The viriginia folks must have one huge room with some massive air handlers to circulate the air that will be trapped behind the towering walls of 1000 4U boxes.
A few years ago I asked apple if they would be willing to sell me 200 laptops without the screens, disks, video cards, and keyboards. They were interested helping me build my cluster but, the the engineers said it would actually cost them more to have a special manufacturing run than woul dbe saved by deleting the hardware.
my plan was stack these things on water cooled chill plates. Basically this would be like a blade.
In my circumstances, adding a well ventilated computer room to the building I was in would have been probibitively expensive. but water cooling and a high density configuration made this very appealing. And if I could have gotten the costs down and reliability up by deleting the screens, keyboard, video, and disks I'd have an affordable system with low sys-admin costs.
I still think its a good idea. Cooling/power costs (including building retrofits) and sys admin costs can dominate the differential purchase price of vairous cluster configurations. In my building the space alone was >120/sq foot, so even the footprint mattered.
ECC memory too. And never forget the costs of installing these puppies. Cooling systems, power busses, cable harnesses, UPS, Diesel backups, Air filtering, locks, redundant parts. and what about the disk servers....
The airplanes displacement of air creates pressure waves. For a given velocity and displacement there is going to be a certain amount of energy and momentum that is transfered to the air. this is usually called sound and you can hear an feel it.
now under special conditions the sound waves all pile up making one giant pressure sheer, the shock front.
to the extent that you can disperse the shock front then the boom is indeed disperesed. You have not however eliminated the energy dumped into the air. But the "boom" is gone.
that's what this article is saying I beleive.
The really cool part of this is that its like to old adage about genius taking many steps. first everyone believes that something cannot be done. then some fool shows it might be not be impossible. then a scientist shows it is theoretically possible, and finally some engineer shows how to do it. Then it seems obvious
now that we have crossed the threshold of knowing that its possible to break the sound barrier without a sonic boom we can now get on with wondering if maybe the remaining waves could be modified in other ways, like directing all the sonic energy up and not down, minimizing it or maximally dispersing it. its now on the table.
It reminds me of discovery of negaitve index of refraction or of "optical bullets". At a certain optical power density the plasma of electrons stripped from air creates a non-linear lens that focuses a light beam in both time and space down to a stable optical pulse that neither diffracts nor diverges for macroscopic distances (hundred of meters till it runs out of energy). Now that is pretty weird since if you ask anyone who knows anything about light they will tell you that the two most fundamental proerties of waves propagation in media are dispersion and diffraction. Thus optical bullets are a form of electormagnetic farfield propagation that is not like a light wave. Negative index of refraction destroys another myth that light cant be focused smaller than a wavelength without non-linear methods.
so now we have yet another wave propagation myth falling, that when the speed of an aobject passes the wave speed in the media that a shock front is created.
just to go off on wacky extrapolation for a moment, I will point out that there is a close connection between the idea of a shock front and the idea that faster than light travel is impossible. Perhaps we can disperse that "light cone" and bend time some day.
As has been noted these routers are not plug and forget. YOu do need to apply patches . you need to know your new drivers will work with what ever version of OS and other software you are using. And frankly you need a freindly GUI interface so you know you aren't doing something stupid when you infrequently have to remember how to maintain your system.
hence apple airports are well worth the $50 premium you pay for them. The Apple software update will come with patches as needed for your security. You dont need to go looking, your apple will automatically get them the the moment they become available. You just have to run them. And you can be sure the apple updates will work well and not screw up your otherwise stable system. And the maintinence of the system is a freindly gui.
Since it will run i86 Linux I guess it could run WINE on top of that. Then I could run cygwin on top of that!
Now if only I had a PPC emulator for i86 Windows, then I could run mac OSX on top of my WINE running on Linux Running on Boch running on OSX. I could then have it running mac Classic and emulate my 68000 processor that emulated my Atari 6502.
Finally I'll fire up a web browser, kick back and re-read Nick Bostroms "you are almost certainly living in a simulation" web page.
The only problem would be not knowing which window to close when I was done.
