Good grief, people! I can't believe I'm reading this reaction here at Slashdot. You all seem to think that your kids should have to earn the right to use one like you did! What's with that? Today a computer is not a computer at all, but rather a communicator. Only a subset of kids will have an interest in the inner workings of a communicator, but everyone has an interest in communicating with others and being able to use the resources on the net.
This has nothing to do with teaching kids how to use a keyboard and mouse, or about binary and hexadecimal data storage. It has everything to do with empowering them to use the intellectual tools of the trades in our society. And one laptop contains every textbook you or your kids will ever need, and always in the most up to date version. The entire MIT undergrad curriculum and much of the grad curriculum is now online, along with most of world literature. Do you think this is mistake that will soon be corrected with a back-to-basics movement? Give me a break! This is the vehicle through which our kids will progress at their own pace, rather than being held to the average abilities in whatever class to which they may be assigned.
Give a human a fish and you feed them for a day. Give a human a fishing rod, and teach them how to use it, and you give them the means to feed others as well as themselves.
I'm looking at a Dell bid for a basic dual Xeon 3GHz, and it is coming out at 4k$ versus 3k$ for the basic Apple dual G5. Of the two, only the Apple gives me a DVD write drive. With the difference, I can pick up a laptop to talk with my beast while I'm away.
I can match the Apple price if I drop back to dual Xeon 2GHz, which I suppose Dell would argue is parity, but the benchmarks don't seem to support that.
As pointed out in the article, Windows update notices appear within a blizzard of other annoying notices that Windows users have to deal with, which are mostly in the nature of sales pitches. Usually when you pay for software, it stops dunning you with advertising, but not Windows.
I don't know but imagine that recent Linux distros have competent security update mechanisms. I do know that Apple has a very slick system for updates. Not that some users don't ignore them anyway. Which is the reason for shipping with things closed up so that inexperienced users don't expose themselves unwittingly. But MS intentionally decided that wasn't their worry (by design).
It isn't "bashing" to point out mistakes. But it will become bashing if MS doesn't learn from its mistakes very soon. The article had a great suggestion there for MS to distribute the fixes at no cost.
I took "by design" as a common English useage equivalent to "intentionally". It really doesn't say anything about the OS design.
In the article it points out that MS considered the matter and decided that the OS should be shipped "open" by default to satisfy a number of customers who expressed a preference for that.
If these were expert customers, they should have considered the consequences of their preference being implemented for inexpert customers, who are far more numerous. It's trivial for an experienced sysadmin to open a system, but damn unlikely for a rube to care about how to close it up.
Then there is the matter of software update notices being lost in a blizzard of other annoying notices, which makes it very unlikely that updates will actually be installed by users. That could be seen as obstruction of security "by design", in the sense you take it.
I didn't see anyone pointing out that Apple has an excellent automated software update mechanism in place, which by default looks weeky for updates and asks if users want them. If you hit return rather than cancel, you get your update. No sysadmin assistance is required, but that factor in Mac adoption is another story. Some users will reject an update because they don't want to take the chance that it requires a reboot (most security patches do not, but other updates often do). But at least during virus scares, the updates are likely to be accepted. If Macs were more common, it seems like the necessary updates would be in place more universally than they are among Windows users.
Can anyone comment on how effective the comparable process is for PC, Linux, Unix, and whether there is a differential between these and the Mac update process?
Let's prepare our kids for the diverse internet, rather than the monocultural intranet. They will grow up in a world of diversity where communication is enabled by language, document and data standards rather than hardware/OS standards.
The internet was not created by standardization to proprietary products. Microsoft and Apple were both slow to the party because of their common dream of product lock-in, which they both continue to pursue in defiance of the principle of the internet.
Let's inform our educational administrators that their jobs will depend on preparing our kids for the real world; not some dream world in which their investment portfolios expand without limit.
