That's all nice, but VS and Nokia were joined a year ago and Lumia/WP7 did not set the US on fire.
So let's think about this.
I figure it's sales channel/carrier issues which are resolvable through one of the two taking up the spending a few notches. Unfortunately, Nokia can't afford a low margin top-end smartphone and they already have it priced under competitors' offerings. (800/900. As we know, the pricing on the 820/920 is not announced.) How much of its licensing revenue does Microsoft want to spend per phone?
Both Nokia and Microsoft are doing this to grow profits and there's the dilemma. Share has to get huge fast in order to provide the volume they seek. But the more share they buy, the more volume they require in order to move the needle.
Jobs' sense of his specialness and his rush to get things done before he died was there way before the cancer was found. I rely on the Isaacson book for this tid-bit.
Meanwhile, Jobs is not Apple and Apple is not Jobs. Addictive, as in products, is a clumsy metaphor. Addictive as in meth is a physical and psychological state which reveals itself in isolation, anti-social behavior, and health decay.
Facile, featuring convenient memory holes, and poorly thought through. Yep, CNN all the way.
An acquisition of a company is not an expense, it is an exchange of one asset, cash for instance, for another. But, when making a strategic acquisition, as Microsoft did, one pays above the asset's value and the difference is booked as another type of asset called goodwill. As the new asset starts contributing profits, the goodwill is reduced by offsetting the retained earnings.
So, what are we to say about the aQuantive write down? The 2007 acquisition, using a fair amount of shareholder assets was a mistake, but, most acquisitions of this type are. I think it comes down to this, the management sold the Board on the acquisition on the basis that this was a good tactic towards the achievement of furthering their strategy of increasing Microsoft's share of the online advertising sector. Why that strategy? Because, they wanted to hurt Google.
Look at that year: the iPhone launch year. What was Google busy doing? Pivoting their nascent phone from Windows Mobile killer to iPhone competitor. They were looking ahead. Microsoft was complacent about phones — we all know the Ballmer quotes — and was spending money looking back at a sector that the same management didn't know it was losing when it happened.
So, sure, the aQuantive write down is a discrete event, and an accounting exercise regarding checks written in 2007. But the same managers who made the deal are in charge, and do we think they're learning their lessons, or are they still spending money in a futile effort to regain relevance in markets that they blew? Everyone looks at Nokia with jaundiced eye for taking Microsoft's cash, but really, shouldn't we be asking if Microsoft is spending its money wisely there? We look at quarterlies to see the trends, to see the mistakes corrected and uncorrected, to form a part of a picture about the whole. We look at Microsoft quarterlies to see if they are successfully diversifying from Windows; truth be told, they do and they don't want to make that transition. It was a bad quarter.
I think his real problem is having youtube in the domain. YouTube doesn't own the copyrights to any audio, except for the videos they author. But, I'm sure that they've trademarked their name in all jurisdictions possible.
In orchestral non-vocal music, the melody is the only protectable part of the composition. So at that point, your analogy fails.
But, just to give everyone a bad analogy to abuse me for: giving protectability to the shapes and grid size is akin to giving protection to an arrangement's choice of the key of F, because that made it easier for the clarinets to perform.
Based on the linked summary of ruling, it seems the judge was convinced that the grid size constituted expression. However, as explored by Judge Alsup's recent ruling in Oracle v. Google, not all choices are expressive, merely consequential to the idea, and to extend copyright protection to these choices is to grant a back door monopoly to the ideas. I hate the histrionic hyperbolic absurdity question, so call this a nine-month early birthday present: armed with this ruling, could a terminal application developer sue others for infringement for also having used a 60 x 40 grid?
As to your essential point about the fairness of Tetris's developers not realizing their maximum revenue because heretofore the law had allowed the basics to be replicated, frankly not all idea and expression vocations are equally protected. Just ask any stand-up comic friend about their recourse for joke-stealers. My takeaway is that with games the reason that people enjoy them, the mayhem, the puzzles, the manipulation of elements, the mise-en-scene of the fantasy, etc., are fair game, meaning there is a limit to the upside, and thus development costs should be constrained. I think in the grand scheme, it's better this way. The alternative is the manifesting Line 4 having its "????????" replaced with "Sue."
And there I was back then listening to KCRW and enjoying both. I do have to admit that I preferred Joe Frank or Cafe LA as following programs. But then, I could hear Car Talk on KPCC.
Fast forward and I listen to Le Show and Car Talk on podcast. Incidentally, one Shearer's best recurring bits these days is Karzai Talk, which is more a satire on US involvement in Afghanistan than one on Click and Clack.
I think logos fall under the realm of trademarks and her enforcement right is against those who use it in such a way as to cause confusion among possible and actual customers.