1) start spammer freindly chat room 2) wait for membership to build trust 3) "Accidentally" post membership on slashdot. 4) submit private e-mail addresses to other spammers. 5) repeat. no rest for the wicked.
but seriously, do you think that maybe these spammers are really sort of victims of a multi-level marketing scam themselves. "here for 300$ you can buy this software and a list of names that will get you started in the exciting field of spamming. PLUS
you will own these lists and software with the rights to resell it to others. You cant lose just like the thousands before you!!".
and on and on it goes each chump-would-be-spam-king desperately recruiting ten more, making a few bucks, and down the pyraimd we go. the ones at the bottom lose but by them we have an avalanche of spam. Every assumes theres money in it since why else would they keep doing it....
Even a century ago people were building clocks that were powered by changes in air pressure. My alpine skis have LEDs mounted in them that are powered by peizo vibrations. And think geek sells a faraday flashlight powered by shaking it.
Thank you. that was exactly the intelligent response I was looking for to my original post. Would be nice if someome could hang some flesh on the points you raise.why is the registry model less secure than whatever its unix countepart is (xinit.d?) and why is a.dll less secure than a shared library or run time linking in java? As for a lack of sudo, this can easily be handles as Apple does with their security framework and dialog boxes to mometarilty elevate to root priv.
Reading the article it sounds to me as though MS is going to take a few obvious steps. 1) firewall on by default or equivalent 2) Separate Securtiy updates from feature updates so that sys admins will be less reluctant to apply them to stable reference platforms. 3) make the system default to autoupdate so that nearly all desktops will be patched. 4) "Behavior Limitation". By which I assume he means something like requiring root privliledges for some operations, and not making the user root by default.
If they do all this, and it sounds like they will, then it would seem that Windows will soar past Linux in security. Because Microsoft controls the entirety of their "distro" they will be able to have a robust patching mechanism that GNU/Linux with its highly custom configs wont be able to do (robustly at least). Moreover MS is mocing towards an instituinalized formal system for checking every line of code for sommon security errors like buffer overflows. Linux/GNU is dependent on developers checking theirt own code and the results will vary, and exerience will not be instituionalized.
Sure they've gotten hammered but the comment lament on Slashdot is that "boy they are dumb. if they just did a few simple things this would not happen. linux Rulez". Well apparently they are goinf to do a few simple things and a few more. How is the Linux desktop market (aka common user) ever going to succeed if it cant match the future windows for security.
Can someone please explain why after these changes Linux is somehow intrisically better than Windows has the potential to becomein terms of security?
This is a legitimate question, flamers will just be proving my point.
Given this is close to half the housholds in america, and is only the people with the energy to actually make the effort to register, it seem pretty clear that the default assumption should be opt-out not opt-in. Indeed I cant think of a clearey more convincing way to demonstrate this than this very fact.
The needs to be a national please-phone-spam me list. you could even make it valuable to telemarketers and raise money too by
1) selling this list to them. 2) having sub categories on the list for various types of calls the recipiuent welcomes such as
i) get rich quick ii) Roofing companies only in your area this week iii) "free" vacations in a condo time share. iiii) changing your phone company iv) call me if I'm already an instant winner
interestingly, The Virus had a GPL licence
on
Blaster Writer Caught
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It turns out the virus had been released under a GPL licence. It was open source. The kid made some changes so he was REQUIRED by the GPL to release them.
But you are of course obliged to make a good faith efferot test your software and make sure it does not have simple bugs, compiles and runs before you release it. The kid was obviously just releasing his testing his changes prior to releasing the source as he was required to do under the GPL.
all viruses should be GPL. THen bill gates will really be right.
