I may be spoiled by Mac OS X (ok, ok, I KNOW I'm spoiled by Mac OS X), but I think KDE is still an ugly interface. What's up with that? They could make it purty,,,why don't they?
"... Steve Jobs in April 1977 [4] asked Rob Janoff, art director of the advertising company Regis McKenna Advertising, to design a new logo. The advertising company Regis McKenna, wasn't picked by coincidence to design the new logo. This company had helped for example Compaq, America Online, Intel and other computer companies through their early years [5]."
Really? So Apple selected Regis McKenna in April 1977 because of the work they had done for AOL and Compaq?
That's strange because the AOL website says it was founded in 1985.
And the Compaq (now HP) site claims that Compaq was founded in the 1980s.
I know Steve Jobs has a good eye for the future, but I suspect he didn't choose Regis McKenna based on the good work they would do in years to come.
I know this is a cute piece, but the guy who did it just read a couple of Apple biographies and slapped it together with some graphics. It just bugs me when misinformation like this spreads across the Internet.
The problem with the Mac web is that expectations run much higher than Apple can realistically deliver. So there's always a lot of hype prior to a Macworld and then much dissapointment following. Just look at the iPod: when it launched, the/. discussion was very critical, but now there's an abundance of stories about what a ground breaking product it is. That's ass-backwards if you ask me.
So, I'd like to help make this a better Macworld, and at risk of incurring the wrath of Apple, I'd like to give you my rumor list for what we'll see:
- A return to beige towers and CRT monitors - No more G4s. All Macs will now run on 1st generation G3s - Mac OS 9 will rise from the dead, and Steve will hold a funeral for unix (which is, afterall, dying.... if you believe the trolls around here). - An all new iPod will be 5 times the size and hold upto 7 songs!
There it is. Don't hold your breath, but I think this is what we'll be seeing next week.
From the article: "It's extremely unlikely that a developer would ever accidentally get infected by Nimda," said Flores. "They would have to try hard just to run the worm."
So I guess its more like an Easter Egg. I hope this isn't World Cup related.
I hate to say it (b/c I do enjoy reading Macslash), but I don't think this story is really worth running again.
There's a lot of blame going around, but the fact is that the MacSlash management forgot to reregister their domain name. Things in life get screwed up all the time for various reasons. Being well organized requires some discipline. If they had marked in their calendar when their domain was about to expire, they would have contacted their domain registrar prior to losing the right to their name.
Frankly I think they're incredibly lucky that the guy agreed to give them the name back. Bully for them.
But this isn't a big story guys. It's been discussed already. Let's move on with talking about the Mac platform, not the missteps of a website that talks about the Mac platform.
Everyone goes to College mainly because everyone else does. The problem now is that a college education is a bit like what a high-school diploma used to be: a ubiquitos minimum requirement for getting your first job.
That being said, many people will say that if you don't get a diploma, then you're missing this basic qualification and you will suffer. I tend to disagree, especially when it comes to IT operations work.
If you can get a job now, AND if the job you get will give you good experience, then you can skip college. The experience you gain will put you ahead of college graduates your age when they get out of school. On the other hand, if you get a job that provides minimal experience and stimulation, you might as well have been in College for those years getting a degree and having a good time.
Theres obviously the cost of College to factor in: don't think you won't feel better than your friends in a few years when they have big student loans to repay and you're sitting on a downpayment for your first house.
The problem with college is that everyone has it, so while you may stand out for not having it, you may also stand out because of what you did instead.
If you can get a good job that will give you loads of experience, go for it. Then do as many certifications on the side as you can. I think you'll find its more rewarding than getting a degree that you'd like to be proud of, but which won't open very many doors.
But I'm glad to see some independent testing on this front. I think those contrived Photoshop bakeoffs are an embarrasment.
I personally don't think Apples are as fast as PCs. I think most people agree. That's really not the point. There are many good reasons to buy a Mac. But a Mac running OS X is slow and everyone knows it.
1) Does the base station make a difference? What if I bought one that wasn't an Apple base station. Anyone had experience using different ones? Which is the most powerful/best?
2) How much better are the new Powerbooks for airport range? I'm probably going to buy one, but I would really like to know if this is any better on the new versions b/c the built in Airport is one of the reasons I'm chosing a laptop over a desktop Mac.
802.11b is just giving you the ethernet. IPSec operates at a higher layer of the OSI model so you shouldn't have any problems. If you can implement it on your Mac, you'll be able to use it w/ airport.
