Actually, it was this morning. I had trashed a colleague's external drive, and along with it 100GB of data. In a flat panic, I hauled my Firewire 800 RAID enclosure from Lacie, and together with the totally amazing Data Rescue II from Prosoft, I had almost all of his data back back by Lunch today. The sheer speed of a Firewire 800 drive compared to a USB 2.0 drive made it all worth the while. USB simply doesn't compare in terms of reliability and speed.
I'm a South African living in Europe. I did a long hard look at the SA IT market last year as I was considering moving back to SA. Having just read the speech, which is much the same as many other politicians in other countries have made, as well as having read the responses written by various South Africans on the forum of mybroadband.co.za, I kind of feel depressed. It just never ceases to simply amaze me what a bunch of clueless morons my countrymen are, no matter what their skin colour (in case someone was going to mention race). There are a few that notice that, on the face of it, the idea that software patents are highly damaging and restrictive to the software market (they might not be if there laws governing licensing but in general, patents are mostly used to restrict competition, isn't that so, Bill Gates?), but for the most part, white South Africans, in spite of being the home country of Mark Shuttleworth, will mindlessly criticize anything that anyone from the government says.
White South Africans are terribly bitter about the fact that legal employment quotas mean that it's very difficult for a white to get a job. The problem with white South Africans is that, as a corollary, will see: Microsoft good, Government bad. This, despite the fact that there are almost guaranteed to be almost no South Africans that could actually afford a retail version of Windows, much less a retail version of Office (South Africans are dumb enough to think that the cracked Windows and Office on their low quality packard bell computers are free.), given that the South African currency lost even more against the Euro this last year than the Dollar did.
The sad thing is that they are, to a tiny point, right. The South African government is so corrupt and so occupied with internal power struggles that the no national Linux system will ever be installed and the education system is so poor (10 year Delphi, of all things, as a standard), that no real development will ever get done.
It breaks my heart to see my country being ruined by its goverment and its population.
In 2000, or thereabouts, Microsoft toyed with the idea of releasing versions of Office apps that would run through a browser (IE via ActiveX of course) so that people in internet cafes (remember those?) would be able to use Office apps anywhere, anytime, but would have to pay per hour of use. This was also the time that Microsoft brought the new software licensing called Open Licensing (which it certainly wasn't), whereby, an enterprise customer would pay one price for three years and get any software updates within those three years free.
Open License was greeted with heavy suspicion by the enterprise community, who saw it, rightly, as Microsoft trying to lock them into a constant revenue stream. Microsoft gave enterprise customers essentially no other choice as both Windows and Office eventually were only sold through this option for volume licensing. Open License (if it is/was called that) turned out to bite those enterprise customers in the ass a few years later, when the licenses expired and Vista was turning out to be the fiasco that it eventually was. It was during these years that the first big customers and nations started turning to alternatives like Linux, as the pain of migration was sometimes deemed less expensive than continuing to pay enormous sums for software that just wasn't coming.
Microsoft countered this by releasing Office 2003, which was only minimally different to Office XP.
But, for consumers, charging extra money for essential system components might or might not work. It works for XBox Live, but I think Microsoft might be facing a few class action law suits when customers find that after not having paid the rental fee their system no longer works. This is very similar to one of the reasons why iTunes, despite its bad Windows interface, was so successful: You owned the music you paid for.
I admin 4 OSX Servers (XServes) 4 Linux servers, 35 OSX clients and 10 WinXP clients, almost all running on Mac hardware (only 5 machines are Lenovo laptops). I have in the past done time on Windows Servers as well as Solaris and Novell. I personally own three Macs, one of which runs WinXP as well in dual boot and I do most of my work on WinXP running on a Mac mini at work. My observations:
1. Mac build quality is simply excellent. None of the PC brands even come close (I don't know about Sony Vaios, so perhaps I'm wrong there). To get an idea of this, open up a Mac Pro tower and look inside at how it is built. The only machines which I know of of similar quality are the HP Blackbird Gaming rigs, which are in the same price category as Mac Pros. The laptops are well designed and built machines. So, while Apple machines are definitely more expensive, you pay for what you get.
2. The reliability of Apple hardware is, in general, much better than the average PC. The razor thin margins that most PC manufacturers have is the cause of this. I have seen, however, that PC manufacturers have lately, in the case of Dell as an example, been releasing more expensive and better designed and manufactured models.
3. OSX is very, very robust and can withstand more end user abuse than WinXP can. My experience is that most end users do not know all that much about their systems and will install and use any little extra that they can. On Windows, this very quickly leads to the registry growing to gargantuan size and dll conflicts.
4. I have had exactly two blue screens on Windows in 8 years and one kernel panic. I see more kernel panics on Macs at work than I see blue screens on Windows. In the last 2 years, perhaps 5 kernel panics on all the clients (usually in connection with Rosetta emulation, corrupt font caches, bad hard drives or bad RAM) and 1 blue screen. OSX has (had) one major problem in all versions prior to 10.5 and that was that users could very easily disable system fonts which would lead to erratic behaviour and crashes. Designers, who use and change fonts very often, ran into this problem very often. On Windows, various software packages will, over time, corrupt their registry settings and/or their other settings and cause erratic behaviour of the OS, such as major system slowdowns, certain services no longer working properly and above all, Windows Explorer becoming erratic and hanging and/or crashing.
5. In terms of productivity, OSX has an edge with the very many features that Apple has built into the OS, such as Expose, Bonjour networking, Drag and Drop everywhere (want text from a web page, just select it and drag it to the desktop or another application), configurable keyboard shortcuts for just about everything and favourites on the left hand side. Windows strong side is the start button, which gives you access to everything in the system with just the arrow keys. Obviously, in an AFP network, Apple networking is very simple, but Apple's support for SMB and AD is very good as well. OSX's font support is also much better than Windows.