The idea of a ralph nader style accountability is a interesting one. the core argument would be that Windows did not follow minimal safe computing standards and that they knew this. Subpeona of e-mail and memos would probably prove the latter, expert testamony would establish the former.
but who would take the case? Not the government. And any Civil alwsuit would probebly not beable to get the subpeona it needs since no jusge is going to let just any lawyer go on a fishing expedition in MS files.
still would be nice to see Rlaph write a book with the same title as the pinto
I just spent 3 hours removing an ancient virus (backdoor) that showed up on a freinds windows machine. I was astonished it took me that long. THe problem Norton Util would say it found a virus but not saw where the files were, the info on their website was out of date since the virus was using new file names now, and if you did not get the right combination of "restore mode off, safe mode on" before scanning you had to do it over. And this was on a computer that "said" it was up-to-date on patches and virus definitions. grrrr
"double taxation" is sort of rush limbaugh-esque sound byte myth. in most states you pay property tax every year. when you get paid a dollar and use it to buy a soda, that dollar has had FICA deductedm then Fed tax deducted, then State tax deducted, then you paid sales tax.
taxes are taxes. there is no such concept as "double taxation".
the only important thing about taxation is to realize it can be also used as a policy tool. As a rule one should seek to minimize its influence on societal decisions, and secondarily to only encourage changes that are universally agreed as good ideas, and finally it should avoid singling out minority groups. For example, smoker taxes are good in the sense that they can act decrease health care costs and lower costs to hotels and others where smoke causes problems, but they are bad in the sense that it singles out a small group.
the best policy to achieve socially neutral taxation is to spread taxes around so make a basket of consumption, luxury, production taxes, property and resource usage taxes. Also its better to have a tax system biased towards being progressive than regressive since there is a dimnishing marginal utility for money.
It looks like taking 5 years to plan a new OS from scratch is _finally_ paying off.
of course there was that period where steve jobs was sent off to wander in the wilderness of NeXT. being a NeXT owner it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.
of course its not really a beach ball. its really a spinning magneto optical disk. a what??? yep the very first next shipped with a magento optical disk as its main drive. It truly sucked (speed wise) and vanished from later editions. (applications launched so slowly you often ended up double and triple launching multiple instances as you clicked on the icon over and over--that probably also one reason why the apple icons hop and can only be launched once). I've always enjoyed the subtle irony of the spinning beachball.
in any case in the next day, NeXT created one of the best RAD gui tool kit ever invented, and a new language to go along with it (objective-C). and gave them away. lots of little groovy app, not major ones, showed up as a result. anyone could make a calculator or an interface to gnuplot. Oh yeah, there was one or two major ones: Mosaic and Zilla (Zilla was not related to 'mozilla', today the modern term for Zilla is 'Grid Computing'. So this strategy of making awesome developmer tools is not new
Its also clear that given how much the mac of today echos its NeXT look and feel (the file browser, the dock, netInfo, three button mice, DisplayPostscript/pdf, cube shaped computers, and of course BSD unix) that not a whole lot of development has happend since its first incarnation. In other words Steve jobs vision got slowed down and only now its taking root and flourishing
playing "what if", would we be further along if he had not cast out? one might speculate that he had to wait for technology to come along. but remember tim bernardslee invented the World wide web to justify buying a NeXT Station, we had postscript, mime e-mail, good sound cards, ethernet,giant screens, and cube shaped computers back in the hey days of NeXT. so maybe we'd be further along indeed if so much time had not been lost.
indeed I think the reason Jobs performance now seems so amazing now is not because is doing anything different but rather because MS and the beigebox makers did not seize the opportunity to innovate during his absence from the scene. the world did not eclipse Jobs it just waited for him to return and lead the way again, showing how to be an early adopter, how to integrate ideas cleverly, and how to tame Unix on the desktop. He didn't have to leap frog his way to the front. he was amazingly enough still there with his NeXT technology. Nothing in principle Sun or MS or IBM could not have done while he was out. BeOS might have been the only one who actually tried, but it was too little too late.
I wonder why apple and jobs seem to be the source of all computer creativity?
I'm one of those folks that prefers tcsh. I like my shell dumbed down a bit since its easier to remember how to use it. I'm a scientist so some times I'm intensively programming but other time I might go away for a year and do non-computer stuff. Its easy to forget stuff when you dont use it all the time.
tcsh is a tad easier to work with. yes its less powerful but most of the time i dont need the power and would gladly trade for the simpler syntax and even more gladly trade uniformity for customization.
it seem to me that making the default shell tcsh and letting power users change it to bash if they want might bave been a better alternative. also considering that all my scripts will now break under the defaults its not so good for me.