Pragmatic Programmers published "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" last year. I liked the book and would recommend it for any one who wanted a taste of today's interesting languages. Over the past year, I've seen that some readers were disappointed at the language choices and some didn't like the way the author, Bruce A. Tate, selected a movie characters as shorthand descriptions for the languages' feels.
The languages: Ruby, IO, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell. As for development and runtime environments, these can be had and installed at no cost.
If I was asked to name the one language that is widely used, has immediate practicality, and the runtime is already installed on your computer, I'd pick javascript, which runs in the browser. Get a browser that has a console for reviewing javascript errors. The java part of its name is deceptive. It is quite different than java, but the 90s Netscape folks figured that that imprecision would help adoption. I'm not one to rue days, but that one could a candidate.
You didn't mention what languages you were familiar with from your consulting days. One question to be asked is whether you want to look at a language that is familiar but advanced the the ones you did work with or would you prefer to explore the other streams of language design. If you wish to write personal application and utilities, there is likely to be a language tied to your platform. For Windows, it's C#. For OS X, Objective-C. For Linux, you will have to pick a gui framework and its language.
1995 and 1997, but your basic point stands. What one could say is that after 2009, when there was a lot of cash in the bank and more was rolling in, the company could have started paying dividends and still have the cash to fund expansion, manufacturing ramp-ups, and large-order supply-chain advantages.
Re:Just out of curiosity
on
PC-BSD 9.0 Release
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· Score: 3, Informative
My FreeBSD box has to be seven or more years old. It's gone from one of the 5's through 9.0 without a reinstall. I don't use it 24/7 (but I have). Its primary purpose is to be my cvs code repository. To tech-date the system, subversion was just emerging, hence, cvs. Probably should go git.
I did use a FreeBSD system for a desktop, but this was for a year and a half around 2001. I got an iBook in September 2001, but I had already left the Windows fold for my home computing, so the desktop went FreeBSD. I do prefer OS X because of the gui integration. For a small business where I was the de facto IT guy, I used FreeBSD/squid for a web proxy and solved some huge problems with an ancient Windows SMB server at zero cost: I had used an off lease machine that was constitutionally unsuited for the business's CAD work.
Documentation for BSDs is great. I was considering a wipe and reinstall, as the path of least resistance, as I went from 8.2 to 9 yesterday, but I ate my veggies, built character, and went and looked up the step I had forgotten from the last time a version upgrade occurred. An up to date manual for FreeBSD is available at www.freebsd.org. It also is downloadable as part of the system sources and the local version is kept in sync via cvsup/make. At the site, you might find the release engineering, errata, and security update histories illuminating.
PC-BSD has some interesting ideas and I do run it virtually. It has had application sandboxing for a while, which is something I see the popular, consumer oses implementing. The project is also working on the package dependency issue and I like the way they are thinking. So, while PC-BSD is relatively new, the project keeps its kernel and userland synchronized tightly with FreeBSD. They got good folks there and I expect that its stability should be good, though not as good as FreeBSD, because of the concerns with third-party windowing parties.
Now, as I look at your summary of your problem, I'm not sure that it quite makes sense as a general question for guidance. The computers that are off-lease have to be 2 or 3 years old. You don't need seven more years from them. If you could, you'd have put Windows 7 on them. Well, PC-BSD is no more a substitute for Windows than Windows is a substitute for PC-BSD. (Yes, that's right, if one has set up a productive Unix-like environment, then Windows is a degraded experience, with quite a few "You can't get there from here." issues.) I hope this isn't a case when someone sets up a problem in order to have others offer suggestions that are swatted down, because the constraints are such that it has moved out of the power spot of the technology being discussed. Besides, the applications are far more important than the underlying os in terms of box longevity. If the cost of wiping and reinstalling saves thousands of dollars in licensing fees, well?
Any way, to summarize, you need seven more years of Windows or Windows-substitue usage from your computers and Windows 7 is too expensive, there's only to be one more wipe and reinstall, Linux doesn't help you out, and the BSDs, with their windowing systems being orthogonal to the kernel development, though very stable, may not support the applications and processor that you want to keep using. Then, I wish you good luck, because I don't think any one else other than you is trying to solve your precise problem.
So let's see, I'm running Lion and work with postgresql, which I think Apple includes with Lion now. Well, at least that's my guess: I had to figure out why 9.0.x was in/usr/bin when I had just installed 9.1.x via the OS X binary available from www.postgresql.org (which goes into/Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/. That was a few weeks back. Yesterday I wanted to work through some examples in a book and needed to add some extensions from contrib, but I couldn't see how via the binary, so I downloaded source, bunzipped, make compiled/installed, uninstalled the binary (to avoid port contention, though I could have configured my source install to not use 5432), and updated my path via.bash_profile so the local (~/bin/pg/bin) binaries would be picked up before the one in/usr/bin. Used the lib and include directories from my MacPorts environment in/opt so I'd get readline.