6. Subjectively, I prefer Windows XP's immediate response to mouse and keyboard events. Pity that Vista threw all this away. In the end, you will be able to get all your work and fun done on both OSes and any hardware is the platform support your software. Windows has a massive edge in terms of the number of software packages, but it is very rare that I cannot find a package to do what I want on OSX. IN vertical markets, or specialised fields, however, there is no contest. Windows is far better supported.
7. Users on both platforms can be as equally clueless about their tools of choice. Very often, on Macs, I find the users know almost nothing about the OSX productivity enhancements, but generally, they cope better with the OS than the equivalent Windows end users. OSX is definitely easier to use.
8. Apple the company can be every bit as malevolent as Microsoft. Both are arrogant and fightened of losing control and will treat busines
You may have used Linux on the desktop for some ten years. Others have used Windows in some form or another, or Mac OS9 and Mac OSX. You may find it strange that person X doesn't know anything about the operating system on their computer. Others who work in user support, see this every single day. It doesn't mean those people are stupid, or clueless (How much do you know about topics not in your world view?). It means their lives are filled with other things than worrying about what the funny little buttons on their computer screen looks like. You may only need one "professional" application, but, as someone who has actually had to edit truly professional videos, for broadcast TV, Sony's Vegas is NOT a professional video editing application. Avid, Final Cut Pro and others are what one would need and use.You may think Bluefish is the world's finest text editor. I don't. And many others don't either. I use Ultraedit on Windows, Textmate on Mac, and jedit as a universal editor on all platforms.
You are, in my opinion, as shortsighted, as all the supposed shortsighted Windows and Mac users you profess to be better than. Linux is fine for some people, but not for others.
In other words, Rob, your article seems to be a filler for the easter weekend.
I work on XP all day at work, but I support a company that is 80% Apple. We tested Vista on various machines late last year, on a Mac Mini, a Mac Pro tower and had a recent Lenovo T61 (".4GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). For some or other reason, Vista ran fairly well on the Mac Pro tower and was pretty usable on the Mac mini, but it runs like a ball of thick shit on the Lenovo T61. While Vista definitely seems to be more stable than XP, it is also much more restrictive in what can and will run and, via the UAC makes it even more difficult to troubleshoot various software issues.
Also, the few in our company who do use Windows use it for CAD, and most CAD software (no, 3ds max is not CAD) uses OpenGL, which Microsoft, in a fit of Embrace and Extend has made a 2nd class citizen on Vista. It uses slow software rendering by default, and it needs a so-called installable client driver from the graphic card manufacturer, and the drivers can not use Aero, so you have your expensive CAD software which cannot use the transparent glass windows and looks like shit on Windows. Both Nvidia and ATi have said that this is a political decision from Microsoft to kill of OpenGL so that they can, once a-fucking-gain control some critical part of the PC system so that they can treat customers like their personal slaves and kill off any possible attempt by customers to migrate to Linux or Apple ("oh, this graphic card only supports DX, oops, I'm fucked").
Needless to say, we're sticvking with XP and putting more pressure on the CAD people to make Mac ports.
Fuck you Microsoft. You are your own worst enemy and enema.
The iPhone is good, nay fantastic, with its combination of an excellent user interface, big screen and multi touch screen, but the truth of the matter is that the platform is locked down in a way that it will be useless for tasks like system administration, since you can't run a shell or interpreter on it (Actually, theoretically, you could, in the same way as X11 works, but who wants X11 on the iPhone?). The only reason I can see behind that is a)Apple is honestly worried that interpreters which have no sandbox, like Python, Ruby, Bash, etc, might make the iPhone susceptible to viruses and also less reliable due to bad unknown code, or b)Apple doesn't want software running on the machines that it can't control
This comment of yours is pure flamebait and should have gotten your comment modded down. The reason is that your post is almost exactly the same as the legions of over-sensitive Microsoft fans and users here on slashdot who almost always include in a post a comment to the tune of "irrational Microsoft hater".
I'm a Mac user (I've got three at home) and I honestly have to agree that Apple gets a free ride on slashdot. Apple gets away with things that Microsoft gets roundly criticized for here, simply because "the design is better, more user firendly" and all the other reasons given, but more truly simply because Apple is trendy, has a much better marketing and PR than Microsoft, and is still seen as the underdog of the American computting industry.
That is plainly false. Iran, for all its faults, legally recognises Jews and has the middle east's largest Jewish community outside of Israel. Some 25000 Jews live there. Iran, while being rabidly anti-Israel, makes a distinction between Jews and Zionism (not that that justifies their policies in any way)
In light of todays major primary elections in the US where the major themes are the war, the economy, healthcare and illegal migration, all this in a time where the US Dollar is so low that my own salary, here in Europe, has gone up 20% in Dollar terms in one year, and where the US is heading for a major recession partly caused by the enormous costs of the war in Iraq and bad practices in high risk loans, all this hugely exacerbated by a major imbalance in foreign trade, one would seriously think that whether God made the dinos from old bits and pieces or whether they evolved is only tangentially of importance in the current US?
The obsession with trying to turn the educational clocks back to the middle ages is, however, symptomatic of a country that has seriously lost its way.
I haven't had any of the problems you've had, since it actually does come with VNC, so your problem must be elsewhere with remote admin, and anything more complex than the simple setups of any of the tools can be done via the command line (all of this is in Apple's documentation. Every Gui tool has a command line backend which is more powerful and flexible than the GUI. Just calm down and read the manuals. I'm sure you'll find a solution to your problems.
I also have to admin Linux machines and they also have a learning curve, just like any server does, even Win2k3.
If there is anything that will kill internet business growth, it is capped connections, because consumers will spend more time worrying about their costs than doing business over the net. I can only shake my head and laugh, because such rapacious greed will surely hurt TW itself when customer growth slows. Oh well, fuck the internet, at least it's a good excuse to get outside and get a life.