Whether or not you're impressed by 3D games is not really relevant to a review of a 3D accelerated video card. You comment is nice, but it's a bit like discussing the merits of driving vs. walking in response to a review of a car. If you don't like driving, that's nice, but it has nothing to do with the relative merits of the car vs. other cars.
This is a review of a 3D accelerated video card. It is designed to render 3D games, so reviewing it with respect to how well it does that job is really the only useful way to discuss it.
I have no comment on your ideas about the merits of 3D gaming. I happen to enjoy 3D games a great deal. I also like chocolate and I don't like cheese. What of it?
I'm saving up to buy a Mac at the moment. If I was buying a PC I would have done so already, but the Mac I'd be happy with is more expensive than the PC I'd be happy with.
This is an interesting distinction, and ultimately the source of my current predicament. My problem has long been that Apple's product line is too shallow and not diverse enough.
The iMac is fine, but I suspect I will want to upgrade my video card at least once over the life of my machine. Why? Because I like games. The Mac itself will last for several years but I know with the pace of game development that I'll want a new video card before the system really needs any other upgrade.
That puts me in the Powermac range, which is very pricey. I really don't want to pay for all the other bells and whistles that come with the Powermacs, like Gigabit Ethernet and a Superdrive, but I don't have a lot of choice once I get into that category. I won't even get into the financial problem of wanting a Apple display.
I just wish Apple would sell a mid range tower. That's all. But I don't presume to know the economics of their market better than they do, so there must be a reason why. Perhaps they like forcing me for save up.
If there emerged a distributed downloading standard that was generally agreeable and became better and better the more servers that participated, I would think it would be great to see a plug-in for popular web serving software to support it.
Think about something like this: if you were running a site under Apache and had the option of installing a plug-in that would participate in the file sharing network as a server node. The plug-in would let you allocate a defined amount of disk storage and a defined amount of bandwidth. Then sysadmins who felt this was a good thing could just turn on their participation.
Sure it wouldn't be much at first, but you might get a very large base of servers with good connectivity all playing a role in the system. I think it would help it scale.
Just a thought. I wonder if anyone has considered a scheme like this.
do you have the same custom hassles even if you buy from the www.apple.ca store?
I live in Toronto and only know ones regional to me. There's a good list of some here. Some of them may be useful to non-Toronto based Canadians because they have websites and will ship to you.
why are you so sure Apple won't open a store in Canada anyway?
I'm not sure everyone has fully appreciated the value of maintaining a healthy, robust, scalable and available DNS system. Without DNS the Internet effectively grinds to a halt. If you wanted to break the Internet, targetting DNS would probably be the way to go. We really can't afford to let it wither under poor stewardship.
I can't speak to the effectiveness of ICANN. I don't know much about them. All I know is that my own DNS needs are served effectively enough and I've never had trouble. But I do agree that it seems odd that it now take $20M to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time (well spare time is over stating the matter...but my point remains).
If you ask me, DNS needs to be reconsidered in light of the possibilities of failure if the root servers fail for some reason. I know there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of caching DNS servers around the world, so one or two root servers failing isn't a big deal. Nonetheless, I think it would be worthwhile to consider a system where centralized root server management would not be a key component.
I don't even know if such a thing is possible. Could we do a peer-to-peer DNS system where servers learn of each other (kind of like routers or Gnutella)? I think something like that might solve this problem. But I don't have the answer. We'd better hope guys like Randy Bush do.
I think the idea of harnessing students to help out with OSS projects is a great idea. Now a lot of people on this thread have argued that OSS projects may be unsuitable to student involvement for various reasons. I would argue that while that may be true, the project leads running OSS projects should do what it takes to get students involved.
If you get a bunch of students working on OSS in school, there's a decent chance a few will stay with OSS after they graduate. This is the same concept used by industry to justify summer student employment programmes. And it works. You want to attract top talent to your organization whether you're for profit or not. That should extend to OSS. Why not compete to get the best minds working on your project in the future?
Now that being said, it does require some effort. Having hired summer interns in the past (I run a small IT dept), I am aware that you can't just expect them to be productive when they show up. It requires extra planning and patience. You have to take time to explain how things work in your organization, how they can help and what they need to do. But invariably, this patience is rewarded once they get on their feet and start being productive. Typically these students do the work nobody else wants to do, but having been one myself at one point, I can attest to the enthusiasm with which this work is met. As a student you are starved for real-world work, and working for any organization that isn't school seems exciting.