The "best" way to select the computer platform of any organization may not be to have a standard platform (as IT groups usually contend), but to let each individual worker decide what kind of computer they need for their job and to support whatever mix of computers results. Empower the employee and watch what happens. I predict that the result will be determined by whatever helps each employee be most competitive in the marketplace, according to what each needs to do to perform.
The fact that the result will be a mix of different types of computers will simply force IT to deal with a heterogeneous environment, which is all to the good, since each organization must deal with a heterogeneous world outside. Let's scrap the false god of platform heterogeneity, once and for all, even if it does spread the wealth around among diverse computer vendors.
Complaining about where to put stuff misses the point, I think. The idea is that this thing sits beside or opposite your ordinary analog desk, rather than replacing it. I personally like to have my digital desktop integrated with my analog desktop, rather than elsewhere in the room, but there are many folks I know who like a separate roll-around workstation. This is for them, only.
The catch is that it really isn't possible to rendezvous with a comet that has recently been in the Oort cloud. Those orbits are too eccentric so we are more likely to visit a pretty old comet that has been processed in the inner solar system for a long time and has settled into a relatively more accessible orbit.
NASA aborted such a mission, the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission or CRAF, in 1992 after developing it for five years, in favor of the Cassini mission to Saturn and its moon Titan.
Does anyone remember Vantage? It was a desk accessory. Remember them, installed with the Font/DA Mover? Now I'm really dating myself. But it was a damned nice text editor that could strip/add prefixes and suffixes, remove line breaks, wrap and unwrap, entab and detab, and it was also programmable to some degree so you could process a batch of files through various filters, or add a script to one of the menus, which were on each file window, since DAs didn't have regular menus. Not only that, but it allowed you to edit the file type and creator.
I regarded BBedit as unwelcome competition for a while, then eventually it became clear that it would be supported, while Vantage was going the way of Hypercard.
OS X runs fine on what is now a legacy G3 iMac running at 233MHz. Not as snappy as on faster newer hardware, but really, just fine. My kids use them for web surfing and IM'ing, email, word processing, whatever.
Whoops! I certainly didn't mean to suggest that "*nix is not for teenagers". In fact I'd been trying to teach some *nix to my kids for ages. OS X did it for me. Lindows or other Linux may do it for others.
FWIW, you can install fink on a Mac with OSX and apt-get to your heart's content.
Still have two of the originals (almost), and the only time they gave me trouble was after a lightning hit to my home. Every ethernet device in the house went out, including two iMac motherboards. Insurance paid, but a year later I discovered after a lot of pain that the processor card had been partly fried but only showed symptoms when upgrading from 32 to 256MB RAM for OS X. Got a new processor card on eBay for $50, and it lives on and on, serving my daughters for all their school, chat, and music download needs... I expect they will drag the iMacs off to college in the next year or two. Better than worrying about an iBook being stolen!
Jobs' Mac gave us windows, icons, mice, and pointers. His NeXT computer gave us the WWW, his iMac gave us a network appliance, and his OS X gave us Unix for teenagers. Quite a set of lifetime achievements...
I am thinking we are near to an XML browser that allows transparent browsing of multidimensional data bases. You'll be able to organize the data graphically in diverse formats when it is numerical, perform elementary analysis of it, or download it and use downloadable software to access the data for more detailed analysis.
This is the holy grail for the web; to make access to arcane databases easy and transparent. Then everyone will soon transform their useful databases into this format...
Kaleidagraph, pro Fit, IGOR: add flexible user-defined fitting procedures for interpretation of data plots. Some procedural scripting or programming capability.
IDL or MATLAB: add highly capable numerical calculations, data analysis and plotting for batch processing of large volumes of data in a uniform way.
One question I'm considering: does something like OpenDX provide open source competition for the likes of MATLAB or IDL?