Although Norway itself, a relatively progressive country in IT matters (both Trolltech and Opera originated there) is fairly insigificant in the big scheme of things, this move coupled with other national governments moving in similar directions, might very well be enough to get the ball rolling. If Norwegian government IT sectors report significant savings and increased efficiency, then even more governments will likely follow. It's a fact of life that smaller countries take a good look at other small countries to compare efficiencies and practices.
A good example would be the Finnish school system, which has consistently scored very highly in the PISA educational ratings. That had a major influence on other European countries, such as Germany, which scored much lower, and Switzerland, making them look at how they could improve their own educational systems. It's the same thing with IT. You could very well see other European countries making similar decisions in the future.
The biggest hurdle will of course be Microsoft, which will do anything it can to stop acceptance of ODF and push in OOXML through the door. They will almost certainly try to get their big business partners to bully local governments into accepting OOXML in place of ODF.
Although I support OSX, WinXP (Vista as little as possible) and Linux at work, I mainly use WinXP at work and am fairly happy with it. I don't have mountains of crappy little systray thingies in there and keep the OS slimmed down to a minimum. At I have three Macs, with OSX 10.4 and 10.5. One of the reasons why I like Macs is because the Macs with such an enormous amount of software. I have music editors, video editors, DVD editors, photo editors, at least two web servers (apache and tomcat), document viewers (PDF and whatever else), Music juke boxes, a complete developers kit of software IDEs, numerous languages (bash, perl, php, python, ruby, java, objc, c, applescript) and the full complement of Unix tools.
While Windows has a fair amount of stuff in it (and apart from WMP, the quality is often somewhat disheartening, I must say - *Movie Maker* seems to be a typical Microsoft throw away application) and the amount and quality is improving, OSX simply has far far more. A lot of that stuff is 3rd party code, such as perl, tcpdump etc (these two feature prominently in the latest security patch) for which Apple is not really responsible, except, of course, for security updates to them as they become available.
Thus, I would say that a good portion of the Apple patches are to underlying Unix tools.
That doesn't of course excuse Apple or make Apple magically more secure than Windows, but it does show a decent sense of security responsibility. That said, even Microsoft is much better in the last year or so at providing security updates to its system. They have also deactivated things like the gaping holes in automatic macro execution in Outlook and Office in general, and even IE7 is no longer the bug magnet that IE6 used to be. BUT, Windows, by design, still has some flaws that are simply not present on other systems. The worst of the lot is ActiveX. The fact that Windows Update runs in the browser with an ActiveX control having direct access to your machine is something that simply should not be allowed to happen. Taking over a Mac remotely is not something that you often hear about.
I suspect however, that Vista, with its massive overkill in the security department, will mostly be better in terms of security as years go by. It's just a pity that Microsoft's implementation of sudo (UAC) as opposed to Apple's only using it for truly sensitive tasks makes users become desensitised to security.
I am the part time sysadmin for a small (40 people) design company that runs on 80% Macs (Designers and file servers) and 20% Windows (CAD and consultants) and Linux (mail, web, dns, dhcp). I am fairly used to supporting the oddities of the various OSs and personally use WinXP about 80% of the time myself. I have found that Mac OSX is generally an incredibly robust system and requiring generally little in the way of user support. Second WinXP is also fairly robust these days, with the caveat (this also applies to OSX to a certain extent) that if your users are allowed, as ours are, to install whatever they feel like, some will install all sorts of little gadgets and widgets that will bring the system to a crawl and, in the case of WinXP, make the system very unreliable. By and large, my largest support task on WinXP is Office support.
One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.
Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.
Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.
I kind of think huge powerful lasers are cool and they will certainly make powerful weapons in the future, BUT, I think that anyone who thinks that China and possibly Russia are sitting still and not doing any laser weapson research themselves is just delusional. The Soviet Union was developing laser weapons 20 years ago, and while Russia went through a load of decline in the 90s, that has been stopped and Russia could (or does already) continue laser and beam particle weapons research. They still have all the old data. The Chinese even have a laser that is designed to blind optics and humans that is standard armament on onw of its tanks and just about everyone assumes that they're researching high powered weapons as well.
The end result: Another (very) costly superpower stalemate.
The only advantage is that lasers look good on sharks.
Perl 6 has been in development now for some 6 years or so, before I even learnt perl. Since then I have come to love Perl's text handling features, hate Perl's bastard syntax for anonymous hashes and array references and the fact that really simple stuff, like automatic de-referencing of references is STILL not in there, or that array walkers or other features that have been in PHP for years now, are still not there. I hardly ever use Perl now. When I need to shell script, I use Bash (because it works in all Unix environments and I don't have to worry about version 5.6 vs. 5.8 etc), or Python (which has a kinky, but very quick syntax and is very fast). For the web, I still use PHP, since just about everyone and his mother has it installed, or Java, because, despite its atrocious verbosity, has an enormous amount of power in its class libraries and enterprise level tools. I also used ASP on Windows and hated it for its primitive libraries, but loved the simple syntax.
Perl is dying, Larry. New coders and scripters on Unix platforms are learning Python, PHP or Ruby. Windows people have moved to C# en masse. Active State Perl is no longer as powerful as Powershell and is also dying.
There have been God knows how many State of the Onion addresses. None of them have announced a final release of Perl 6. I think that by the time you finally do release Perl 6, Larry, Ruby will have gotten to the point that it runs as fast as Perl does (and the syntax is far, far simpler) and sadly, Perl 6 will not be able to find a niche or enough mindshare to really matter any more.
Judging by your username, you come from Poland, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Those countries, while having strongly growing economies, are not yet where most of western Europe is. Here, in Switzerland, Macs are insanely popular. I know two people who DON'T have Macs. My entire company recently switched over to Macs. I have three Macs at home. One of the Macs also runs WinXP and MS Office (both legal unpirated editions, as opposed to the massive pirating of software in eastern Europe). Macs here in Switzerland have the highest uptake rate worldwide, higher even than the USA.