So, have to say, I'm confused, what's the problem with Lion again? Because I have Pixelmator through the app store, VMWare Fusion (drag.app folder to/Applications), from a brick store, postgresql from make build && make install, and I've written my own applications in Haskell (ghc-compiled) and java. It isn't the scroll thing is it, because that really isn't such a big deal. Hackintoshing?
Really.
Really? I like OS X, but I'll use FreeBSD or Linux on a computer where I don't have a license for OS X's use. Truth is, those other operating systems are better in many regards for many tasks.
And let's think about who and who isn't in the app store.
Microsoft Office isn't. If users are forbidden to install Office, all the folks who are okay with buying Macs because they can run Office stop buying Macs.
Adobe Dreamweaver isn't. Say goodbye to web designers who are taught that tool.
I see someone cued the fanboys arguing that the big lockdown won't occur. I don't see that it's likely, but the point would be that those of us who need to run applications that cannot and will not be found in the App Store will replace our Macs with machines onto which we may install our productivity things. It will probably mean that we will have regretted giving Apple those last dollars and will not give Apple any more dollars. Are we in numbers such that Apple will miss us? Not my concern. I'm trying to get things done with the least amount of friction. No one ever guaranteed me it was always going to be easy, but I appreciate it when it is.
The standard answer is that homoiconicity and functions as first-class objects combine powerfully and result in fewer lines of code. There were problems with inefficiency of its data structures and, as I've read Rich Hickey explain, the list, an implementation, instead of the sequence being the abstraction. Hickey started clojure, which is proudly a Lisp, and it was a choice and not a nod to the flavor-of-the-month.
Let me clarify. Even though I disagree with Stallman over the necessity of all things being user accessible, I appreciate the point and believe that his is an important voice to hear. It's just there's a time and place for everything and clumsy formulations such as Jobs as Mayor Daley or "malign influence on computing" are counter-productive as he tries to build the world he wants. That's his problem and I don't believe the FSF has to respond to what he says as an individual.
Well, I know some of the answer. That there is something along the lines of device freedom, though we don't ask that of the microprocessors in the microwave. (Though some clever folks have put the os of their choice on appliances.) This is an elite freedom, in that most of the world could not make use of the freedom if it was available. The ironic thing: people are putting their own code onto their iPhones and iPads, so I guess this is about Apple having to support customizations. That doesn't make sense to me.
The FSF and Apple had a kerfuffle over Objective-C and gcc over a decade ago. The FSF won and Apple became a well-behaved licensee, meeting the terms of the license. Apple didn't start talking about Communism and if they needed functionality under a different license, they got the code or wrote it. Exactly what we tell those folks who pop up now and then and try to exploit work that is available through the GPL.
Should the FSF distance itself from Stallman because of this tasteless compulsion to express a polemic with the thinnest veneer of humanism? No. Why start now?
They do do it. When you get a new system, that Windows OEM license has terms which say you infringe if you transfer it to another system, even if you've removed it from the first.
Didn't read the article, mea culpa, but how was he going to receive the photos his program took? How can Apple assume that photos are all that his application does and nothing else is transmitted or a control channel isn't opened? The Secret Service is the federal agency for investigating credit card fraud, so, they're called in, you betcha, to verify that idiot, self-entitled, privacy-hating, condescending artist is the reality and not the brilliant disguise.
Why is this marked interesting? ~/Applications/ is on the path. "Installation" is copying the executable to a directory and "running" is invoking from the command line using a fully qualified path. Put an entry in the login items and the program will run again at account login. No admin rights needed as Unix lets a user control her directories and run programs. This security hole is found every where. It's actually considered a feature, as in, "I have the right to run whatever program I want on hardware I own."
As far as a program turning on the camera, getting the stream, and turning off the camera, this is provided by the apis and I would be stunned to find that any environment, OS X, Windows, Linux, etc., would require setuid for access.
Finally, at the end — no, scratch that — at the beginning of the day for any discussion of security, the moment unfettered physical access comes up, somebody does the "Game over, man." schtick.
As to the escalation to the Secret Service, this guy put software on all the computers that was transmitting data to a point outside the store. Maybe it was just photos, but what if it was also data which could be used for identity theft or credit card fraud or to put the store's Macs on his botnet?