The propagation of typographical errors doesn't prove that the original papers have never been read or consulted, as assumed in this study. Anyone who has actually written research papers understands that the development of the bibliography is the last and often the most unpleaseant chore in the preparation of such a paper. Would it make any sense to claim that the actual reading of the cited papers was done at that stage of the process? Of course not. Actual citations are rather hurriedly copied from anywhere they can be found at that time; from review papers or other papers that have cited them, or online sources. Any typo that appears in an easily accessed place will obviously be reproduced many times.
Sorry, but this article does not herald the end of science as we know it. The entire premise of the study is faulty. But I bet they were very careful not to make any typographical errors in their bibliography!
The only folks who could log into a particular Mac from another one using X11 or an Aqua server, would be those holding [distinct, unique] accounts on that particular Mac client. So they would get their own native preferences when they log in. There's no ambiguity here at all.
This has all been worked out already for other Unix boxes that use X11 to get remote displays of their programs.
Counterintuitive as it may be, I'm assured that the X11 program that provides display of windows for programs running on another program is called the X server, while the other component running on a computer displaying its windows on some other computer is called the client. Makes some sense if you take a computer point of view instead of a user point of view.
But it takes two programs to tango, and I haven't heard of an Xfree86 client.
Given Xfree86, wouldn't it make sense for the open source communtiy to offer an X11 client that could be run on a Mac under OSX? Then, presumably, anyone running Xfree86 could log into such a machine graphically, and run OroborOSX if they wanted to use an Aqua-like window manager. Does this already exist?
Wouldn't Apple would be reinventing this if they were to develop their own graphical remote user interface?
If so, this would not seem to be as useful as X11, which would allow logins from diverse X servers rather than Macs only.
Slashdot Mirror
Good grief, people! I can't believe I'm reading this reaction here at Slashdot. You all seem to think that your kids should have to earn the right to use one like you did! What's with that? Today a computer is not a computer at all, but rather a communicator. Only a subset of kids will have an interest in the inner workings of a communicator, but everyone has an interest in communicating with others and being able to use the resources on the net.
This has nothing to do with teaching kids how to use a keyboard and mouse, or about binary and hexadecimal data storage. It has everything to do with empowering them to use the intellectual tools of the trades in our society. And one laptop contains every textbook you or your kids will ever need, and always in the most up to date version. The entire MIT undergrad curriculum and much of the grad curriculum is now online, along with most of world literature. Do you think this is mistake that will soon be corrected with a back-to-basics movement? Give me a break! This is the vehicle through which our kids will progress at their own pace, rather than being held to the average abilities in whatever class to which they may be assigned.
Give a human a fish and you feed them for a day. Give a human a fishing rod, and teach them how to use it, and you give them the means to feed others as well as themselves.
I'm looking at a Dell bid for a basic dual Xeon 3GHz, and it is coming out at 4k$ versus 3k$ for the basic Apple dual G5. Of the two, only the Apple gives me a DVD write drive. With the difference, I can pick up a laptop to talk with my beast while I'm away.
I can match the Apple price if I drop back to dual Xeon 2GHz, which I suppose Dell would argue is parity, but the benchmarks don't seem to support that.
Can who sell it for less?
As pointed out in the article, Windows update notices appear within a blizzard of other annoying notices that Windows users have to deal with, which are mostly in the nature of sales pitches. Usually when you pay for software, it stops dunning you with advertising, but not Windows.
I don't know but imagine that recent Linux distros have competent security update mechanisms. I do know that Apple has a very slick system for updates. Not that some users don't ignore them anyway. Which is the reason for shipping with things closed up so that inexperienced users don't expose themselves unwittingly. But MS intentionally decided that wasn't their worry (by design).
It isn't "bashing" to point out mistakes. But it will become bashing if MS doesn't learn from its mistakes very soon. The article had a great suggestion there for MS to distribute the fixes at no cost.
I took "by design" as a common English useage equivalent to "intentionally". It really doesn't say anything about the OS design.
