Actually, that isn't true. The various shells are all standard interfaces, i.e. they are essentially the same on all *nix boxes. And OS X has bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh and (my favourite) zsh installed in/bin by default.
There's a helluva lot more to the "UNIX interface" than the shell. For example, the multitude of binaries like ls, cp, tar, gzip, etc, etc.
Even just the relatively "mainstream" UNIXes - Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris - all have userspaces that behave differently, which can produce anything from annoyance to catastrophe (when a Linux admin runs 'killall' on a Solaris box, for example). Throw some of the more esoteric variants into the mix like AIX or HPUX, and the idea of UNIX having a "standard interface" becomes even more laughable.
Not exactly a loan. Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. Common wisdom at the time was that Microsoft needed to prop up some kind of paper tiger competitor to avoid further anti-trust restrictions.
Which makes no sense given that back then, Apple and Microsoft weren't competitors (in an anti-trust sense of the word). Heck, they barely are now.
Sure, any new Windows release inevitably contains at least a couple of horribly disfigured interpretations of features in the MacOS release from two or three years prior. But MS either doesn't remotely have the competence to steal / copy those features in a useful way, or they are doing a great impression of such a company on a long term basis.
There's been plenty of that in the opposite direction as well. OS X's Dock springs immediately to mind.
Microsoft has persisted in imposing its own standards and interfaces, which just don't suit the way I work.
Apple does exactly the same thing. UNIX doesn't have a "standard interface", and Aqua is a mishmash of NeXTSTEP and MacOS Classic, neither of which were "standard".
In before "Government conspiracy to kill off low/middle class families."
Who needs that ? You'd never want to kill off the lower class (you need labour), and the middle class has been happily committing economic suicide for nearly a decade.
Would anyone take their business' truck to the car mechanic for an Oil change and accept, "well we have to do it between 3am and 4am so as not to impact your business."
Your analogy is wrong because you're missing the point.
An oil change is done when the owner doesn't need to use the the car, and hence will not be bothered by its absence. Similarly, things like patching and maintenance are done when the owner (that is, the business) says it doesn't need to use those services - which, since it depends on them to function, is inevitably NOT during regular business hours.
IT Professionals ought to advance the profession and figure out why they are working 12 hour shifts and holidays and then systematically eliminate these events as much as possible till only having to do so when a human life or safety systems is jeopardized.
Because few businesses are prepared to pay the cost of completely redundant systems and, in many cases, full redundancy is simply impossible because the relevant application doesn't support it.
But it got a lot worse after Blair Witch... oh, how I wish I could get that hour and half of my life back.
Indeed. Up until then it was used sparingly and for specific effects. Since then it has been used whenever there's anything on screen that could be remotely described as "action".
MS's help (like almost every other software company's help) is almost useless.
It's the same help that used to come in those books you liked so much. Only now you can search it, or copy/paste from it, or click on the shortcuts that take you directly to the relevant parts of the UI.
How is F1 going to let you know that windowskey+L locks the screen?
I'm complaining that windows documentation is extremely poor where it exists at all.
But it's not...
Documentation you have to pay extra for is a no-go; for the price of Windows the damned thing ought to have stellar user docs, and it doesn't. Same goes for its apps.
What documentation is missing, or only available for a fee ?
Odd that that's what people complain about Linux. How am I supposed to research a command or other feature if I don't know it's there? I wouldn't have known that windowskey+L locked the screen if somebody at slashdot hadn't mentioned it. I had no idea you could lock the screen.
It wouldn't have to be on paper, a CD holding printed documentation in book form (PDF maybe) or plain HTML would suffice.
Start -> Help. It's been there for about 15 years - toughly since they stopped distributing Windows and DOS with those inch-thick manuals, strangely enough.
It's odd that as their OSes became more complex, they also had less and less documentation. The IBM XT came with fat books that completely explained line commands, interrupts, and all sorts of other goodies. Now you get a skinny booklet geared to a 5th grade reader.
This is not even remotely odd when you account for the interest level of the average user then and now.
To say nothing of all the information still being there, if you want to look. Only now it's in the Intarcloud in a constantly updated and searchable form.
I read about this almost a month ago in the New York Times blogs [nytimes.com] and must point out one very important detail (to me at least) about this case that was not present in The Wall Street Journal article: Google applied for a trademark on "NEXUS ONE" [uspto.gov]. Now it's not even assigned to an examining attorney yet but come on. You can 'borrow' something from a novel but if you're going to be making money, hand over fist, with it you should probably get permission. And then on top of that you go after the trademark since Dick never did?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was first sold in 1968. It's long past the point _anything_ in it deserves legal protection.