Isn't this our encounter with Sherlock Holmes, unable to see the merit in knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun? At the end of the day, if he does not subscribe to the theory that an educated person knows something other than their trade, or if he has no room for the linguistics which led Larry Wall to perl, or ascribes no value to learning about the aesthetics which motivated Donald Knuth to explore problems of computing, or care that "Alice in Wonderland" and Monty Python — with their absurdity constructed from rigorous logic — are so often referenced by computer folks, or even that the people from the field that he knows about were whip smart and could write, well, it's his life.
If the question is more accurately framed "How can I go to college without having to do college-y things?" then, why go to college? To have something on a piece of paper? To put a check on the form?
It may not help my code or my employability that I may compare and contrast John Steinbeck, Thomas Malory, and a Broadway play. I had that conversation recently, and, indeed, I did not get my points from some college course, now over 30 years from my past, but I did get a framework for discussion, for how to engage with ideas and debate and uncertainty and patterns. It may not help. It doesn't hurt.
Arthur Conan Doyle probably understood Watson and Holmes could be compared with Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. Because the stories suggest some research into and familiarity with science, psychology, and the art of medical diagnosis, it's hard to imagine that the author would have been successful had Sir Arthur limited his field of knowledge to literature featuring two male characters who embody a duality.
I think Doyle suggests that the cost of Holmes' singular focus was a miserable purposelessness which manifested in addiction when the game was not afoot. In fiction, this need not be pursued, especially as the stories were adored as puzzles and not as verisimilitude. Were Holmes real, he would have been a footnote footnoted with the sordid details of tragic dissipation. In the real world, people need the well to be refreshed, and so often the insight comes, as with Archimedes, when the mind is engaged "off-topic."
Don't go to college for the check mark, it's really the employers who care about that. Go for the experiences and ideas that one doesn't expect or that one dismisses without consideration. And do not discard the liberal arts. Those folks write, write, and write. If one doesn't go to college and write thousands and thousands of mush-headed words, one, arguably, wasted the money and most surely postponed writing the blather until the moment one's nascent career is on the line.
Isn't a student who buys a Mac and gets Office for Mac or a retail license of Windows and Office/Windows to run virtually way, way more profitable than the one who for $15-20 (the OEM's license cost) gets an XBox?
Are the Microsoft shareholders even paying attention any more?
I suppose my first thought is, just be a label, don't buy a big one. You'll overpay for their catalogs, skewed toward Boomers, and which have a plausible licensing revenue stream for twenty years. Go back to the 50s, 60s, and even 70s and you'll see the key labels for generating decades spanning artists were led by independent music and business savvy folks. (Columbia is an exception, but it had an exceptional A&R man in John Hammond.)
We are now well into the first decade of blogs. Google can catalog them and find the bloggers who first spotted the talent that is moving up the food chain. Hire them as scouts. Hire the successful independents as executives. Go back to the basics of the pre 1990s record industry. Lower advances, give the artists a greater share of revenues, and use the money to develop the artists' careers. Get them performing, performing, performing. Promote via YouTube. Be international. Rhythms melody and groove can transcend language. Open up a music store and ignore the labels' catalogs. "We are selling tomorrow not 1974." If you can't have more, have better. Don't be hung up on licensing the petty crap. Oh yeah, get licenses for uses in film and movies, but don't worry if that YouTube video just got mashed up. (The kids probably aren't saying that any more, are they?)
Funny thing is, do that, be about the music that is about to explode, and the music fans among the labels' suits will be clamoring to be part of the excitement. Probably start their own things utilizing the web and, dare we say it, Google's advertising.
Apocryphally, a lot of people get their music from YouTube. Owning the place where people know to go is such a huge first step. Take the next. Be Temps. Keep on walkin' and don't look back.
So, when Mundie was saying tablets were the fad, he really misspoke and meant to say netbooks, into which Microsoft put a fair amount of resources so as to reassert dominance over Linux.
You should note how in recent updates interpreted and compiled languages have had syntax and semantic extensions in order to assist with the concurrency and parallel problems. C++0a for C++ immediately comes to mind. Scala and Clojure both run on the jvm, so their programs may use java libraries and objects, but they use functional paradigms first and foremost. The problem with objects is mutable state, which means extra and complex overhead is required in order make sure that each thread, which may not bring the object into scope in the exact sequence the programmer intended, still gets with minimal delay the appropriate version of the object for reading or writing.
I daresay the faculty at The University of Waterloo are thinking about this.
