As a sysadmin, the nightmare is coders in general, though the ones who think they're a goddamn expert at everything are the worst (despite any possible level of knowledge).
The problem with programmers touching systems has absolutely nothing to do with capability or intelligence. It has to do with knowledge and, more importantly, give a damn.
What it comes down to is a mindset. If there is a scale of "makes good sysadmins", with 1 being "line them and their theoretical children against a wall" and 10 being "they are God", most developers I've run into are somewhere around a 2. Some are as high as a 5. For perspective, your average unscripted phone support person is probably a 4 to 6.
The crucial problem, I think, is that of mindset or approach. Developers/programmers/coders are, for the most part, very liberal in their approach. "Try it, see what happens." That's not what you want when "never goes down, ever" is your desired outcome. A good sysadmin is willing to take risks (because he has to, to some degree), and I'd put a security-focused admin towards the "rarely, if ever, takes risks". Anything from restarting a service to
The other crucial factor I've noticed in what makes a coder a bad admin is when they're willing to write a quick hack to make something work. For a coder, the answer is "almost always, preferentially, because I'm awesome". That is (almost) always the wrong thing to do, yet it's their default. A good sysadmin writes PoCs and one-off automations which are easily repeatable (and documents it; that is the biggest role of a sysadmin), but they won't implement the inter-dependent nightmares a programmer seems to prefer.
I am all for hiring some coder who knows a certain system (eg. sendmail) like the back of their own hand. Those people are awesome (and necessary). But unless they demonstrate the architectural simplicity and boring consistency of a sysadmin, they need to stop pretending they can do our jobs. (Then again, I may be biased. The challenging jobs I've had have been coming in behind such a programmer who made a tangled mess of things, and left before things fell apart.)
(Programmers who understand networking do tend to make pretty decent network/switching guys, though - assuming they're not megalomaniacs.)
On the contrary. The longer regexp has been around, the fewer IT types seem to understand what it is, let alone know it.
The longer something is around, the more likely it is to be abstracted to oblivion. Consider: C has been around for a number of days. Just a couple. How many people graduating college know C now, vs. 10 years ago? 20 years ago? I'd argue "fewer and fewer".
Those have 4, maybe 5 years of longevity. However, if you've not used a skill in that long, chances are you're fairly rusty. You may be able to pick it up again, but the spin up speed will be low enough to not justify the salary a person with 5+ years of experience is likely expecting.
Personally, I've preferred to specialize in fairly timeless IT skills. This wasn't just a choice of pragmatism, it was a choice of preference: UNIX mail systems, LDAP, bash, perl, grep, php, sed, awk (and regex in general) - linux, and the many different UNIX which simply won't die (AIX and goddamn it, SCO, I'm looking at you). Part of it hasn't been by choice, but by necessity, yet it still serves as a long-term desirable skill.
Meanwhile, I'm "keeping myself current" with such trivially "easy" fluff as virtualization and storage, and persuing other things I find interesting (storage, namely). I've got the fundamental understanding down fairly well, so so-called new concepts don't come difficultly. I'll have it explained to me, in brief, and instantly it makes sense. "Oh, that's like x, with a little y and more marketing bullshit^Wbling".
Granted, I'm thinking of skill utility. My experience supports what the article states - it's marketability that suffers after about 2 years. Why? Because marketing/sales people are idiots, don't look at hard skills, and simply filter on keywords because they haven't been told or don't care to understand enough to make an informed decision. *deep breath*
The days of concern over the CPU overhead of HTTPS are long past.
Really? Why do you say that? SSL still takes a fair amount of CPU overhead. Compared to an HTTP connection, HTTPS is markedly slower (aggregated over thousands of connections). I've seen a couple sites that use HTTPS exclusively throw up transparent SSL accelerator appliances in front of their servers to allow them to only need a fraction of the number of hosts for actually hosting the data.
Yet, the populations in those countries is still growing (or, in the case of Mexico/Central America, coming to the US... and growing there.) Therein lies the point.
re: #2, if you were to have US consuming a percentage, per its population, it would revert the US to 3rd world status immediately. Birth control would not be affordable. Populations would increase, requiring more food - requiring more arrable land. Not only that, but agriculture would revert to 3rd world toil-in-the-fields work, and there would be markedly less food production.