In time, when eastern Europe gets richer, and it will, you will see the same thing happening there. I'm not a Mac user because somehow Macs and OSX are trendy. I really hate the new OSX 10.5 user interface. I even think Vista looks better. I use OSX because it is rock solid compared to Windows. I have to support the last few Windows users at work and it is almost always a royal pain. OSX is simply less costly in terms of user support, by, at least, a whole order of magnitude.
The reason that Macs are popular has to do with price and the perceived price. The rate of Mac usage in France, for example, is very high, despite the French economy being worse off than the English and German ones. Macs are less popular in England and Germany because they are perceived as costing more, especially in Germany, which is known for its cost saving mentality. In Holland, Denmark and Sweden, Macs are also wildly popular, and even in Italy to a certain extent.
The irony of using Macs is that the OS supplies fantastic Windows drivers. As with OSX the hardware set is a known factor and all the hardware works flawlessly in Windows. Much better than Lenovo or no name brand PCs (of which we still have a few around to shove under conservative clients noses who think that Macs are still like Mac OS7). Macs are actually better PCs than PCs themselves.
What blows my mind is the continual high use of IE6, as evidenced by many web browser stats.
The only people who would be forced into using IE6 would be Win2K and earlier users (who make up, at most, some 10 % to 15 % of the market), WinXP users who are still on dial-up and therefore on SP1 or so,internal company installs where IE6 is mandated due to site compatibility, and pirated WinXP. IE7 has been an mandatory install for some time now on WinXP, but obviously not on pirated WinXP.
I would love to know what real precentage of WinXP users are using pirated WinXP. If it really is as high as 30% (or higher, since many cracks exist for IE7 and Vista already), I think MS is heading for some real problems.
I can just surf the wave created by my own supplier Jeebus, you really are one stupid bastard. After all the years of Micorosoft's "partners" getting fucked over after they are no longer useful to Microsoft, I would have thought that just about everyone knows better. You know why, dumbass, WinCE is not the most used OS on Smartphones and Symbian is? 1. Because WinCE's a buggy, slow OS with a terrible UI ans 2. The majors companies in the mobile phone arena had seen what Micorosoft did to all their "partners" in the past - use them until they were no longer useful and then break the partnership and fuck the partner over. They did this starting with IBM, the did it to Sun, with Netscape and they tried to do to Linux in general via SCO.
So what will you do when MS steals or breaks your business? You locked yourself into a so called de facto standard, in your own words, and then you'll be fucked when they're no longer useful.
I can almost guarantee you that WPF is going to go the same path as ActiveX did, i.e. It will be used by companies that are Windows only internally on intranets, it will get used by a tiny minority of general windows web developers, the rest will almost certainly avoid it like the plague for the very obvious reason that their sites would lose customers if they were only usable by Windows users with.Net version x.x only. And all those who do NOT code for.Net on the backend (and, believe it or not, that is most of them) will most likely have no benefit in developing for.Net on the frontend then.
Eventually Microsoft will give up and, in say 8 years, come up with the next idea which, too, will go down that same path. Ad infinitum.
I am a media producer, sysadmin and believe or not java coder (my oracle skills are basic but usable). I actually recently went ahead and bought the Adobe CS3 premium design suite and standard web suite plus MSOffice Professional. The Adobe tools are actually that good. I use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks and Dreamweaver daily, and I need Office because one of the things we offer is customised Office templates.
BUT, as many people have said here, it depends on what your goals are: If you want to teach the kids design principles, you can use Inkscape and the GIMP and Scribus. They certainly are good enough for that. Those principles can be applied just as well to PS, AI and ID. Introducing them to OpenOffice would certainly be a useful bonus as well, because MS Office sucks giant balls, even though it can be very powerful in knowledgeable hands.
HOWEVER, since, if they ever are going to work in the industry, or go to college where they will have easier access to better tools and not have to play catch up, I would recommend the following: Teach them Pixel editing with PS7. Although the CS3 suite has changed the UI greatly, the basic key combinations are still the same (ctrl-alt-I - reverse the selection, q - quick mask toggle, ctrl-u -HSL control, ctrl-m - graduation curves etc etc etc), layers, masks, vectors and filter effects are still the same mostly. Time is money in the design business so knowing at least the basics of the tools will give them a leg up (I had my first PS lessons in PS 1.0.7 and AI lessons in 3.0).
For vector animations, you can easily use Flash5 for making the animations. That part of Flash has hardly changed. I would NOT, however, teach them any Actionscript in Flash5. Actionscript 3.0, the current iteration, has more in common with Java or C# than Javascript in some ways (strongly typed, OO based, namespaces etc). Here I would teach them basic coding using Flex2 in combination with Actionscript 3.0 and the free Flex2 compiler. The bonus here is that any of them learning to code Flash will learn better coding practices than is standard in Flash (code on multiple symbols and timelines all over the place makes maintaining Flash apps very difficult).
For vector art, use Inkscape. It is very good and the curve to move to AI is not as great as some would make it to be.
For Website design and coding, I would teach them the basics of coding in one of the hundreds of free editors (Eclipse for example, or CoffeCup). Dreamweaver has changed rapidly and the older versions are not much better than free editors.
For Video editing, I would use a free editor like ZS4. They offer some of the same tools that higher end editors do (chroma keying etc). Windows Movie Maker is simply too limited to really explore things like multi track editing etc.
It's Swiss, in English, Suisse (the country) and Suisses (the people) in French, Schweiz (for the country) and Schweizer (for the people) in German, Svizzera (country) and Svizzeri (the people) in Italian and Svizra (country) and Svizers(people) in Rumantsch, you damn Amerikaner;-)
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Actually, it was this morning. I had trashed a colleague's external drive, and along with it 100GB of data. In a flat panic, I hauled my Firewire 800 RAID enclosure from Lacie, and together with the totally amazing Data Rescue II from Prosoft, I had almost all of his data back back by Lunch today. The sheer speed of a Firewire 800 drive compared to a USB 2.0 drive made it all worth the while. USB simply doesn't compare in terms of reliability and speed.