Now, this is still the First College Programming Course problem. MIT a couple of years back changed from Scheme to python. The bright kids who are admitted to top CS schools have written lots of code before they arrive on campus. The top CS schools will still, in the course of the undergraduate program, teach OOP, procedural, assembly, and functional programming approaches, compilers, formal languages, discrete mathematics, and data structures. The freshman language is an implementation detail.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all nice, but VS and Nokia were joined a year ago and Lumia/WP7 did not set the US on fire. So let's think about this. I figure it's sales channel/carrier issues which are resolvable through one of the two taking up the spending a few notches. Unfortunately, Nokia can't afford a low margin top-end smartphone and they already have it priced under competitors' offerings. (800/900. As we know, the pricing on the 820/920 is not announced.) How much of its licensing revenue does Microsoft want to spend per phone? Both Nokia and Microsoft are doing this to grow profits and there's the dilemma. Share has to get huge fast in order to provide the volume they seek. But the more share they buy, the more volume they require in order to move the needle.
Jobs' sense of his specialness and his rush to get things done before he died was there way before the cancer was found. I rely on the Isaacson book for this tid-bit.
Meanwhile, Jobs is not Apple and Apple is not Jobs. Addictive, as in products, is a clumsy metaphor. Addictive as in meth is a physical and psychological state which reveals itself in isolation, anti-social behavior, and health decay.
Facile, featuring convenient memory holes, and poorly thought through. Yep, CNN all the way.
An acquisition of a company is not an expense, it is an exchange of one asset, cash for instance, for another. But, when making a strategic acquisition, as Microsoft did, one pays above the asset's value and the difference is booked as another type of asset called goodwill. As the new asset starts contributing profits, the goodwill is reduced by offsetting the retained earnings.
So, what are we to say about the aQuantive write down? The 2007 acquisition, using a fair amount of shareholder assets was a mistake, but, most acquisitions of this type are. I think it comes down to this, the management sold the Board on the acquisition on the basis that this was a good tactic towards the achievement of furthering their strategy of increasing Microsoft's share of the online advertising sector. Why that strategy? Because, they wanted to hurt Google.
Look at that year: the iPhone launch year. What was Google busy doing? Pivoting their nascent phone from Windows Mobile killer to iPhone competitor. They were looking ahead. Microsoft was complacent about phones — we all know the Ballmer quotes — and was spending money looking back at a sector that the same management didn't know it was losing when it happened.
So, sure, the aQuantive write down is a discrete event, and an accounting exercise regarding checks written in 2007. But the same managers who made the deal are in charge, and do we think they're learning their lessons, or are they still spending money in a futile effort to regain relevance in markets that they blew? Everyone looks at Nokia with jaundiced eye for taking Microsoft's cash, but really, shouldn't we be asking if Microsoft is spending its money wisely there? We look at quarterlies to see the trends, to see the mistakes corrected and uncorrected, to form a part of a picture about the whole. We look at Microsoft quarterlies to see if they are successfully diversifying from Windows; truth be told, they do and they don't want to make that transition. It was a bad quarter.
I think his real problem is having youtube in the domain. YouTube doesn't own the copyrights to any audio, except for the videos they author. But, I'm sure that they've trademarked their name in all jurisdictions possible.
... not all choices are expressive, merely consequential to the idea, and...
This would have been better said as "... not all choices are expressive, some are consequential to the idea, and.."
In orchestral non-vocal music, the melody is the only protectable part of the composition. So at that point, your analogy fails.
But, just to give everyone a bad analogy to abuse me for: giving protectability to the shapes and grid size is akin to giving protection to an arrangement's choice of the key of F, because that made it easier for the clarinets to perform.
Based on the linked summary of ruling, it seems the judge was convinced that the grid size constituted expression. However, as explored by Judge Alsup's recent ruling in Oracle v. Google, not all choices are expressive, merely consequential to the idea, and to extend copyright protection to these choices is to grant a back door monopoly to the ideas. I hate the histrionic hyperbolic absurdity question, so call this a nine-month early birthday present: armed with this ruling, could a terminal application developer sue others for infringement for also having used a 60 x 40 grid?
As to your essential point about the fairness of Tetris's developers not realizing their maximum revenue because heretofore the law had allowed the basics to be replicated, frankly not all idea and expression vocations are equally protected. Just ask any stand-up comic friend about their recourse for joke-stealers. My takeaway is that with games the reason that people enjoy them, the mayhem, the puzzles, the manipulation of elements, the mise-en-scene of the fantasy, etc., are fair game, meaning there is a limit to the upside, and thus development costs should be constrained. I think in the grand scheme, it's better this way. The alternative is the manifesting Line 4 having its "????????" replaced with "Sue."
And there I was back then listening to KCRW and enjoying both. I do have to admit that I preferred Joe Frank or Cafe LA as following programs. But then, I could hear Car Talk on KPCC.
Fast forward and I listen to Le Show and Car Talk on podcast. Incidentally, one Shearer's best recurring bits these days is Karzai Talk, which is more a satire on US involvement in Afghanistan than one on Click and Clack.