Overall, I think a global war, with populations dying quickly from starvation, disease, and of course war, is immensely preferable to populations dying off from starvation and disease over generations.
They might say that, but they would be wrong. The region hasn't been "stable" for millennia. The only time I can think of when it's been stable is under foreign autocratic rule.
* WWI (WWII may not have even been fought, as Germany would've been surpreme after prolongued fighting). Japan would own China and they'd have started industrialization much sooner than they did. * WWII (there'd be many fewer Russians and Europeans than today, after many years more fighting). Russia would rule Europe. * Korean War (they'd probably still be fighting, if one side hadn't decimated the other) * Tens+ of thousands of Kurds and Sunnis are alive today who would've been genocided by Saddam. This would be going on today. *
If it wasn't for the efforts of the US in the past 100 years, there would be more, larger arm races, or a single empire in the world. (Imagine what would've happened if, instead of the US and European housing markets collapsing, it was the housing markets throughout the whole world due to broader government control of a region.)
You seem to have a different definition of 'stabilizing' than I do. Generally, oppositional weights are required for stabilizing something. If it's one sided in weight, it's not going to balance.
Affluence means increased consumption. Increased consumption - ie, what the land can actually maintain - is the only 'real' problem, here (long term).
You need poor people for the affluent to consume. (How do you think the West has maintained its charade? By outsourcing their poverty to the 3rd world.)
When you figure out that the moon is a valuable mineral-rich oil grape, you can disregard my post.:)
1) Reduce the populations in India, Central America, China, Muslim countries, and Africa. (The rest of the world is doing a fine enough job depopulating itself, as it is.) 1a) Wait for China to decrease these populations through war. With the male:female ratio in China, there is a huge glut of unlaid males in China. Conquering wars is the most likely outcome of this happening, historically.
2) Reduce consumption. The only way to make this happen is to actually decrease production. This isn't going to happen without #1 happening, not willingly. Even if you decrease production artificially, you won't have the desired effect: it'll actually increase consumption some years later with the next, burgeoning impoverished generation.
So basically, you're looking at war. Worst case scenario, MAD. Best case, there's a "winner". Voila, decreased consumption!
The world population booms we're seeing now are precisely because the West, and the US specifically, has been a stabilizing force in world affairs for the past century. Wars haven't been allowed to culminate "naturally", and all the while advances have come in leaps and bounds making affluent life easier for everyone.
Having not seen the technology, my guess is that they basically took an existing Open project and used existing voices with it (which take a very, very long time to make 'good'). The result was that they picked the better voices for the region/dialect. For instance, some of the better Festival voices are free-to-use and are either British women or British men. The US voices are not nearly as full or vibrant, for whatever reason.
My experience is the opposite, but I think you're probably correct.
I have a very hard time communicating with my wife on a bad cellular connection. She has a very high-pitched voice, relatively speaking. The higher tones get filtered out. Likewise, the bass in many male voices likely get filtered out, I'd imagine - or are too low for the use with generic headphones. Think: James Earl Jones audio books with crappy ear buds.
I do think that the cadence of speech women use is probably more conductive for communication, as well. For instance, you can hear and understand what a female is saying from across a crowded room, but now what the guy she's speaking to is saying. The higher frequency travels as audible sound better.
That's probably because, as a stereotype, women nurture aggressively, while men are known to nurture with aggression (to put it simply).
When women try to be 'aggressive' it tends to just come out as bitchiness, them being a banshee/battleaxe, etc.
My wife is very demure in her assertions. It's both a blessing and a curse, but the result is that she's actually quite successful in communication. If a male were to take her approach, he'd be disregarded as ineffective or unassertive.
That isn't what Occupy Wall Street is protesting at all.
I'm sure it's a contributing factor for many, but for most of them, they're protesting (get this) Wall Street's existence. They're protesting against the existence of capitalism, as evidenced by the placards and battle cry.
Let's not be confusing what's actually going on by falsely attributing motivations.