So I urge project leads to seriously think about how they can encourage students to join their projects.
I'm Glad to Hear this from Microsoft
on
HTTP's Days Numbered
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I share the growing concern that wrapping web services in HTTP is akin to putting a ladder outside your house next to an open window. SOAP is being touted for it's ability to get through corporate firewalls via HTTP. I can't believe someone would consider this a feature rather than a bug in the spec.
We need a wide range of new protocols for web services with security and scalability in mind while they are being developed. We don't want to use HTTP for more than HTML. We want to be able to control who does what, where and to whom.
I hope the.NET team at Microsoft is listening to this guy.
Right on. The result of parallelising computational tasks that are currently done in serial has been known for ages. The whole concept of a quantum computing key search has been to try all the keys at once. This is essentially implementing that concept using non-quantum hardware - to a certain extent.
This is a big deal in the sense that we may be moving toward the point where our ability to process in parallel can crack any keys generated by computers without that capability. But it is analagous to my abilty to encrypt using a computer what you would be unable to decrypt using as handheld calculator. If both sides are equipped with the same computing technology, the security remains intact.
I don't know that the award will really make much of a difference to people porting software, but this kind of encouragement is exactly what the Mac needs. If the Mac can really use all the open source software that is out there for BSD and Linux (and by use it, I mean have it ported to work well w/ Aqua and install easily), then the Mac will become even more compelling. And consumers will notice the difference. If they buy a Mac they are a download away from thousands of programs and utilities. With a PC, there may be more software in the stores, but they'll have to pay for each version.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be spoiled by Mac OS X (ok, ok, I KNOW I'm spoiled by Mac OS X), but I think KDE is still an ugly interface. What's up with that? They could make it purty,,,why don't they?
"... Steve Jobs in April 1977 [4] asked Rob Janoff, art director of the advertising company Regis McKenna Advertising, to design a new logo. The advertising company Regis McKenna, wasn't picked by coincidence to design the new logo. This company had helped for example Compaq, America Online, Intel and other computer companies through their early years [5]."
Really? So Apple selected Regis McKenna in April 1977 because of the work they had done for AOL and Compaq?
That's strange because the AOL website says it was founded in 1985.
And the Compaq (now HP) site claims that Compaq was founded in the 1980s.
I know Steve Jobs has a good eye for the future, but I suspect he didn't choose Regis McKenna based on the good work they would do in years to come.
I know this is a cute piece, but the guy who did it just read a couple of Apple biographies and slapped it together with some graphics. It just bugs me when misinformation like this spreads across the Internet.
There's an informative piece about spam in this week's Onion: http://www.theonion.com/onion3825/anti-spam_legisl ation.html
The problem with the Mac web is that expectations run much higher than Apple can realistically deliver. So there's always a lot of hype prior to a Macworld and then much dissapointment following. Just look at the iPod: when it launched, the /. discussion was very critical, but now there's an abundance of stories about what a ground breaking product it is. That's ass-backwards if you ask me.
.... if you believe the trolls around here).
So, I'd like to help make this a better Macworld, and at risk of incurring the wrath of Apple, I'd like to give you my rumor list for what we'll see:
- A return to beige towers and CRT monitors
- No more G4s. All Macs will now run on 1st generation G3s
- Mac OS 9 will rise from the dead, and Steve will hold a funeral for unix (which is, afterall, dying
- An all new iPod will be 5 times the size and hold upto 7 songs!
There it is. Don't hold your breath, but I think this is what we'll be seeing next week.
From the article:
"It's extremely unlikely that a developer would ever accidentally get infected by Nimda," said Flores. "They would have to try hard just to run the worm."
So I guess its more like an Easter Egg. I hope this isn't World Cup related.
My tsch prompt in the terminal has changed. I'm pretty sure it's b/c of this update.
t er:~] elliotj%
When I launch my terminal.app this the prompt:
[elliot\032johnson\226\149\146s\032compu
but if I "pwd", it reports that I'm at:
/Users/elliotj
Wierd. Any ideas?
I hate to say it (b/c I do enjoy reading Macslash), but I don't think this story is really worth running again.
There's a lot of blame going around, but the fact is that the MacSlash management forgot to reregister their domain name. Things in life get screwed up all the time for various reasons. Being well organized requires some discipline. If they had marked in their calendar when their domain was about to expire, they would have contacted their domain registrar prior to losing the right to their name.