I think logos fall under the realm of trademarks and her enforcement right is against those who use it in such a way as to cause confusion among possible and actual customers.
Pragmatic Programmers published "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" last year. I liked the book and would recommend it for any one who wanted a taste of today's interesting languages. Over the past year, I've seen that some readers were disappointed at the language choices and some didn't like the way the author, Bruce A. Tate, selected a movie characters as shorthand descriptions for the languages' feels.
The languages: Ruby, IO, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell. As for development and runtime environments, these can be had and installed at no cost.
If I was asked to name the one language that is widely used, has immediate practicality, and the runtime is already installed on your computer, I'd pick javascript, which runs in the browser. Get a browser that has a console for reviewing javascript errors. The java part of its name is deceptive. It is quite different than java, but the 90s Netscape folks figured that that imprecision would help adoption. I'm not one to rue days, but that one could a candidate.
You didn't mention what languages you were familiar with from your consulting days. One question to be asked is whether you want to look at a language that is familiar but advanced the the ones you did work with or would you prefer to explore the other streams of language design. If you wish to write personal application and utilities, there is likely to be a language tied to your platform. For Windows, it's C#. For OS X, Objective-C. For Linux, you will have to pick a gui framework and its language.
The pressure came from investors disappointed with Microsoft's stock performance last decade. Apple hasn't had that problem in recent times.
1995 and 1997, but your basic point stands. What one could say is that after 2009, when there was a lot of cash in the bank and more was rolling in, the company could have started paying dividends and still have the cash to fund expansion, manufacturing ramp-ups, and large-order supply-chain advantages.
My FreeBSD box has to be seven or more years old. It's gone from one of the 5's through 9.0 without a reinstall. I don't use it 24/7 (but I have). Its primary purpose is to be my cvs code repository. To tech-date the system, subversion was just emerging, hence, cvs. Probably should go git.
I did use a FreeBSD system for a desktop, but this was for a year and a half around 2001. I got an iBook in September 2001, but I had already left the Windows fold for my home computing, so the desktop went FreeBSD. I do prefer OS X because of the gui integration. For a small business where I was the de facto IT guy, I used FreeBSD/squid for a web proxy and solved some huge problems with an ancient Windows SMB server at zero cost: I had used an off lease machine that was constitutionally unsuited for the business's CAD work.
Documentation for BSDs is great. I was considering a wipe and reinstall, as the path of least resistance, as I went from 8.2 to 9 yesterday, but I ate my veggies, built character, and went and looked up the step I had forgotten from the last time a version upgrade occurred. An up to date manual for FreeBSD is available at www.freebsd.org. It also is downloadable as part of the system sources and the local version is kept in sync via cvsup/make. At the site, you might find the release engineering, errata, and security update histories illuminating.
PC-BSD has some interesting ideas and I do run it virtually. It has had application sandboxing for a while, which is something I see the popular, consumer oses implementing. The project is also working on the package dependency issue and I like the way they are thinking. So, while PC-BSD is relatively new, the project keeps its kernel and userland synchronized tightly with FreeBSD. They got good folks there and I expect that its stability should be good, though not as good as FreeBSD, because of the concerns with third-party windowing parties.
Now, as I look at your summary of your problem, I'm not sure that it quite makes sense as a general question for guidance. The computers that are off-lease have to be 2 or 3 years old. You don't need seven more years from them. If you could, you'd have put Windows 7 on them. Well, PC-BSD is no more a substitute for Windows than Windows is a substitute for PC-BSD. (Yes, that's right, if one has set up a productive Unix-like environment, then Windows is a degraded experience, with quite a few "You can't get there from here." issues.) I hope this isn't a case when someone sets up a problem in order to have others offer suggestions that are swatted down, because the constraints are such that it has moved out of the power spot of the technology being discussed. Besides, the applications are far more important than the underlying os in terms of box longevity. If the cost of wiping and reinstalling saves thousands of dollars in licensing fees, well?
Any way, to summarize, you need seven more years of Windows or Windows-substitue usage from your computers and Windows 7 is too expensive, there's only to be one more wipe and reinstall, Linux doesn't help you out, and the BSDs, with their windowing systems being orthogonal to the kernel development, though very stable, may not support the applications and processor that you want to keep using. Then, I wish you good luck, because I don't think any one else other than you is trying to solve your precise problem.
So let's see, I'm running Lion and work with postgresql, which I think Apple includes with Lion now. Well, at least that's my guess: I had to figure out why 9.0.x was in /usr/bin when I had just installed 9.1.x via the OS X binary available from www.postgresql.org (which goes into /Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/. That was a few weeks back. Yesterday I wanted to work through some examples in a book and needed to add some extensions from contrib, but I couldn't see how via the binary, so I downloaded source, bunzipped, make compiled/installed, uninstalled the binary (to avoid port contention, though I could have configured my source install to not use 5432), and updated my path via .bash_profile so the local (~/bin/pg/bin) binaries would be picked up before the one in /usr/bin. Used the lib and include directories from my MacPorts environment in /opt so I'd get readline.