I'm a South African living in Europe. I did a long hard look at the SA IT market last year as I was considering moving back to SA. Having just read the speech, which is much the same as many other politicians in other countries have made, as well as having read the responses written by various South Africans on the forum of mybroadband.co.za, I kind of feel depressed. It just never ceases to simply amaze me what a bunch of clueless morons my countrymen are, no matter what their skin colour (in case someone was going to mention race). There are a few that notice that, on the face of it, the idea that software patents are highly damaging and restrictive to the software market (they might not be if there laws governing licensing but in general, patents are mostly used to restrict competition, isn't that so, Bill Gates?), but for the most part, white South Africans, in spite of being the home country of Mark Shuttleworth, will mindlessly criticize anything that anyone from the government says.
White South Africans are terribly bitter about the fact that legal employment quotas mean that it's very difficult for a white to get a job. The problem with white South Africans is that, as a corollary, will see: Microsoft good, Government bad. This, despite the fact that there are almost guaranteed to be almost no South Africans that could actually afford a retail version of Windows, much less a retail version of Office (South Africans are dumb enough to think that the cracked Windows and Office on their low quality packard bell computers are free.), given that the South African currency lost even more against the Euro this last year than the Dollar did.
The sad thing is that they are, to a tiny point, right. The South African government is so corrupt and so occupied with internal power struggles that the no national Linux system will ever be installed and the education system is so poor (10 year Delphi, of all things, as a standard), that no real development will ever get done.
It breaks my heart to see my country being ruined by its goverment and its population.
In 2000, or thereabouts, Microsoft toyed with the idea of releasing versions of Office apps that would run through a browser (IE via ActiveX of course) so that people in internet cafes (remember those?) would be able to use Office apps anywhere, anytime, but would have to pay per hour of use. This was also the time that Microsoft brought the new software licensing called Open Licensing (which it certainly wasn't), whereby, an enterprise customer would pay one price for three years and get any software updates within those three years free.
Open License was greeted with heavy suspicion by the enterprise community, who saw it, rightly, as Microsoft trying to lock them into a constant revenue stream. Microsoft gave enterprise customers essentially no other choice as both Windows and Office eventually were only sold through this option for volume licensing. Open License (if it is/was called that) turned out to bite those enterprise customers in the ass a few years later, when the licenses expired and Vista was turning out to be the fiasco that it eventually was. It was during these years that the first big customers and nations started turning to alternatives like Linux, as the pain of migration was sometimes deemed less expensive than continuing to pay enormous sums for software that just wasn't coming.
Microsoft countered this by releasing Office 2003, which was only minimally different to Office XP.
But, for consumers, charging extra money for essential system components might or might not work. It works for XBox Live, but I think Microsoft might be facing a few class action law suits when customers find that after not having paid the rental fee their system no longer works. This is very similar to one of the reasons why iTunes, despite its bad Windows interface, was so successful: You owned the music you paid for.
It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
I admin 4 OSX Servers (XServes) 4 Linux servers, 35 OSX clients and 10 WinXP clients, almost all running on Mac hardware (only 5 machines are Lenovo laptops). I have in the past done time on Windows Servers as well as Solaris and Novell. I personally own three Macs, one of which runs WinXP as well in dual boot and I do most of my work on WinXP running on a Mac mini at work. My observations:
1. Mac build quality is simply excellent. None of the PC brands even come close (I don't know about Sony Vaios, so perhaps I'm wrong there). To get an idea of this, open up a Mac Pro tower and look inside at how it is built. The only machines which I know of of similar quality are the HP Blackbird Gaming rigs, which are in the same price category as Mac Pros. The laptops are well designed and built machines. So, while Apple machines are definitely more expensive, you pay for what you get.
2. The reliability of Apple hardware is, in general, much better than the average PC. The razor thin margins that most PC manufacturers have is the cause of this. I have seen, however, that PC manufacturers have lately, in the case of Dell as an example, been releasing more expensive and better designed and manufactured models.
3. OSX is very, very robust and can withstand more end user abuse than WinXP can. My experience is that most end users do not know all that much about their systems and will install and use any little extra that they can. On Windows, this very quickly leads to the registry growing to gargantuan size and dll conflicts.
4. I have had exactly two blue screens on Windows in 8 years and one kernel panic. I see more kernel panics on Macs at work than I see blue screens on Windows. In the last 2 years, perhaps 5 kernel panics on all the clients (usually in connection with Rosetta emulation, corrupt font caches, bad hard drives or bad RAM) and 1 blue screen. OSX has (had) one major problem in all versions prior to 10.5 and that was that users could very easily disable system fonts which would lead to erratic behaviour and crashes. Designers, who use and change fonts very often, ran into this problem very often. On Windows, various software packages will, over time, corrupt their registry settings and/or their other settings and cause erratic behaviour of the OS, such as major system slowdowns, certain services no longer working properly and above all, Windows Explorer becoming erratic and hanging and/or crashing.
5. In terms of productivity, OSX has an edge with the very many features that Apple has built into the OS, such as Expose, Bonjour networking, Drag and Drop everywhere (want text from a web page, just select it and drag it to the desktop or another application), configurable keyboard shortcuts for just about everything and favourites on the left hand side. Windows strong side is the start button, which gives you access to everything in the system with just the arrow keys. Obviously, in an AFP network, Apple networking is very simple, but Apple's support for SMB and AD is very good as well. OSX's font support is also much better than Windows.