In a just system, the case would be thrown out, and the woman slapped with a fine for wasting the court's time.
What they've done is some link has downloaded a file, and then IE has popped up a dialog asking "do you want to open or save this", and they automatically clicked "open" because that's what they're used to doing.
So how did they "get used to it" ? The default after downloading a file in IE is, and always has been, "Save".
Besides, it's been Microsoft's attacking of software application vendors on their platform which has lead to so much being attempted in the browser since it isolates them so much from Microsoft. You don't hear so much of what software vendors software broke at every release of a new version of Microsoft Windows. That's because more and more business applications are fed from app servers to browsers and a minimum standard feature set must be met in the browser for it to be useful across the web and therefore IntraNet.
No, it's because Microsoft go to insane lengths to make sure applications *don't* break between Windows releases.
This has little to do with the browser being the problem, it is about the design of the Windows OS not doing it's own memory protection [...]
Oh, do go on. This should be pretty funny.
[...] and letting applications run many things as admin when they should be run as the user and they should not be accessing OS or other application space memory.
Perhaps you can highlight an OS that does not do this ?
It's amazing how much harder you want to work when your pay is linked to your productivity. Eastern European countries seem to have more of a salary based system in health care. I see it in colleagues who are salaried - no incentive to work hard.
High "productivity" is something I look for in a fast food worker or a cashier. Not in a doctor.
,P> 2) Eventually you'll learn that pay is extremely unfair. Some very valuable people make little money and vice versa. (Think Wall Street CEOs) Your hard work will take a long time to pay off and you'll probably never truly get better pay proportionate to your better work. Don't burn yourself out in the meantime. (Remember the Tortoise and the Hare)
4) You can never judge someone else's worth to the company. Some may be more efficient than you or may be working from home or they may have a skill or knowledge/experience that is vital to the company.
First, I said 40 rooms painted per week. Not 40 customers. And that was after two years of experience and good tools. I can do one room in 15 minutes with an industrial paint gun. And when you're the 17-year-old, you do it in an apartment building as I said, where there is no additional travel. And it's residential, so there is no travel in the first place -- your market is your geographically-chosen region.
Wow. You're suggesting a sustained rate of 40 rooms/week for multiple years, within a geographical area small enough that travel time is irrelevant, is easy ? Where do you live ? An Arcology ?
Regarding all of your other thigns, you are mixing up two sets of people -- employers and customers. You have to do something better than your customers want to do -- you do it ten times per week, they do it ten timse per life-time. They don't want to do it it all. You don't have to be better than your competitors at the actual job. You have to be better at one single thing of the entire business. Maybe simply availability, maybe only cost, maybe just the guarantee, or just the tools. Sometimes just your race or religion is enough.
Which, again, applies equally if you're trying to find a job working for someone else. You don't need to be the best at the job, you just need to be better than the other people applying, in some way the hirer cares about.
The lack of 15 year-olds with real jobs and careers they've started on their own is a factor of pressure from adults who never tried.
And a factor of there not being a need for a business to satisfy. Where do you think all these customers and their money are going to come from ?
I was 14 when I started. I had a business making me $18 after take per hour when I was 15.
So what do you think was the biggest obstacle to the other fifty kids who lived within a stone's throw of you doing the same thing ? Lack of interest, or the fact you had all the customers ?
Or look at it from the other direction. If the fifty kids around you had all been doing the same thing you were, do you really think you'd still have been making the same amount of money ?
How much were other people making ? What was their relative amount of free time ? How reliably could you make that $18/hr ? Were you paying the requisite levels of tax ?
And, by the way, you pay way less tax for your own business, as is compared to being an employee. WAY less.
However, you sustain many other expenses you don't as an employee - health insurance, working space, tools, communications infrastructure, legal support, insurance, etc, etc.
Running a business is not an easy thing to do, especially when your expertise is not in how to run a business. My father did it quite successfully for decades. I have many friends who have been doing it successfully for years, but also many who have failed miserably. Having been witness to these things, I find the idea that starting a business being easier than finding a job, to be laughable.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft always pointed to the market share of the Mac OS as proof that Microsoft did not have a desktop OS monopoly.
And it did them no good, because Apple don't compete in the "desktop OS for x86 PCs market".
Actually, that isn't true. The various shells are all standard interfaces, i.e. they are essentially the same on all *nix boxes. And OS X has bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh and (my favourite) zsh installed in /bin by default.
There's a helluva lot more to the "UNIX interface" than the shell. For example, the multitude of binaries like ls, cp, tar, gzip, etc, etc.