So, have to say, I'm confused, what's the problem with Lion again? Because I have Pixelmator through the app store, VMWare Fusion (drag .app folder to /Applications), from a brick store, postgresql from make build && make install, and I've written my own applications in Haskell (ghc-compiled) and java. It isn't the scroll thing is it, because that really isn't such a big deal. Hackintoshing?
Really.
Really? I like OS X, but I'll use FreeBSD or Linux on a computer where I don't have a license for OS X's use. Truth is, those other operating systems are better in many regards for many tasks.
And let's think about who and who isn't in the app store.
Microsoft Office isn't. If users are forbidden to install Office, all the folks who are okay with buying Macs because they can run Office stop buying Macs.
Adobe Dreamweaver isn't. Say goodbye to web designers who are taught that tool.
I see someone cued the fanboys arguing that the big lockdown won't occur. I don't see that it's likely, but the point would be that those of us who need to run applications that cannot and will not be found in the App Store will replace our Macs with machines onto which we may install our productivity things. It will probably mean that we will have regretted giving Apple those last dollars and will not give Apple any more dollars. Are we in numbers such that Apple will miss us? Not my concern. I'm trying to get things done with the least amount of friction. No one ever guaranteed me it was always going to be easy, but I appreciate it when it is.
The standard answer is that homoiconicity and functions as first-class objects combine powerfully and result in fewer lines of code. There were problems with inefficiency of its data structures and, as I've read Rich Hickey explain, the list, an implementation, instead of the sequence being the abstraction. Hickey started clojure, which is proudly a Lisp, and it was a choice and not a nod to the flavor-of-the-month.
Let me clarify. Even though I disagree with Stallman over the necessity of all things being user accessible, I appreciate the point and believe that his is an important voice to hear. It's just there's a time and place for everything and clumsy formulations such as Jobs as Mayor Daley or "malign influence on computing" are counter-productive as he tries to build the world he wants. That's his problem and I don't believe the FSF has to respond to what he says as an individual.
Well, I know some of the answer. That there is something along the lines of device freedom, though we don't ask that of the microprocessors in the microwave. (Though some clever folks have put the os of their choice on appliances.) This is an elite freedom, in that most of the world could not make use of the freedom if it was available. The ironic thing: people are putting their own code onto their iPhones and iPads, so I guess this is about Apple having to support customizations. That doesn't make sense to me.
The FSF and Apple had a kerfuffle over Objective-C and gcc over a decade ago. The FSF won and Apple became a well-behaved licensee, meeting the terms of the license. Apple didn't start talking about Communism and if they needed functionality under a different license, they got the code or wrote it. Exactly what we tell those folks who pop up now and then and try to exploit work that is available through the GPL.
Should the FSF distance itself from Stallman because of this tasteless compulsion to express a polemic with the thinnest veneer of humanism? No. Why start now?
They do do it. When you get a new system, that Windows OEM license has terms which say you infringe if you transfer it to another system, even if you've removed it from the first.
Didn't read the article, mea culpa, but how was he going to receive the photos his program took? How can Apple assume that photos are all that his application does and nothing else is transmitted or a control channel isn't opened? The Secret Service is the federal agency for investigating credit card fraud, so, they're called in, you betcha, to verify that idiot, self-entitled, privacy-hating, condescending artist is the reality and not the brilliant disguise.
Why is this marked interesting? ~/Applications/ is on the path. "Installation" is copying the executable to a directory and "running" is invoking from the command line using a fully qualified path. Put an entry in the login items and the program will run again at account login. No admin rights needed as Unix lets a user control her directories and run programs. This security hole is found every where. It's actually considered a feature, as in, "I have the right to run whatever program I want on hardware I own."
As far as a program turning on the camera, getting the stream, and turning off the camera, this is provided by the apis and I would be stunned to find that any environment, OS X, Windows, Linux, etc., would require setuid for access.
Finally, at the end — no, scratch that — at the beginning of the day for any discussion of security, the moment unfettered physical access comes up, somebody does the "Game over, man." schtick.
As to the escalation to the Secret Service, this guy put software on all the computers that was transmitting data to a point outside the store. Maybe it was just photos, but what if it was also data which could be used for identity theft or credit card fraud or to put the store's Macs on his botnet?