6. Subjectively, I prefer Windows XP's immediate response to mouse and keyboard events. Pity that Vista threw all this away. In the end, you will be able to get all your work and fun done on both OSes and any hardware is the platform support your software. Windows has a massive edge in terms of the number of software packages, but it is very rare that I cannot find a package to do what I want on OSX. IN vertical markets, or specialised fields, however, there is no contest. Windows is far better supported.
7. Users on both platforms can be as equally clueless about their tools of choice. Very often, on Macs, I find the users know almost nothing about the OSX productivity enhancements, but generally, they cope better with the OS than the equivalent Windows end users. OSX is definitely easier to use.
8. Apple the company can be every bit as malevolent as Microsoft. Both are arrogant and fightened of losing control and will treat busines
You may have used Linux on the desktop for some ten years. Others have used Windows in some form or another, or Mac OS9 and Mac OSX. You may find it strange that person X doesn't know anything about the operating system on their computer. Others who work in user support, see this every single day. It doesn't mean those people are stupid, or clueless (How much do you know about topics not in your world view?). It means their lives are filled with other things than worrying about what the funny little buttons on their computer screen looks like. You may only need one "professional" application, but, as someone who has actually had to edit truly professional videos, for broadcast TV, Sony's Vegas is NOT a professional video editing application. Avid, Final Cut Pro and others are what one would need and use.You may think Bluefish is the world's finest text editor. I don't. And many others don't either. I use Ultraedit on Windows, Textmate on Mac, and jedit as a universal editor on all platforms.
You are, in my opinion, as shortsighted, as all the supposed shortsighted Windows and Mac users you profess to be better than. Linux is fine for some people, but not for others.
In other words, Rob, your article seems to be a filler for the easter weekend.
Stick to writing polls.
I work on XP all day at work, but I support a company that is 80% Apple. We tested Vista on various machines late last year, on a Mac Mini, a Mac Pro tower and had a recent Lenovo T61 (".4GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). For some or other reason, Vista ran fairly well on the Mac Pro tower and was pretty usable on the Mac mini, but it runs like a ball of thick shit on the Lenovo T61. While Vista definitely seems to be more stable than XP, it is also much more restrictive in what can and will run and, via the UAC makes it even more difficult to troubleshoot various software issues.
Also, the few in our company who do use Windows use it for CAD, and most CAD software (no, 3ds max is not CAD) uses OpenGL, which Microsoft, in a fit of Embrace and Extend has made a 2nd class citizen on Vista. It uses slow software rendering by default, and it needs a so-called installable client driver from the graphic card manufacturer, and the drivers can not use Aero, so you have your expensive CAD software which cannot use the transparent glass windows and looks like shit on Windows. Both Nvidia and ATi have said that this is a political decision from Microsoft to kill of OpenGL so that they can, once a-fucking-gain control some critical part of the PC system so that they can treat customers like their personal slaves and kill off any possible attempt by customers to migrate to Linux or Apple ("oh, this graphic card only supports DX, oops, I'm fucked").
Needless to say, we're sticvking with XP and putting more pressure on the CAD people to make Mac ports.
Fuck you Microsoft. You are your own worst enemy and enema.
The iPhone is good, nay fantastic, with its combination of an excellent user interface, big screen and multi touch screen, but the truth of the matter is that the platform is locked down in a way that it will be useless for tasks like system administration, since you can't run a shell or interpreter on it (Actually, theoretically, you could, in the same way as X11 works, but who wants X11 on the iPhone?). The only reason I can see behind that is
a)Apple is honestly worried that interpreters which have no sandbox, like Python, Ruby, Bash, etc, might make the iPhone susceptible to viruses and also less reliable due to bad unknown code, or
b)Apple doesn't want software running on the machines that it can't control
while much-praised by irrational Apple-haters*
This comment of yours is pure flamebait and should have gotten your comment modded down. The reason is that your post is almost exactly the same as the legions of over-sensitive Microsoft fans and users here on slashdot who almost always include in a post a comment to the tune of "irrational Microsoft hater".
I'm a Mac user (I've got three at home) and I honestly have to agree that Apple gets a free ride on slashdot. Apple gets away with things that Microsoft gets roundly criticized for here, simply because "the design is better, more user firendly" and all the other reasons given, but more truly simply because Apple is trendy, has a much better marketing and PR than Microsoft, and is still seen as the underdog of the American computting industry.
In Iran, well, its illegal to even be jewish.
That is plainly false. Iran, for all its faults, legally recognises Jews and has the middle east's largest Jewish community outside of Israel. Some 25000 Jews live there. Iran, while being rabidly anti-Israel, makes a distinction between Jews and Zionism (not that that justifies their policies in any way)
In light of todays major primary elections in the US where the major themes are the war, the economy, healthcare and illegal migration, all this in a time where the US Dollar is so low that my own salary, here in Europe, has gone up 20% in Dollar terms in one year, and where the US is heading for a major recession partly caused by the enormous costs of the war in Iraq and bad practices in high risk loans, all this hugely exacerbated by a major imbalance in foreign trade, one would seriously think that whether God made the dinos from old bits and pieces or whether they evolved is only tangentially of importance in the current US?
The obsession with trying to turn the educational clocks back to the middle ages is, however, symptomatic of a country that has seriously lost its way.
One look at your writing skills says more than your entire post does, IMHO.
I haven't had any of the problems you've had, since it actually does come with VNC, so your problem must be elsewhere with remote admin, and anything more complex than the simple setups of any of the tools can be done via the command line (all of this is in Apple's documentation. Every Gui tool has a command line backend which is more powerful and flexible than the GUI. Just calm down and read the manuals. I'm sure you'll find a solution to your problems.
I also have to admin Linux machines and they also have a learning curve, just like any server does, even Win2k3.
If there is anything that will kill internet business growth, it is capped connections, because consumers will spend more time worrying about their costs than doing business over the net. I can only shake my head and laugh, because such rapacious greed will surely hurt TW itself when customer growth slows. Oh well, fuck the internet, at least it's a good excuse to get outside and get a life.