I was looking into it a while back to see what I might do with a handful of high powered video cards. That is, until I determined that it's basically manufacturing nothing out of thin air and assigning an arbitrary (though consistent) value to it.
It's really no different than a fiat currency, in practice. A fiat currency from a nowhere country. In theory, it's better - like gold or something like that - but nobody uses it, and it's derived from a fairly obscure source. It's a fad, IMO.
More power to people making money off of it, though. I really don't understand how or why that works for them.
BTDT. It's common when you've got idiots who don't understand IT, but think they do, holding the purse strings and making decisions.
I've been in this same situation two times now. In one, the "I'm out of storage" situation lasted for the full term of my employment, with multiple proposals, rationales, etc. as to why we needed more. Apparently operating at 90%+ capacity was acceptable enough to them. Their lack of interest (or maybe I should say, disdain) meant I left.
The second time, I had the boss actually recommending "just using a daisy chain of large USB drives". I shit you not.
People don't realize that hard drives are cheap. Storage is expensive. People who make decisions need to take a step back and look at the current and historic cost of tape for some perspective.
Apple is not the same company it was even in the 1990s. Yes, it's more profitable. Yes, they have a wider range of products.
No, they are not a computing company. I've made this argument here recently, and people argue the nitty points without looking at the broader picture.
Apple does not produce a server platform (hardware + software). This right here should be telling: they make consumer products, not production products. Even their "Server" OS is quite lacking.
Apple has been short-changing developers on their platform for some time, both with their developer programs for App Store and how they've made fairly drastic API changes without giving the bigger shops a forewarning.
Every single one of Apple's products in the past 10 years has been a reductionism - a move towards minimalism. This is contrary to what a professional wants. Professionals need more, better tools, not fewer.
Apple's consumer 'media players' intentionally lack features audio and video professionals would like, such as the ability to do what the Sony Discman could do 10 years ago (record high quality lossless audio). Playback quality is also significantly lacking.
The distinction is nuanced, but there is a distinction. Apple doesn't really give half a shit to the nuanced or professional user. Many graphics professionals abandoned Apple a long time ago due to dick moves they pulled that made things difficult for eg. Adobe to continue producing software or for graphics artists to work effectively with the platform (threading, multiprocessing, etc.).
Anyone who thinks Apple is still a "computing" company and not a "consumer electronic device" company needs to pay better attention. Apple has not done a single innovative thing in the world of computing for quite some time. Marketing, sales, and consumer products? Absolutely - they're incredible. But don't expect them to be the same company they were for professional needs in even the late 90s.
From one of the biggest proponents of "climate change as social change", even: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
It's simple really. A warming climate means more evaporation. Evaporation means more humidity and rainfall. More water means more plant growth. The only real thing to differentiate the Amazon from the Sahara is, after all, rainfall. Topographically they're very similar.
Time put Hitler on their cover, too. Just because Jobs is seen as a "computer guy" and a computer revolutionary by pop culture doesn't mean it's so. Most college students think Che and Mao were the peoples' liberators, too. There are a lot of gullible people out there.
I remember the 1980s. Sales figures from the 1980s reflected again in the 2000s. It was quite impressive, from a marketing and sales perspective. If coming in 3rd behind Compaq and HP in 1999 is impressive to you, maybe we should consider putting Carly Fiorina, or another CEO of the same era, on the pedistal?
No?
The only thing remarkable about Apple in the past 15 years is that they've somehow convinced people to pay twice as much for minimalism in design and utility. More power to them - automatic transmissions are preferred by most to manual transmissions, after all. There's a place for it. But when the only thing your computer is able to do is the rough equivilent of driving to the grocery store 5 minutes away (as was the case until about OSX 10.4, and even still its a tenuous holder of 'utility'), you're not really making a general computing device, so much as a consumer device. (And, of course, selling it at designer wear prices - which is why anyone thinks Jobs is a genius in the business world.)
You're incorrect. The current model is roughly the same as the one from 10, 20, 30 years ago (and probably longer): we humans are not only capable but fully responsible for whatever disaster befalls us through way of the earth's climatic changes, and OMGTHESKYISFALLING.