If they use water as the media then it sounds like a nice warm environment where some sort of bacteria might be able to live if it could find a food source. (see of example nylon and volatile organic molecule eating bacteria)
if you left your computer off and the population got large emough then when you switched it on the pump would clog. the pore size is 1 micron. which means a lot of bugs will get wedged in the pores.
viruses would pass through the filter. so maybe the way to keep the bacterial population down wold be load the water up with viruses that kill bacteria.
this of course is just ludicrous speculation. and lots of reasons why it might even be gibberish.
the fact is that the only crimminals that get caught are the stupid ones. hence if you try to infer that crimminals are stupid based on only the sample that were caught you will come to the wrong conclusion. It's like proving that birds cant actually fly by counting only the ones you find on the ground. the smart crimminals dont get caught so you dont know they exist.
why not put the virus fixing script on the 19 computers, plus some choice words about MS security and the need to patch.
IN fact why not have the virus download a patch that installs a daemon that periodically installs all MS patches. anyone who is too dumb to deactivate it needs to have it installed. its a self -selecting fix
Are macs inherentnly more secure?
on the one hand apple does not seem to do a lot of stupid things like VBS, and ActiveX and auto execute scripts in Outlook and Word. MS totally overlooked the security models when creating features and convenience. and unfortunatley they have done it again with C#.
thus its clear MS is cavelier.
On the other hand keeping unix secure is truly hard work. there are lots of dark alleys few sys admins really know about and the development is distributed so one has to trust an awful ot of people.
I fear keeping my linux systems patch and basically just rely on aa fire wall.
with macs I know that 1) a single entitiy has considered the system as whole and tries to keep everyone having the same config (redhat susue, united linux encourage highly modified configurations). and 2) because of this and their large commercial market share they have an excellent pathc distribution system that does not seem to break your computer.
thus macs I think actually have reasons they are more secure. and I believe apple is managing security better than MS.
boy those twinkies sure looked good but now I feel sick to my stomach. wish I could have my time back and my money back too.
Next time I'll just steal them.
Its not really stealing y'know, cause if I like them then next time i'll pay for them so really the twinky folks will make money this way. It costs them almost nothing to kake those things y'know so its really not stealling since I think they over charge. The fact that I'm willing to pay that much for them doesn't really mean they are worth that. common sense.
Oh and the reason I had to eat the whole box I did buy was that since I had already paid my money I did not want to stop in the middle of it even though I already know I would not like it.
what was my point. Oh yeah everything should be free, I dont need to use my judgement, I never learn from my mistakes or take steps to avoid them, and its all about me. music video and twinkies all free to me. yeah that's it.
if people cant make stuff I like it should be free.
Can some informed person speculate as to what the purpose of a PC card is in the day of Firewire800? Does a PC card have better bus access or something? Is it a form factor issue (e.g. its not dangling but is sort of part of the laptop?) With laptops getting smaller and PC-cards tending to get larger and bulging outside the chasis, the form factor issue looks less distinct to me. so why PC cards?
your're kidding right? using a database rather than spewing custom format poorly documented text config files, how is that not an imporvement?. the data base allows reporducible installs and uninstalls, extensibility, remote admin, and automated scripting that hand edited text files could never be counted on to perform reilably (e.g. I edit a config script and now my custom perl sys admin tool cant properly edit it). also apparently you are not aware that the apple system does support most of the test based config files as an extention to netinfo and that using nidump and niload you can workd with the data base in those formats if you cant figure out how to use a database. finally even apple is relegating netinfo to the past and moving on to ldap like systems.