In the article it points out that MS considered the matter and decided that the OS should be shipped "open" by default to satisfy a number of customers who expressed a preference for that.
If these were expert customers, they should have considered the consequences of their preference being implemented for inexpert customers, who are far more numerous. It's trivial for an experienced sysadmin to open a system, but damn unlikely for a rube to care about how to close it up.
Then there is the matter of software update notices being lost in a blizzard of other annoying notices, which makes it very unlikely that updates will actually be installed by users. That could be seen as obstruction of security "by design", in the sense you take it.
It's on the front page now, in the form of Pegararo's article in the Wash Post "Windows insecure by design"....
Good article summarizes the differences between security approaches for MS, Apple, and Linux. Hard to believe MS hasn't gotten this message yet.
I didn't see anyone pointing out that Apple has an excellent automated software update mechanism in place, which by default looks weeky for updates and asks if users want them. If you hit return rather than cancel, you get your update. No sysadmin assistance is required, but that factor in Mac adoption is another story. Some users will reject an update because they don't want to take the chance that it requires a reboot (most security patches do not, but other updates often do). But at least during virus scares, the updates are likely to be accepted. If Macs were more common, it seems like the necessary updates would be in place more universally than they are among Windows users.
Can anyone comment on how effective the comparable process is for PC, Linux, Unix, and whether there is a differential between these and the Mac update process?
Let's prepare our kids for the diverse internet, rather than the monocultural intranet. They will grow up in a world of diversity where communication is enabled by language, document and data standards rather than hardware/OS standards.
The internet was not created by standardization to proprietary products. Microsoft and Apple were both slow to the party because of their common dream of product lock-in, which they both continue to pursue in defiance of the principle of the internet.
Let's inform our educational administrators that their jobs will depend on preparing our kids for the real world; not some dream world in which their investment portfolios expand without limit.
As in "let's scrap the false god of platform homogeneity, once and for all".
The "best" way to select the computer platform of any organization may not be to have a standard platform (as IT groups usually contend), but to let each individual worker decide what kind of computer they need for their job and to support whatever mix of computers results. Empower the employee and watch what happens. I predict that the result will be determined by whatever helps each employee be most competitive in the marketplace, according to what each needs to do to perform.
The fact that the result will be a mix of different types of computers will simply force IT to deal with a heterogeneous environment, which is all to the good, since each organization must deal with a heterogeneous world outside. Let's scrap the false god of platform heterogeneity, once and for all, even if it does spread the wealth around among diverse computer vendors.
Complaining about where to put stuff misses the point, I think. The idea is that this thing sits beside or opposite your ordinary analog desk, rather than replacing it. I personally like to have my digital desktop integrated with my analog desktop, rather than elsewhere in the room, but there are many folks I know who like a separate roll-around workstation. This is for them, only.
Does that help?
The catch is that it really isn't possible to rendezvous with a comet that has recently been in the Oort cloud. Those orbits are too eccentric so we are more likely to visit a pretty old comet that has been processed in the inner solar system for a long time and has settled into a relatively more accessible orbit.
NASA aborted such a mission, the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission or CRAF, in 1992 after developing it for five years, in favor of the Cassini mission to Saturn and its moon Titan.
Does anyone remember Vantage? It was a desk accessory. Remember them, installed with the Font/DA Mover? Now I'm really dating myself. But it was a damned nice text editor that could strip/add prefixes and suffixes, remove line breaks, wrap and unwrap, entab and detab, and it was also programmable to some degree so you could process a batch of files through various filters, or add a script to one of the menus, which were on each file window, since DAs didn't have regular menus. Not only that, but it allowed you to edit the file type and creator.
I regarded BBedit as unwelcome competition for a while, then eventually it became clear that it would be supported, while Vantage was going the way of Hypercard.
OS X runs fine on what is now a legacy G3 iMac running at 233MHz. Not as snappy as on faster newer hardware, but really, just fine. My kids use them for web surfing and IM'ing, email, word processing, whatever.