Although Norway itself, a relatively progressive country in IT matters (both Trolltech and Opera originated there) is fairly insigificant in the big scheme of things, this move coupled with other national governments moving in similar directions, might very well be enough to get the ball rolling. If Norwegian government IT sectors report significant savings and increased efficiency, then even more governments will likely follow. It's a fact of life that smaller countries take a good look at other small countries to compare efficiencies and practices.
A good example would be the Finnish school system, which has consistently scored very highly in the PISA educational ratings. That had a major influence on other European countries, such as Germany, which scored much lower, and Switzerland, making them look at how they could improve their own educational systems. It's the same thing with IT. You could very well see other European countries making similar decisions in the future.
The biggest hurdle will of course be Microsoft, which will do anything it can to stop acceptance of ODF and push in OOXML through the door. They will almost certainly try to get their big business partners to bully local governments into accepting OOXML in place of ODF.
Although I support OSX, WinXP (Vista as little as possible) and Linux at work, I mainly use WinXP at work and am fairly happy with it. I don't have mountains of crappy little systray thingies in there and keep the OS slimmed down to a minimum. At I have three Macs, with OSX 10.4 and 10.5. One of the reasons why I like Macs is because the Macs with such an enormous amount of software. I have music editors, video editors, DVD editors, photo editors, at least two web servers (apache and tomcat), document viewers (PDF and whatever else), Music juke boxes, a complete developers kit of software IDEs, numerous languages (bash, perl, php, python, ruby, java, objc, c, applescript) and the full complement of Unix tools.
While Windows has a fair amount of stuff in it (and apart from WMP, the quality is often somewhat disheartening, I must say - *Movie Maker* seems to be a typical Microsoft throw away application) and the amount and quality is improving, OSX simply has far far more. A lot of that stuff is 3rd party code, such as perl, tcpdump etc (these two feature prominently in the latest security patch) for which Apple is not really responsible, except, of course, for security updates to them as they become available.
Thus, I would say that a good portion of the Apple patches are to underlying Unix tools.
That doesn't of course excuse Apple or make Apple magically more secure than Windows, but it does show a decent sense of security responsibility. That said, even Microsoft is much better in the last year or so at providing security updates to its system. They have also deactivated things like the gaping holes in automatic macro execution in Outlook and Office in general, and even IE7 is no longer the bug magnet that IE6 used to be. BUT, Windows, by design, still has some flaws that are simply not present on other systems. The worst of the lot is ActiveX. The fact that Windows Update runs in the browser with an ActiveX control having direct access to your machine is something that simply should not be allowed to happen. Taking over a Mac remotely is not something that you often hear about.
I suspect however, that Vista, with its massive overkill in the security department, will mostly be better in terms of security as years go by. It's just a pity that Microsoft's implementation of sudo (UAC) as opposed to Apple's only using it for truly sensitive tasks makes users become desensitised to security.
I am the part time sysadmin for a small (40 people) design company that runs on 80% Macs (Designers and file servers) and 20% Windows (CAD and consultants) and Linux (mail, web, dns, dhcp). I am fairly used to supporting the oddities of the various OSs and personally use WinXP about 80% of the time myself. I have found that Mac OSX is generally an incredibly robust system and requiring generally little in the way of user support. Second WinXP is also fairly robust these days, with the caveat (this also applies to OSX to a certain extent) that if your users are allowed, as ours are, to install whatever they feel like, some will install all sorts of little gadgets and widgets that will bring the system to a crawl and, in the case of WinXP, make the system very unreliable. By and large, my largest support task on WinXP is Office support.
One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.
Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.
Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.
I kind of think huge powerful lasers are cool and they will certainly make powerful weapons in the future, BUT, I think that anyone who thinks that China and possibly Russia are sitting still and not doing any laser weapson research themselves is just delusional. The Soviet Union was developing laser weapons 20 years ago, and while Russia went through a load of decline in the 90s, that has been stopped and Russia could (or does already) continue laser and beam particle weapons research. They still have all the old data. The Chinese even have a laser that is designed to blind optics and humans that is standard armament on onw of its tanks and just about everyone assumes that they're researching high powered weapons as well.
The end result: Another (very) costly superpower stalemate.
The only advantage is that lasers look good on sharks.
sums up your IQ
Perl 6 has been in development now for some 6 years or so, before I even learnt perl. Since then I have come to love Perl's text handling features, hate Perl's bastard syntax for anonymous hashes and array references and the fact that really simple stuff, like automatic de-referencing of references is STILL not in there, or that array walkers or other features that have been in PHP for years now, are still not there. I hardly ever use Perl now. When I need to shell script, I use Bash (because it works in all Unix environments and I don't have to worry about version 5.6 vs. 5.8 etc), or Python (which has a kinky, but very quick syntax and is very fast). For the web, I still use PHP, since just about everyone and his mother has it installed, or Java, because, despite its atrocious verbosity, has an enormous amount of power in its class libraries and enterprise level tools. I also used ASP on Windows and hated it for its primitive libraries, but loved the simple syntax.
Perl is dying, Larry. New coders and scripters on Unix platforms are learning Python, PHP or Ruby. Windows people have moved to C# en masse. Active State Perl is no longer as powerful as Powershell and is also dying.
There have been God knows how many State of the Onion addresses. None of them have announced a final release of Perl 6. I think that by the time you finally do release Perl 6, Larry, Ruby will have gotten to the point that it runs as fast as Perl does (and the syntax is far, far simpler) and sadly, Perl 6 will not be able to find a niche or enough mindshare to really matter any more.
Judging by your username, you come from Poland, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Those countries, while having strongly growing economies, are not yet where most of western Europe is. Here, in Switzerland, Macs are insanely popular. I know two people who DON'T have Macs. My entire company recently switched over to Macs. I have three Macs at home. One of the Macs also runs WinXP and MS Office (both legal unpirated editions, as opposed to the massive pirating of software in eastern Europe). Macs here in Switzerland have the highest uptake rate worldwide, higher even than the USA.