X11 is not a modern windows system. and its not approriate to the apple model either with all its hidden text file tweaks. In use its pretty good but quartz is much better it would appear (I only can observe the finished product not the nuts and bolts).
as for mach-O they have laready proven their worth in the seemless portability of next code across multiple platforms and cpu. ELF was not as mature as it is now when NeXT was derived from BSD, so its not a evil conspiracy but a rational choice they made to free themselves to make a seemless platform without having to keep it compatible with a hodgepodge of non standard ELF binaries. why should apple abandon a proven success now.
Slashdot Mirror
Man they really blew it. They should have ordered it from macmall. it would have come with 1000 free printers and 1000 ipod cases.
A few years ago I asked apple if they would be willing to sell me 200 laptops without the screens, disks, video cards, and keyboards. They were interested helping me build my cluster but, the the engineers said it would actually cost them more to have a special manufacturing run than woul dbe saved by deleting the hardware.
my plan was stack these things on water cooled chill plates. Basically this would be like a blade.
In my circumstances, adding a well ventilated computer room to the building I was in would have been probibitively expensive. but water cooling and a high density configuration made this very appealing. And if I could have gotten the costs down and reliability up by deleting the screens, keyboard, video, and disks I'd have an affordable system with low sys-admin costs.
I still think its a good idea. Cooling/power costs (including building retrofits) and sys admin costs can dominate the differential purchase price of vairous cluster configurations. In my building the space alone was >120/sq foot, so even the footprint mattered.
ECC memory too.
And never forget the costs of installing these puppies. Cooling systems, power busses, cable harnesses, UPS, Diesel backups, Air filtering, locks, redundant parts.
and what about the disk servers....
now under special conditions the sound waves all pile up making one giant pressure sheer, the shock front.
to the extent that you can disperse the shock front then the boom is indeed disperesed. You have not however eliminated the energy dumped into the air. But the "boom" is gone.
that's what this article is saying I beleive.
The really cool part of this is that its like to old adage about genius taking many steps. first everyone believes that something cannot be done. then some fool shows it might be not be impossible. then a scientist shows it is theoretically possible, and finally some engineer shows how to do it. Then it seems obvious
now that we have crossed the threshold of knowing that its possible to break the sound barrier without a sonic boom we can now get on with wondering if maybe the remaining waves could be modified in other ways, like directing all the sonic energy up and not down, minimizing it or maximally dispersing it. its now on the table.
It reminds me of discovery of negaitve index of refraction or of "optical bullets". At a certain optical power density the plasma of electrons stripped from air creates a non-linear lens that focuses a light beam in both time and space down to a stable optical pulse that neither diffracts nor diverges for macroscopic distances (hundred of meters till it runs out of energy). Now that is pretty weird since if you ask anyone who knows anything about light they will tell you that the two most fundamental proerties of waves propagation in media are dispersion and diffraction. Thus optical bullets are a form of electormagnetic farfield propagation that is not like a light wave. Negative index of refraction destroys another myth that light cant be focused smaller than a wavelength without non-linear methods.
so now we have yet another wave propagation myth falling, that when the speed of an aobject passes the wave speed in the media that a shock front is created.
just to go off on wacky extrapolation for a moment, I will point out that there is a close connection between the idea of a shock front and the idea that faster than light travel is impossible. Perhaps we can disperse that "light cone" and bend time some day.
hence apple airports are well worth the $50 premium you pay for them. The Apple software update will come with patches as needed for your security. You dont need to go looking, your apple will automatically get them the the moment they become available. You just have to run them. And you can be sure the apple updates will work well and not screw up your otherwise stable system. And the maintinence of the system is a freindly gui.
Now if only I had a PPC emulator for i86 Windows, then I could run mac OSX on top of my WINE running on Linux Running on Boch running on OSX. I could then have it running mac Classic and emulate my 68000 processor that emulated my Atari 6502.
Finally I'll fire up a web browser, kick back and re-read Nick Bostroms "you are almost certainly living in a simulation" web page.
The only problem would be not knowing which window to close when I was done.
1) start spammer freindly chat room
2) wait for membership to build trust
3) "Accidentally" post membership on slashdot.
4) submit private e-mail addresses to other spammers.
