the suite of IIS administration and migration tools are command line utilities and the reason for that is probably that Microsoft can churn those out alot faster and at a lower cost than any GUI based counterpart. The fact that experienced and well educated system administrators on Unix or Windows systems tend to regard GUI utilities as nice to look at and occasionally useful but mostly just as a dispensable luxury has nothing to do with arrogance.