Even just the relatively "mainstream" UNIXes - Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris - all have userspaces that behave differently, which can produce anything from annoyance to catastrophe (when a Linux admin runs 'killall' on a Solaris box, for example). Throw some of the more esoteric variants into the mix like AIX or HPUX, and the idea of UNIX having a "standard interface" becomes even more laughable.
Microsoft needed to keep Apple alive to show there was competition in the desktop OS marketspace, in order to try and keep the DoJ at bay.
Except Apple does not - and never did - compete in the "desktop OS marketspace". They sell computers, not operating systems.
Not exactly a loan. Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. Common wisdom at the time was that Microsoft needed to prop up some kind of paper tiger competitor to avoid further anti-trust restrictions.
Which makes no sense given that back then, Apple and Microsoft weren't competitors (in an anti-trust sense of the word). Heck, they barely are now.
Sure, any new Windows release inevitably contains at least a couple of horribly disfigured interpretations of features in the MacOS release from two or three years prior. But MS either doesn't remotely have the competence to steal / copy those features in a useful way, or they are doing a great impression of such a company on a long term basis.
There's been plenty of that in the opposite direction as well. OS X's Dock springs immediately to mind.
Microsoft has persisted in imposing its own standards and interfaces, which just don't suit the way I work.
Apple does exactly the same thing. UNIX doesn't have a "standard interface", and Aqua is a mishmash of NeXTSTEP and MacOS Classic, neither of which were "standard".
But that's why 7 has done pretty well out of the gate stability wise, it's not really a new OS at all. It's a refined version of the last one.
They're basically _all_ "refined versions of the last one". The last "new OS" in the Windows NT line was in 1993 - Windows NT 3.1.
Although, people wishing to avoid all GM foods, corn itself has been so selectively bred that it doesn't even resemble its nearest neighbors.
Selective Breeding is to Genetic Engineering as Evolution is to Creationism.
Ie: not the same thing.
In before "Government conspiracy to kill off low/middle class families."
Who needs that ? You'd never want to kill off the lower class (you need labour), and the middle class has been happily committing economic suicide for nearly a decade.
Would anyone take their business' truck to the car mechanic for an Oil change and accept, "well we have to do it between 3am and 4am so as not to impact your business."
Your analogy is wrong because you're missing the point.
An oil change is done when the owner doesn't need to use the the car, and hence will not be bothered by its absence. Similarly, things like patching and maintenance are done when the owner (that is, the business) says it doesn't need to use those services - which, since it depends on them to function, is inevitably NOT during regular business hours.
IT Professionals ought to advance the profession and figure out why they are working 12 hour shifts and holidays and then systematically eliminate these events as much as possible till only having to do so when a human life or safety systems is jeopardized.
Because few businesses are prepared to pay the cost of completely redundant systems and, in many cases, full redundancy is simply impossible because the relevant application doesn't support it.
But it got a lot worse after Blair Witch... oh, how I wish I could get that hour and half of my life back.
Indeed. Up until then it was used sparingly and for specific effects. Since then it has been used whenever there's anything on screen that could be remotely described as "action".
It seems you needed a lesson in respect of other's hard work. Now you've learned the hard way that it doesn't pay to try and rip off someone.
How do you feel about region free DVD players?
MS's help (like almost every other software company's help) is almost useless.
It's the same help that used to come in those books you liked so much. Only now you can search it, or copy/paste from it, or click on the shortcuts that take you directly to the relevant parts of the UI.
How is F1 going to let you know that windowskey+L locks the screen?
Er, maybe because THAT'S WHERE IT'S DOCUMENTED ?
I'm complaining that windows documentation is extremely poor where it exists at all.
But it's not...
Documentation you have to pay extra for is a no-go; for the price of Windows the damned thing ought to have stellar user docs, and it doesn't. Same goes for its apps.
What documentation is missing, or only available for a fee ?
Odd that that's what people complain about Linux. How am I supposed to research a command or other feature if I don't know it's there? I wouldn't have known that windowskey+L locked the screen if somebody at slashdot hadn't mentioned it. I had no idea you could lock the screen.
It wouldn't have to be on paper, a CD holding printed documentation in book form (PDF maybe) or plain HTML would suffice.
Start -> Help. It's been there for about 15 years - toughly since they stopped distributing Windows and DOS with those inch-thick manuals, strangely enough.
In other words, what's wrong with the Control Panel interface that hinders developers to the point where they have to hack in these types of kludges?
An interface appropriate for end users may not be an interface appropriate for developers.
It's odd that as their OSes became more complex, they also had less and less documentation. The IBM XT came with fat books that completely explained line commands, interrupts, and all sorts of other goodies. Now you get a skinny booklet geared to a 5th grade reader.