The general theme is, "I don't know what causes it, but man - specifically, the white man - is responsible for all bad in the world". Global warming? Climate change? Global cooling? Regional desertification? IT's the evil West, the White Man, the Christian. Whatever's convenient at the time. (Interesting how the current climate change is only getting the negative press, without mentioning that the Sahara is re-vegetating and getting a fair amount of moisture.)
The irony is that more deforestation and occurred in the century prior to Columbus than in the century after. There were a lot of people in the Americas. They used trees. Contrary to popular belief, they did not reduce, reuse, recycle: indigenous would use up an areas resources (animals, wood, water) and move onto the next location. So, he may have been correct, sorta, despite blaming the white man.
Jobs, and Apple in general, had very little impact on the 'personal computer revolution'. They were like the bad poet hanging out at the hipster bar, trying to pick up chicks: they were there, sure, but their percentage was so small as to not even really count.
Apple was nothing until MacOS X came out in 2001 - after the dotcom bubble burst. Before that, the only people who bought Macs were computer illiterate parents who wanted their kids to have "the very best" and hipster media professionals (who, arguably, had a reason to preference Macs).
The only 'revolution' Apple has been a part of has been the one where they went 180 degrees from their initial 'advertising intent' (the 1984 video). iTunes basically made their other products worth purchasing for most people, and it was the only real selling point for their portable media devices until they came out with the video-capable variants.
So if Apple really 'revolutionized' anything, it had nothing to do with PCs. If anything, it's marketing and consumer digital distribution channels. At those, they excelled. The Mac is a misnomer; it's nothing to the modern Apple portfolio, and is quickly fading as it gets supplanted by the next portable media device from Apple (still not as good as most things from most other competition, except for the new iTunes, with iStore your iMoney).
Slashdot Mirror
As a sysadmin, the nightmare is coders in general, though the ones who think they're a goddamn expert at everything are the worst (despite any possible level of knowledge).
The problem with programmers touching systems has absolutely nothing to do with capability or intelligence. It has to do with knowledge and, more importantly, give a damn.
What it comes down to is a mindset. If there is a scale of "makes good sysadmins", with 1 being "line them and their theoretical children against a wall" and 10 being "they are God", most developers I've run into are somewhere around a 2. Some are as high as a 5. For perspective, your average unscripted phone support person is probably a 4 to 6.
The crucial problem, I think, is that of mindset or approach. Developers/programmers/coders are, for the most part, very liberal in their approach. "Try it, see what happens." That's not what you want when "never goes down, ever" is your desired outcome. A good sysadmin is willing to take risks (because he has to, to some degree), and I'd put a security-focused admin towards the "rarely, if ever, takes risks". Anything from restarting a service to
The other crucial factor I've noticed in what makes a coder a bad admin is when they're willing to write a quick hack to make something work. For a coder, the answer is "almost always, preferentially, because I'm awesome". That is (almost) always the wrong thing to do, yet it's their default. A good sysadmin writes PoCs and one-off automations which are easily repeatable (and documents it; that is the biggest role of a sysadmin), but they won't implement the inter-dependent nightmares a programmer seems to prefer.
I am all for hiring some coder who knows a certain system (eg. sendmail) like the back of their own hand. Those people are awesome (and necessary). But unless they demonstrate the architectural simplicity and boring consistency of a sysadmin, they need to stop pretending they can do our jobs. (Then again, I may be biased. The challenging jobs I've had have been coming in behind such a programmer who made a tangled mess of things, and left before things fell apart.)
(Programmers who understand networking do tend to make pretty decent network/switching guys, though - assuming they're not megalomaniacs.)
I believe you mean "gorified" - that's what happens if it happens for too long, or too often.
On the contrary. The longer regexp has been around, the fewer IT types seem to understand what it is, let alone know it.
The longer something is around, the more likely it is to be abstracted to oblivion. Consider: C has been around for a number of days. Just a couple. How many people graduating college know C now, vs. 10 years ago? 20 years ago? I'd argue "fewer and fewer".
Exactly.
Those have 4, maybe 5 years of longevity. However, if you've not used a skill in that long, chances are you're fairly rusty. You may be able to pick it up again, but the spin up speed will be low enough to not justify the salary a person with 5+ years of experience is likely expecting.