Isn't this our encounter with Sherlock Holmes, unable to see the merit in knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun? At the end of the day, if he does not subscribe to the theory that an educated person knows something other than their trade, or if he has no room for the linguistics which led Larry Wall to perl, or ascribes no value to learning about the aesthetics which motivated Donald Knuth to explore problems of computing, or care that "Alice in Wonderland" and Monty Python — with their absurdity constructed from rigorous logic — are so often referenced by computer folks, or even that the people from the field that he knows about were whip smart and could write, well, it's his life.
If the question is more accurately framed "How can I go to college without having to do college-y things?" then, why go to college? To have something on a piece of paper? To put a check on the form?
It may not help my code or my employability that I may compare and contrast John Steinbeck, Thomas Malory, and a Broadway play. I had that conversation recently, and, indeed, I did not get my points from some college course, now over 30 years from my past, but I did get a framework for discussion, for how to engage with ideas and debate and uncertainty and patterns. It may not help. It doesn't hurt.
Arthur Conan Doyle probably understood Watson and Holmes could be compared with Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. Because the stories suggest some research into and familiarity with science, psychology, and the art of medical diagnosis, it's hard to imagine that the author would have been successful had Sir Arthur limited his field of knowledge to literature featuring two male characters who embody a duality.
I think Doyle suggests that the cost of Holmes' singular focus was a miserable purposelessness which manifested in addiction when the game was not afoot. In fiction, this need not be pursued, especially as the stories were adored as puzzles and not as verisimilitude. Were Holmes real, he would have been a footnote footnoted with the sordid details of tragic dissipation. In the real world, people need the well to be refreshed, and so often the insight comes, as with Archimedes, when the mind is engaged "off-topic."
Don't go to college for the check mark, it's really the employers who care about that. Go for the experiences and ideas that one doesn't expect or that one dismisses without consideration. And do not discard the liberal arts. Those folks write, write, and write. If one doesn't go to college and write thousands and thousands of mush-headed words, one, arguably, wasted the money and most surely postponed writing the blather until the moment one's nascent career is on the line.
Isn't a student who buys a Mac and gets Office for Mac or a retail license of Windows and Office/Windows to run virtually way, way more profitable than the one who for $15-20 (the OEM's license cost) gets an XBox?
Are the Microsoft shareholders even paying attention any more?
I suppose my first thought is, just be a label, don't buy a big one. You'll overpay for their catalogs, skewed toward Boomers, and which have a plausible licensing revenue stream for twenty years. Go back to the 50s, 60s, and even 70s and you'll see the key labels for generating decades spanning artists were led by independent music and business savvy folks. (Columbia is an exception, but it had an exceptional A&R man in John Hammond.)
We are now well into the first decade of blogs. Google can catalog them and find the bloggers who first spotted the talent that is moving up the food chain. Hire them as scouts. Hire the successful independents as executives. Go back to the basics of the pre 1990s record industry. Lower advances, give the artists a greater share of revenues, and use the money to develop the artists' careers. Get them performing, performing, performing. Promote via YouTube. Be international. Rhythms melody and groove can transcend language. Open up a music store and ignore the labels' catalogs. "We are selling tomorrow not 1974." If you can't have more, have better. Don't be hung up on licensing the petty crap. Oh yeah, get licenses for uses in film and movies, but don't worry if that YouTube video just got mashed up. (The kids probably aren't saying that any more, are they?)
Funny thing is, do that, be about the music that is about to explode, and the music fans among the labels' suits will be clamoring to be part of the excitement. Probably start their own things utilizing the web and, dare we say it, Google's advertising.
Apocryphally, a lot of people get their music from YouTube. Owning the place where people know to go is such a huge first step. Take the next. Be Temps. Keep on walkin' and don't look back.
So, when Mundie was saying tablets were the fad, he really misspoke and meant to say netbooks, into which Microsoft put a fair amount of resources so as to reassert dominance over Linux.
You should note how in recent updates interpreted and compiled languages have had syntax and semantic extensions in order to assist with the concurrency and parallel problems. C++0a for C++ immediately comes to mind. Scala and Clojure both run on the jvm, so their programs may use java libraries and objects, but they use functional paradigms first and foremost. The problem with objects is mutable state, which means extra and complex overhead is required in order make sure that each thread, which may not bring the object into scope in the exact sequence the programmer intended, still gets with minimal delay the appropriate version of the object for reading or writing.
I daresay the faculty at The University of Waterloo are thinking about this.
Now, this is still the First College Programming Course problem. MIT a couple of years back changed from Scheme to python. The bright kids who are admitted to top CS schools have written lots of code before they arrive on campus. The top CS schools will still, in the course of the undergraduate program, teach OOP, procedural, assembly, and functional programming approaches, compilers, formal languages, discrete mathematics, and data structures. The freshman language is an implementation detail.