This is not even remotely odd when you account for the interest level of the average user then and now.
To say nothing of all the information still being there, if you want to look. Only now it's in the Intarcloud in a constantly updated and searchable form.
I read about this almost a month ago in the New York Times blogs [nytimes.com] and must point out one very important detail (to me at least) about this case that was not present in The Wall Street Journal article: Google applied for a trademark on "NEXUS ONE" [uspto.gov]. Now it's not even assigned to an examining attorney yet but come on. You can 'borrow' something from a novel but if you're going to be making money, hand over fist, with it you should probably get permission. And then on top of that you go after the trademark since Dick never did?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was first sold in 1968. It's long past the point _anything_ in it deserves legal protection.
In a just system, the case would be thrown out, and the woman slapped with a fine for wasting the court's time.
What they've done is some link has downloaded a file, and then IE has popped up a dialog asking "do you want to open or save this", and they automatically clicked "open" because that's what they're used to doing.
So how did they "get used to it" ? The default after downloading a file in IE is, and always has been, "Save".
Slashdot needs to retire the Bill Gates Borg picture.
Are you kidding ? It's the *epitomy* of Slashdot.
Besides, it's been Microsoft's attacking of software application vendors on their platform which has lead to so much being attempted in the browser since it isolates them so much from Microsoft. You don't hear so much of what software vendors software broke at every release of a new version of Microsoft Windows. That's because more and more business applications are fed from app servers to browsers and a minimum standard feature set must be met in the browser for it to be useful across the web and therefore IntraNet.
No, it's because Microsoft go to insane lengths to make sure applications *don't* break between Windows releases.
This has little to do with the browser being the problem, it is about the design of the Windows OS not doing it's own memory protection [...]
Oh, do go on. This should be pretty funny.
[...] and letting applications run many things as admin when they should be run as the user and they should not be accessing OS or other application space memory.
Perhaps you can highlight an OS that does not do this ?
I'm still waiting for my PowerBook G5. Luckily, I heard it'll be released next Tuesday !
It's amazing how much harder you want to work when your pay is linked to your productivity. Eastern European countries seem to have more of a salary based system in health care. I see it in colleagues who are salaried - no incentive to work hard.
High "productivity" is something I look for in a fast food worker or a cashier. Not in a doctor.
Hmmm...
First, I said 40 rooms painted per week. Not 40 customers. And that was after two years of experience and good tools. I can do one room in 15 minutes with an industrial paint gun. And when you're the 17-year-old, you do it in an apartment building as I said, where there is no additional travel. And it's residential, so there is no travel in the first place -- your market is your geographically-chosen region.
Wow. You're suggesting a sustained rate of 40 rooms/week for multiple years, within a geographical area small enough that travel time is irrelevant, is easy ? Where do you live ? An Arcology ?
Regarding all of your other thigns, you are mixing up two sets of people -- employers and customers. You have to do something better than your customers want to do -- you do it ten times per week, they do it ten timse per life-time. They don't want to do it it all. You don't have to be better than your competitors at the actual job. You have to be better at one single thing of the entire business. Maybe simply availability, maybe only cost, maybe just the guarantee, or just the tools. Sometimes just your race or religion is enough.
Which, again, applies equally if you're trying to find a job working for someone else. You don't need to be the best at the job, you just need to be better than the other people applying, in some way the hirer cares about.
The lack of 15 year-olds with real jobs and careers they've started on their own is a factor of pressure from adults who never tried.
And a factor of there not being a need for a business to satisfy. Where do you think all these customers and their money are going to come from ?
I was 14 when I started. I had a business making me $18 after take per hour when I was 15.
So what do you think was the biggest obstacle to the other fifty kids who lived within a stone's throw of you doing the same thing ? Lack of interest, or the fact you had all the customers ?
Or look at it from the other direction. If the fifty kids around you had all been doing the same thing you were, do you really think you'd still have been making the same amount of money ?
How much were other people making ? What was their relative amount of free time ? How reliably could you make that $18/hr ? Were you paying the requisite levels of tax ?
And, by the way, you pay way less tax for your own business, as is compared to being an employee. WAY less.
However, you sustain many other expenses you don't as an employee - health insurance, working space, tools, communications infrastructure, legal support, insurance, etc, etc.
Running a business is not an easy thing to do, especially when your expertise is not in how to run a business. My father did it quite successfully for decades. I have many friends who have been doing it successfully for years, but also many who have failed miserably. Having been witness to these things, I find the idea that starting a business being easier than finding a job, to be laughable.