Personally, I've preferred to specialize in fairly timeless IT skills. This wasn't just a choice of pragmatism, it was a choice of preference: UNIX mail systems, LDAP, bash, perl, grep, php, sed, awk (and regex in general) - linux, and the many different UNIX which simply won't die (AIX and goddamn it, SCO, I'm looking at you). Part of it hasn't been by choice, but by necessity, yet it still serves as a long-term desirable skill.
Meanwhile, I'm "keeping myself current" with such trivially "easy" fluff as virtualization and storage, and persuing other things I find interesting (storage, namely). I've got the fundamental understanding down fairly well, so so-called new concepts don't come difficultly. I'll have it explained to me, in brief, and instantly it makes sense. "Oh, that's like x, with a little y and more marketing bullshit^Wbling".
Granted, I'm thinking of skill utility. My experience supports what the article states - it's marketability that suffers after about 2 years. Why? Because marketing/sales people are idiots, don't look at hard skills, and simply filter on keywords because they haven't been told or don't care to understand enough to make an informed decision. *deep breath*
You could probably get upwards of a month of normal smartphone use without recharging.
And maybe 2 or three days with an iPhone.
The days of concern over the CPU overhead of HTTPS are long past.
Really? Why do you say that? SSL still takes a fair amount of CPU overhead. Compared to an HTTP connection, HTTPS is markedly slower (aggregated over thousands of connections). I've seen a couple sites that use HTTPS exclusively throw up transparent SSL accelerator appliances in front of their servers to allow them to only need a fraction of the number of hosts for actually hosting the data.
For a moment there, I was incredibly excited that electronics might be disrupted and we'd be plunged into a primitive dark age once again.
Then I realized it was over, and nothing really happened. :( Yesterday, it'd have been greatly appreciated...
Yet, consumption is growing with the population decreases. That's the problem, not the population rate of increase or decrease.
China's population has not been shrinking for 50 years, by the way.
Yet, the populations in those countries is still growing (or, in the case of Mexico/Central America, coming to the US... and growing there.) Therein lies the point.
re: #2, if you were to have US consuming a percentage, per its population, it would revert the US to 3rd world status immediately. Birth control would not be affordable. Populations would increase, requiring more food - requiring more arrable land. Not only that, but agriculture would revert to 3rd world toil-in-the-fields work, and there would be markedly less food production.
Overall, I think a global war, with populations dying quickly from starvation, disease, and of course war, is immensely preferable to populations dying off from starvation and disease over generations.
They might say that, but they would be wrong. The region hasn't been "stable" for millennia. The only time I can think of when it's been stable is under foreign autocratic rule.
Nope. Let's see:
* WWI (WWII may not have even been fought, as Germany would've been surpreme after prolongued fighting). Japan would own China and they'd have started industrialization much sooner than they did.
* WWII (there'd be many fewer Russians and Europeans than today, after many years more fighting). Russia would rule Europe.
* Korean War (they'd probably still be fighting, if one side hadn't decimated the other)
* Tens+ of thousands of Kurds and Sunnis are alive today who would've been genocided by Saddam. This would be going on today.
*
If it wasn't for the efforts of the US in the past 100 years, there would be more, larger arm races, or a single empire in the world. (Imagine what would've happened if, instead of the US and European housing markets collapsing, it was the housing markets throughout the whole world due to broader government control of a region.)
You seem to have a different definition of 'stabilizing' than I do. Generally, oppositional weights are required for stabilizing something. If it's one sided in weight, it's not going to balance.
Affluence means increased consumption. Increased consumption - ie, what the land can actually maintain - is the only 'real' problem, here (long term).
You need poor people for the affluent to consume. (How do you think the West has maintained its charade? By outsourcing their poverty to the 3rd world.)
When you figure out that the moon is a valuable mineral-rich oil grape, you can disregard my post. :)
There are really only two options.
1) Reduce the populations in India, Central America, China, Muslim countries, and Africa. (The rest of the world is doing a fine enough job depopulating itself, as it is.)
1a) Wait for China to decrease these populations through war. With the male:female ratio in China, there is a huge glut of unlaid males in China. Conquering wars is the most likely outcome of this happening, historically.