Frankly I think they're incredibly lucky that the guy agreed to give them the name back. Bully for them.
But this isn't a big story guys. It's been discussed already. Let's move on with talking about the Mac platform, not the missteps of a website that talks about the Mac platform.
I won't be able to attend in person, so maybe you could answer this online.
Do you actually even use a Mac? If so, which one and what do you do with it?
And, do you like it?
Everyone goes to College mainly because everyone else does. The problem now is that a college education is a bit like what a high-school diploma used to be: a ubiquitos minimum requirement for getting your first job.
That being said, many people will say that if you don't get a diploma, then you're missing this basic qualification and you will suffer. I tend to disagree, especially when it comes to IT operations work.
If you can get a job now, AND if the job you get will give you good experience, then you can skip college. The experience you gain will put you ahead of college graduates your age when they get out of school. On the other hand, if you get a job that provides minimal experience and stimulation, you might as well have been in College for those years getting a degree and having a good time.
Theres obviously the cost of College to factor in: don't think you won't feel better than your friends in a few years when they have big student loans to repay and you're sitting on a downpayment for your first house.
The problem with college is that everyone has it, so while you may stand out for not having it, you may also stand out because of what you did instead.
If you can get a good job that will give you loads of experience, go for it. Then do as many certifications on the side as you can. I think you'll find its more rewarding than getting a degree that you'd like to be proud of, but which won't open very many doors.
I really like the Mac. Honestly.
But I'm glad to see some independent testing on this front. I think those contrived Photoshop bakeoffs are an embarrasment.
I personally don't think Apples are as fast as PCs. I think most people agree. That's really not the point. There are many good reasons to buy a Mac. But a Mac running OS X is slow and everyone knows it.
1) Does the base station make a difference? What if I bought one that wasn't an Apple base station. Anyone had experience using different ones? Which is the most powerful/best?
2) How much better are the new Powerbooks for airport range? I'm probably going to buy one, but I would really like to know if this is any better on the new versions b/c the built in Airport is one of the reasons I'm chosing a laptop over a desktop Mac.
802.11b is just giving you the ethernet. IPSec operates at a higher layer of the OSI model so you shouldn't have any problems. If you can implement it on your Mac, you'll be able to use it w/ airport.
Whether or not you're impressed by 3D games is not really relevant to a review of a 3D accelerated video card. You comment is nice, but it's a bit like discussing the merits of driving vs. walking in response to a review of a car. If you don't like driving, that's nice, but it has nothing to do with the relative merits of the car vs. other cars.
This is a review of a 3D accelerated video card. It is designed to render 3D games, so reviewing it with respect to how well it does that job is really the only useful way to discuss it.
I have no comment on your ideas about the merits of 3D gaming. I happen to enjoy 3D games a great deal. I also like chocolate and I don't like cheese. What of it?
I hope there are even more new features. I like the looks of that list, but it would be hard to make an exciting demonstration out of it.
I'm hoping for a new piece of eye candy. Maybe a new Aqua theme, or some great new config tools or something.
I'm saving up to buy a Mac at the moment. If I was buying a PC I would have done so already, but the Mac I'd be happy with is more expensive than the PC I'd be happy with.
This is an interesting distinction, and ultimately the source of my current predicament. My problem has long been that Apple's product line is too shallow and not diverse enough.
The iMac is fine, but I suspect I will want to upgrade my video card at least once over the life of my machine. Why? Because I like games. The Mac itself will last for several years but I know with the pace of game development that I'll want a new video card before the system really needs any other upgrade.
That puts me in the Powermac range, which is very pricey. I really don't want to pay for all the other bells and whistles that come with the Powermacs, like Gigabit Ethernet and a Superdrive, but I don't have a lot of choice once I get into that category. I won't even get into the financial problem of wanting a Apple display.
I just wish Apple would sell a mid range tower. That's all. But I don't presume to know the economics of their market better than they do, so there must be a reason why. Perhaps they like forcing me for save up.
I said that if it hadn't been based on a popular book, I don't think anyone would have enjoyed it.
I fully appreciate how immensely popular the book was.
If there emerged a distributed downloading standard that was generally agreeable and became better and better the more servers that participated, I would think it would be great to see a plug-in for popular web serving software to support it.