5) repeat. no rest for the wicked.
but seriously, do you think that maybe these spammers are really sort of victims of a multi-level marketing scam themselves. "here for 300$ you can buy this software and a list of names that will get you started in the exciting field of spamming.
PLUS
you will own these lists and software with the rights to resell it to others. You cant lose just like the thousands before you!!".
and on and on it goes each chump-would-be-spam-king desperately recruiting ten more, making a few bucks, and down the pyraimd we go. the ones at the bottom lose but by them we have an avalanche of spam. Every assumes theres money in it since why else would they keep doing it....
Actually windows does have admin and user levels. they just need to figure out how to implement a sudo-like framework.
Even a century ago people were building clocks that were powered by changes in air pressure. My alpine skis have LEDs mounted in them that are powered by peizo vibrations. And think geek sells a faraday flashlight powered by shaking it.
Thank you. that was exactly the intelligent response I was looking for to my original post. Would be nice if someome could hang some flesh on the points you raise.why is the registry model less secure than whatever its unix countepart is (xinit.d?) and why is a .dll less secure than a shared library or run time linking in java? As for a lack of sudo, this can easily be handles as Apple does with their security framework and dialog boxes to mometarilty elevate to root priv.
1) firewall on by default or equivalent
2) Separate Securtiy updates from feature updates so that sys admins will be less reluctant to apply them to stable reference platforms.
3) make the system default to autoupdate so that nearly all desktops will be patched.
4) "Behavior Limitation". By which I assume he means something like requiring root privliledges for some operations, and not making the user root by default.
If they do all this, and it sounds like they will, then it would seem that Windows will soar past Linux in security. Because Microsoft controls the entirety of their "distro" they will be able to have a robust patching mechanism that GNU/Linux with its highly custom configs wont be able to do (robustly at least). Moreover MS is mocing towards an instituinalized formal system for checking every line of code for sommon security errors like buffer overflows. Linux/GNU is dependent on developers checking theirt own code and the results will vary, and exerience will not be instituionalized.
Sure they've gotten hammered but the comment lament on Slashdot is that "boy they are dumb. if they just did a few simple things this would not happen. linux Rulez". Well apparently they are goinf to do a few simple things and a few more. How is the Linux desktop market (aka common user) ever going to succeed if it cant match the future windows for security.
Can someone please explain why after these changes Linux is somehow intrisically better than Windows has the potential to becomein terms of security?
This is a legitimate question, flamers will just be proving my point.
Dude, This site may help you understand the nature of software ownership enforcement
The needs to be a national please-phone-spam me list. you could even make it valuable to telemarketers and raise money too by
1) selling this list to them.
2) having sub categories on the list for various types of calls the recipiuent welcomes such as
i) get rich quick
ii) Roofing companies only in your area this week
iii) "free" vacations in a condo time share.
iiii) changing your phone company
iv) call me if I'm already an instant winner
But you are of course obliged to make a good faith efferot test your software and make sure it does not have simple bugs, compiles and runs before you release it. The kid was obviously just releasing his testing his changes prior to releasing the source as he was required to do under the GPL.
all viruses should be GPL. THen bill gates will really be right.
but who would take the case? Not the government. And any Civil alwsuit would probebly not beable to get the subpeona it needs since no jusge is going to let just any lawyer go on a fishing expedition in MS files.
still would be nice to see Rlaph write a book with the same title as the pinto
I just spent 3 hours removing an ancient virus (backdoor) that showed up on a freinds windows machine. I was astonished it took me that long. THe problem Norton Util would say it found a virus but not saw where the files were, the info on their website was out of date since the virus was using new file names now, and if you did not get the right combination of "restore mode off, safe mode on" before scanning you had to do it over. And this was on a computer that "said" it was up-to-date on patches and virus definitions. grrrr
taxes are taxes. there is no such concept as "double taxation".
the only important thing about taxation is to realize it can be also used as a policy tool. As a rule one should seek to minimize its influence on societal decisions, and secondarily to only encourage changes that are universally agreed as good ideas, and finally it should avoid singling out minority groups. For example, smoker taxes are good in the sense that they can act decrease health care costs and lower costs to hotels and others where smoke causes problems, but they are bad in the sense that it singles out a small group.