2) Reduce consumption. The only way to make this happen is to actually decrease production. This isn't going to happen without #1 happening, not willingly. Even if you decrease production artificially, you won't have the desired effect: it'll actually increase consumption some years later with the next, burgeoning impoverished generation.
So basically, you're looking at war. Worst case scenario, MAD. Best case, there's a "winner". Voila, decreased consumption!
The world population booms we're seeing now are precisely because the West, and the US specifically, has been a stabilizing force in world affairs for the past century. Wars haven't been allowed to culminate "naturally", and all the while advances have come in leaps and bounds making affluent life easier for everyone.
Having not seen the technology, my guess is that they basically took an existing Open project and used existing voices with it (which take a very, very long time to make 'good'). The result was that they picked the better voices for the region/dialect. For instance, some of the better Festival voices are free-to-use and are either British women or British men. The US voices are not nearly as full or vibrant, for whatever reason.
My experience is the opposite, but I think you're probably correct.
I have a very hard time communicating with my wife on a bad cellular connection. She has a very high-pitched voice, relatively speaking. The higher tones get filtered out. Likewise, the bass in many male voices likely get filtered out, I'd imagine - or are too low for the use with generic headphones. Think: James Earl Jones audio books with crappy ear buds.
I do think that the cadence of speech women use is probably more conductive for communication, as well. For instance, you can hear and understand what a female is saying from across a crowded room, but now what the guy she's speaking to is saying. The higher frequency travels as audible sound better.
That's probably because, as a stereotype, women nurture aggressively, while men are known to nurture with aggression (to put it simply).
When women try to be 'aggressive' it tends to just come out as bitchiness, them being a banshee/battleaxe, etc.
My wife is very demure in her assertions. It's both a blessing and a curse, but the result is that she's actually quite successful in communication. If a male were to take her approach, he'd be disregarded as ineffective or unassertive.
I'm sure a lot of it has to do with upbringing.
Unfortunately, I'm well above that 500 number mark on a daily basis. :( Not that I'd willingly use o365... Yeck.
(What about Distribution Lists?)
That isn't what Occupy Wall Street is protesting at all.
I'm sure it's a contributing factor for many, but for most of them, they're protesting (get this) Wall Street's existence. They're protesting against the existence of capitalism, as evidenced by the placards and battle cry.
Let's not be confusing what's actually going on by falsely attributing motivations.
I was looking into it a while back to see what I might do with a handful of high powered video cards. That is, until I determined that it's basically manufacturing nothing out of thin air and assigning an arbitrary (though consistent) value to it.
It's really no different than a fiat currency, in practice. A fiat currency from a nowhere country. In theory, it's better - like gold or something like that - but nobody uses it, and it's derived from a fairly obscure source. It's a fad, IMO.
More power to people making money off of it, though. I really don't understand how or why that works for them.
BTDT. It's common when you've got idiots who don't understand IT, but think they do, holding the purse strings and making decisions.
I've been in this same situation two times now. In one, the "I'm out of storage" situation lasted for the full term of my employment, with multiple proposals, rationales, etc. as to why we needed more. Apparently operating at 90%+ capacity was acceptable enough to them. Their lack of interest (or maybe I should say, disdain) meant I left.
The second time, I had the boss actually recommending "just using a daisy chain of large USB drives". I shit you not.
People don't realize that hard drives are cheap. Storage is expensive. People who make decisions need to take a step back and look at the current and historic cost of tape for some perspective.
Apple is not the same company it was even in the 1990s. Yes, it's more profitable. Yes, they have a wider range of products.
No, they are not a computing company. I've made this argument here recently, and people argue the nitty points without looking at the broader picture.
Apple does not produce a server platform (hardware + software). This right here should be telling: they make consumer products, not production products. Even their "Server" OS is quite lacking.
Apple has been short-changing developers on their platform for some time, both with their developer programs for App Store and how they've made fairly drastic API changes without giving the bigger shops a forewarning.
Every single one of Apple's products in the past 10 years has been a reductionism - a move towards minimalism. This is contrary to what a professional wants. Professionals need more, better tools, not fewer.