In time, when eastern Europe gets richer, and it will, you will see the same thing happening there. I'm not a Mac user because somehow Macs and OSX are trendy. I really hate the new OSX 10.5 user interface. I even think Vista looks better. I use OSX because it is rock solid compared to Windows. I have to support the last few Windows users at work and it is almost always a royal pain. OSX is simply less costly in terms of user support, by, at least, a whole order of magnitude.
The reason that Macs are popular has to do with price and the perceived price. The rate of Mac usage in France, for example, is very high, despite the French economy being worse off than the English and German ones. Macs are less popular in England and Germany because they are perceived as costing more, especially in Germany, which is known for its cost saving mentality. In Holland, Denmark and Sweden, Macs are also wildly popular, and even in Italy to a certain extent.
The irony of using Macs is that the OS supplies fantastic Windows drivers. As with OSX the hardware set is a known factor and all the hardware works flawlessly in Windows. Much better than Lenovo or no name brand PCs (of which we still have a few around to shove under conservative clients noses who think that Macs are still like Mac OS7). Macs are actually better PCs than PCs themselves.
What blows my mind is the continual high use of IE6, as evidenced by many web browser stats.
The only people who would be forced into using IE6 would be Win2K and earlier users (who make up, at most, some 10 % to 15 % of the market), WinXP users who are still on dial-up and therefore on SP1 or so,internal company installs where IE6 is mandated due to site compatibility, and pirated WinXP. IE7 has been an mandatory install for some time now on WinXP, but obviously not on pirated WinXP.
I would love to know what real precentage of WinXP users are using pirated WinXP. If it really is as high as 30% (or higher, since many cracks exist for IE7 and Vista already), I think MS is heading for some real problems.
I can just surf the wave created by my own supplier Jeebus, you really are one stupid bastard. After all the years of Micorosoft's "partners" getting fucked over after they are no longer useful to Microsoft, I would have thought that just about everyone knows better. You know why, dumbass, WinCE is not the most used OS on Smartphones and Symbian is? 1. Because WinCE's a buggy, slow OS with a terrible UI ans 2. The majors companies in the mobile phone arena had seen what Micorosoft did to all their "partners" in the past - use them until they were no longer useful and then break the partnership and fuck the partner over. They did this starting with IBM, the did it to Sun, with Netscape and they tried to do to Linux in general via SCO.
So what will you do when MS steals or breaks your business? You locked yourself into a so called de facto standard, in your own words, and then you'll be fucked when they're no longer useful.
I can almost guarantee you that WPF is going to go the same path as ActiveX did, i.e. It will be used by companies that are Windows only internally on intranets, it will get used by a tiny minority of general windows web developers, the rest will almost certainly avoid it like the plague for the very obvious reason that their sites would lose customers if they were only usable by Windows users with .Net version x.x only. And all those who do NOT code for .Net on the backend (and, believe it or not, that is most of them) will most likely have no benefit in developing for .Net on the frontend then.
Eventually Microsoft will give up and, in say 8 years, come up with the next idea which, too, will go down that same path. Ad infinitum.
I am a media producer, sysadmin and believe or not java coder (my oracle skills are basic but usable). I actually recently went ahead and bought the Adobe CS3 premium design suite and standard web suite plus MSOffice Professional. The Adobe tools are actually that good. I use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks and Dreamweaver daily, and I need Office because one of the things we offer is customised Office templates.
BUT, as many people have said here, it depends on what your goals are: If you want to teach the kids design principles, you can use Inkscape and the GIMP and Scribus. They certainly are good enough for that. Those principles can be applied just as well to PS, AI and ID. Introducing them to OpenOffice would certainly be a useful bonus as well, because MS Office sucks giant balls, even though it can be very powerful in knowledgeable hands.
HOWEVER, since, if they ever are going to work in the industry, or go to college where they will have easier access to better tools and not have to play catch up, I would recommend the following:
Teach them Pixel editing with PS7. Although the CS3 suite has changed the UI greatly, the basic key combinations are still the same (ctrl-alt-I - reverse the selection, q - quick mask toggle, ctrl-u -HSL control, ctrl-m - graduation curves etc etc etc), layers, masks, vectors and filter effects are still the same mostly. Time is money in the design business so knowing at least the basics of the tools will give them a leg up (I had my first PS lessons in PS 1.0.7 and AI lessons in 3.0).
For vector animations, you can easily use Flash5 for making the animations. That part of Flash has hardly changed. I would NOT, however, teach them any Actionscript in Flash5. Actionscript 3.0, the current iteration, has more in common with Java or C# than Javascript in some ways (strongly typed, OO based, namespaces etc). Here I would teach them basic coding using Flex2 in combination with Actionscript 3.0 and the free Flex2 compiler. The bonus here is that any of them learning to code Flash will learn better coding practices than is standard in Flash (code on multiple symbols and timelines all over the place makes maintaining Flash apps very difficult).
For vector art, use Inkscape. It is very good and the curve to move to AI is not as great as some would make it to be.
For Website design and coding, I would teach them the basics of coding in one of the hundreds of free editors (Eclipse for example, or CoffeCup). Dreamweaver has changed rapidly and the older versions are not much better than free editors.
For Video editing, I would use a free editor like ZS4. They offer some of the same tools that higher end editors do (chroma keying etc). Windows Movie Maker is simply too limited to really explore things like multi track editing etc.
It's Swiss, in English, Suisse (the country) and Suisses (the people) in French, Schweiz (for the country) and Schweizer (for the people) in German, Svizzera (country) and Svizzeri (the people) in Italian and Svizra (country) and Svizers(people) in Rumantsch, you damn Amerikaner ;-)