Or did I miss your point?
Gotta be an April Fools story, 1 month late...
Whoops! I certainly didn't mean to suggest that "*nix is not for teenagers". In fact I'd been trying to teach some *nix to my kids for ages. OS X did it for me. Lindows or other Linux may do it for others.
FWIW, you can install fink on a Mac with OSX and apt-get to your heart's content.
Still have two of the originals (almost), and the only time they gave me trouble was after a lightning hit to my home. Every ethernet device in the house went out, including two iMac motherboards. Insurance paid, but a year later I discovered after a lot of pain that the processor card had been partly fried but only showed symptoms when upgrading from 32 to 256MB RAM for OS X. Got a new processor card on eBay for $50, and it lives on and on, serving my daughters for all their school, chat, and music download needs... I expect they will drag the iMacs off to college in the next year or two. Better than worrying about an iBook being stolen!
Jobs' Mac gave us windows, icons, mice, and pointers. His NeXT computer gave us the WWW, his iMac gave us a network appliance, and his OS X gave us Unix for teenagers. Quite a set of lifetime achievements...
I am thinking we are near to an XML browser that allows transparent browsing of multidimensional data bases. You'll be able to organize the data graphically in diverse formats when it is numerical, perform elementary analysis of it, or download it and use downloadable software to access the data for more detailed analysis.
This is the holy grail for the web; to make access to arcane databases easy and transparent. Then everyone will soon transform their useful databases into this format...
I've used many of these programs and the choice depends on your goals, more or less in order of increasing complexity and expense:
mathpad: interactive exploratory calculations and simple 2d/3d plotting; unique nonprocedural programming language.
Kaleidagraph, pro Fit, IGOR: add flexible user-defined fitting procedures for interpretation of data plots. Some procedural scripting or programming capability.
IDL or MATLAB: add highly capable numerical calculations, data analysis and plotting for batch processing of large volumes of data in a uniform way.
One question I'm considering: does something like OpenDX provide open source competition for the likes of MATLAB or IDL?
If it came apart first, nothing but pieces will ever be found...
The propagation of typographical errors doesn't prove that the original papers have never been read or consulted, as assumed in this study. Anyone who has actually written research papers understands that the development of the bibliography is the last and often the most unpleaseant chore in the preparation of such a paper. Would it make any sense to claim that the actual reading of the cited papers was done at that stage of the process? Of course not. Actual citations are rather hurriedly copied from anywhere they can be found at that time; from review papers or other papers that have cited them, or online sources. Any typo that appears in an easily accessed place will obviously be reproduced many times.
Sorry, but this article does not herald the end of science as we know it. The entire premise of the study is faulty. But I bet they were very careful not to make any typographical errors in their bibliography!
Yup. Got the same answer from the XDarwin guys, but haven't given it a try yet...
Thanks, Tom
The only folks who could log into a particular Mac from another one using X11 or an Aqua server, would be those holding [distinct, unique] accounts on that particular Mac client. So they would get their own native preferences when they log in. There's no ambiguity here at all.
This has all been worked out already for other Unix boxes that use X11 to get remote displays of their programs.
Counterintuitive as it may be, I'm assured that the X11 program that provides display of windows for programs running on another program is called the X server, while the other component running on a computer displaying its windows on some other computer is called the client. Makes some sense if you take a computer point of view instead of a user point of view. But it takes two programs to tango, and I haven't heard of an Xfree86 client.
Given Xfree86, wouldn't it make sense for the open source communtiy to offer an X11 client that could be run on a Mac under OSX? Then, presumably, anyone running Xfree86 could log into such a machine graphically, and run OroborOSX if they wanted to use an Aqua-like window manager. Does this already exist?
Wouldn't Apple would be reinventing this if they were to develop their own graphical remote user interface?
If so, this would not seem to be as useful as X11, which would allow logins from diverse X servers rather than Macs only.