Apple's consumer 'media players' intentionally lack features audio and video professionals would like, such as the ability to do what the Sony Discman could do 10 years ago (record high quality lossless audio). Playback quality is also significantly lacking.
The distinction is nuanced, but there is a distinction. Apple doesn't really give half a shit to the nuanced or professional user. Many graphics professionals abandoned Apple a long time ago due to dick moves they pulled that made things difficult for eg. Adobe to continue producing software or for graphics artists to work effectively with the platform (threading, multiprocessing, etc.).
Anyone who thinks Apple is still a "computing" company and not a "consumer electronic device" company needs to pay better attention. Apple has not done a single innovative thing in the world of computing for quite some time. Marketing, sales, and consumer products? Absolutely - they're incredible. But don't expect them to be the same company they were for professional needs in even the late 90s.
From one of the biggest proponents of "climate change as social change", even: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
It's simple really. A warming climate means more evaporation. Evaporation means more humidity and rainfall. More water means more plant growth. The only real thing to differentiate the Amazon from the Sahara is, after all, rainfall. Topographically they're very similar.
Time put Hitler on their cover, too. Just because Jobs is seen as a "computer guy" and a computer revolutionary by pop culture doesn't mean it's so. Most college students think Che and Mao were the peoples' liberators, too. There are a lot of gullible people out there.
I remember the 1980s. Sales figures from the 1980s reflected again in the 2000s. It was quite impressive, from a marketing and sales perspective. If coming in 3rd behind Compaq and HP in 1999 is impressive to you, maybe we should consider putting Carly Fiorina, or another CEO of the same era, on the pedistal?
No?
The only thing remarkable about Apple in the past 15 years is that they've somehow convinced people to pay twice as much for minimalism in design and utility. More power to them - automatic transmissions are preferred by most to manual transmissions, after all. There's a place for it. But when the only thing your computer is able to do is the rough equivilent of driving to the grocery store 5 minutes away (as was the case until about OSX 10.4, and even still its a tenuous holder of 'utility'), you're not really making a general computing device, so much as a consumer device. (And, of course, selling it at designer wear prices - which is why anyone thinks Jobs is a genius in the business world.)
You're incorrect. The current model is roughly the same as the one from 10, 20, 30 years ago (and probably longer): we humans are not only capable but fully responsible for whatever disaster befalls us through way of the earth's climatic changes, and OMGTHESKYISFALLING.
The general theme is, "I don't know what causes it, but man - specifically, the white man - is responsible for all bad in the world". Global warming? Climate change? Global cooling? Regional desertification? IT's the evil West, the White Man, the Christian. Whatever's convenient at the time. (Interesting how the current climate change is only getting the negative press, without mentioning that the Sahara is re-vegetating and getting a fair amount of moisture.)
The irony is that more deforestation and occurred in the century prior to Columbus than in the century after. There were a lot of people in the Americas. They used trees. Contrary to popular belief, they did not reduce, reuse, recycle: indigenous would use up an areas resources (animals, wood, water) and move onto the next location. So, he may have been correct, sorta, despite blaming the white man.
Jobs, and Apple in general, had very little impact on the 'personal computer revolution'. They were like the bad poet hanging out at the hipster bar, trying to pick up chicks: they were there, sure, but their percentage was so small as to not even really count.
Apple was nothing until MacOS X came out in 2001 - after the dotcom bubble burst. Before that, the only people who bought Macs were computer illiterate parents who wanted their kids to have "the very best" and hipster media professionals (who, arguably, had a reason to preference Macs).
The only 'revolution' Apple has been a part of has been the one where they went 180 degrees from their initial 'advertising intent' (the 1984 video). iTunes basically made their other products worth purchasing for most people, and it was the only real selling point for their portable media devices until they came out with the video-capable variants.
So if Apple really 'revolutionized' anything, it had nothing to do with PCs. If anything, it's marketing and consumer digital distribution channels. At those, they excelled. The Mac is a misnomer; it's nothing to the modern Apple portfolio, and is quickly fading as it gets supplanted by the next portable media device from Apple (still not as good as most things from most other competition, except for the new iTunes, with iStore your iMoney).