Think about something like this: if you were running a site under Apache and had the option of installing a plug-in that would participate in the file sharing network as a server node. The plug-in would let you allocate a defined amount of disk storage and a defined amount of bandwidth. Then sysadmins who felt this was a good thing could just turn on their participation.
Sure it wouldn't be much at first, but you might get a very large base of servers with good connectivity all playing a role in the system. I think it would help it scale.
Just a thought. I wonder if anyone has considered a scheme like this.
do you have the same custom hassles even if you buy from the www.apple.ca store?
I live in Toronto and only know ones regional to me. There's a good list of some here. Some of them may be useful to non-Toronto based Canadians because they have websites and will ship to you.
why are you so sure Apple won't open a store in Canada anyway?
IBM has had an all-in-one for ages: Netvista
I'm not sure everyone has fully appreciated the value of maintaining a healthy, robust, scalable and available DNS system. Without DNS the Internet effectively grinds to a halt. If you wanted to break the Internet, targetting DNS would probably be the way to go. We really can't afford to let it wither under poor stewardship.
I can't speak to the effectiveness of ICANN. I don't know much about them. All I know is that my own DNS needs are served effectively enough and I've never had trouble. But I do agree that it seems odd that it now take $20M to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time (well spare time is over stating the matter...but my point remains).
If you ask me, DNS needs to be reconsidered in light of the possibilities of failure if the root servers fail for some reason. I know there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of caching DNS servers around the world, so one or two root servers failing isn't a big deal. Nonetheless, I think it would be worthwhile to consider a system where centralized root server management would not be a key component.
I don't even know if such a thing is possible. Could we do a peer-to-peer DNS system where servers learn of each other (kind of like routers or Gnutella)? I think something like that might solve this problem. But I don't have the answer. We'd better hope guys like Randy Bush do.
I think the idea of harnessing students to help out with OSS projects is a great idea. Now a lot of people on this thread have argued that OSS projects may be unsuitable to student involvement for various reasons. I would argue that while that may be true, the project leads running OSS projects should do what it takes to get students involved.
If you get a bunch of students working on OSS in school, there's a decent chance a few will stay with OSS after they graduate. This is the same concept used by industry to justify summer student employment programmes. And it works. You want to attract top talent to your organization whether you're for profit or not. That should extend to OSS. Why not compete to get the best minds working on your project in the future?
Now that being said, it does require some effort. Having hired summer interns in the past (I run a small IT dept), I am aware that you can't just expect them to be productive when they show up. It requires extra planning and patience. You have to take time to explain how things work in your organization, how they can help and what they need to do. But invariably, this patience is rewarded once they get on their feet and start being productive. Typically these students do the work nobody else wants to do, but having been one myself at one point, I can attest to the enthusiasm with which this work is met. As a student you are starved for real-world work, and working for any organization that isn't school seems exciting.
So I urge project leads to seriously think about how they can encourage students to join their projects.
I share the growing concern that wrapping web services in HTTP is akin to putting a ladder outside your house next to an open window. SOAP is being touted for it's ability to get through corporate firewalls via HTTP. I can't believe someone would consider this a feature rather than a bug in the spec.
.NET team at Microsoft is listening to this guy.
We need a wide range of new protocols for web services with security and scalability in mind while they are being developed. We don't want to use HTTP for more than HTML. We want to be able to control who does what, where and to whom.
I hope the
Right on. The result of parallelising computational tasks that are currently done in serial has been known for ages. The whole concept of a quantum computing key search has been to try all the keys at once. This is essentially implementing that concept using non-quantum hardware - to a certain extent.
This is a big deal in the sense that we may be moving toward the point where our ability to process in parallel can crack any keys generated by computers without that capability. But it is analagous to my abilty to encrypt using a computer what you would be unable to decrypt using as handheld calculator. If both sides are equipped with the same computing technology, the security remains intact.
to the future of the Mac platform.
I think MS will continue to support the platform b/c they really don't want it to die for various reasons (anti-trust...mac apps make $ etc)
Still, Apple should be rolling up its sleeves and Aqua-izing Open Office ASAP.
I don't know that the award will really make much of a difference to people porting software, but this kind of encouragement is exactly what the Mac needs. If the Mac can really use all the open source software that is out there for BSD and Linux (and by use it, I mean have it ported to work well w/ Aqua and install easily), then the Mac will become even more compelling. And consumers will notice the difference. If they buy a Mac they are a download away from thousands of programs and utilities. With a PC, there may be more software in the stores, but they'll have to pay for each version.