the best policy to achieve socially neutral taxation is to spread taxes around so make a basket of consumption, luxury, production taxes, property and resource usage taxes. Also its better to have a tax system biased towards being progressive than regressive since there is a dimnishing marginal utility for money.
of course there was that period where steve jobs was sent off to wander in the wilderness of NeXT. being a NeXT owner it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.
of course its not really a beach ball. its really a spinning magneto optical disk. a what??? yep the very first next shipped with a magento optical disk as its main drive. It truly sucked (speed wise) and vanished from later editions. (applications launched so slowly you often ended up double and triple launching multiple instances as you clicked on the icon over and over--that probably also one reason why the apple icons hop and can only be launched once). I've always enjoyed the subtle irony of the spinning beachball.
in any case in the next day, NeXT created one of the best RAD gui tool kit ever invented, and a new language to go along with it (objective-C). and gave them away. lots of little groovy app, not major ones, showed up as a result. anyone could make a calculator or an interface to gnuplot. Oh yeah, there was one or two major ones: Mosaic and Zilla (Zilla was not related to 'mozilla', today the modern term for Zilla is 'Grid Computing'. So this strategy of making awesome developmer tools is not new
Its also clear that given how much the mac of today echos its NeXT look and feel (the file browser, the dock, netInfo, three button mice, DisplayPostscript/pdf, cube shaped computers, and of course BSD unix) that not a whole lot of development has happend since its first incarnation. In other words Steve jobs vision got slowed down and only now its taking root and flourishing
playing "what if", would we be further along if he had not cast out? one might speculate that he had to wait for technology to come along. but remember tim bernardslee invented the World wide web to justify buying a NeXT Station, we had postscript, mime e-mail, good sound cards, ethernet,giant screens, and cube shaped computers back in the hey days of NeXT. so maybe we'd be further along indeed if so much time had not been lost.
indeed I think the reason Jobs performance now seems so amazing now is not because is doing anything different but rather because MS and the beigebox makers did not seize the opportunity to innovate during his absence from the scene. the world did not eclipse Jobs it just waited for him to return and lead the way again, showing how to be an early adopter, how to integrate ideas cleverly, and how to tame Unix on the desktop. He didn't have to leap frog his way to the front. he was amazingly enough still there with his NeXT technology. Nothing in principle Sun or MS or IBM could not have done while he was out. BeOS might have been the only one who actually tried, but it was too little too late.
I wonder why apple and jobs seem to be the source of all computer creativity?
tcsh is a tad easier to work with. yes its less powerful but most of the time i dont need the power and would gladly trade for the simpler syntax and even more gladly trade uniformity for customization.
it seem to me that making the default shell tcsh and letting power users change it to bash if they want might bave been a better alternative. also considering that all my scripts will now break under the defaults its not so good for me.
if you left your computer off and the population got large emough then when you switched it on the pump would clog. the pore size is 1 micron. which means a lot of bugs will get wedged in the pores.
viruses would pass through the filter. so maybe the way to keep the bacterial population down wold be load the water up with viruses that kill bacteria.
this of course is just ludicrous speculation. and lots of reasons why it might even be gibberish.
the fact is that the only crimminals that get caught are the stupid ones. hence if you try to infer that crimminals are stupid based on only the sample that were caught you will come to the wrong conclusion. It's like proving that birds cant actually fly by counting only the ones you find on the ground. the smart crimminals dont get caught so you dont know they exist.
IN fact why not have the virus download a patch that installs a daemon that periodically installs all MS patches. anyone who is too dumb to deactivate it needs to have it installed. its a self -selecting fix
thus its clear MS is cavelier.
On the other hand keeping unix secure is truly hard work. there are lots of dark alleys few sys admins really know about and the development is distributed so one has to trust an awful ot of people.
I fear keeping my linux systems patch and basically just rely on aa fire wall.
with macs I know that 1) a single entitiy has considered the system as whole and tries to keep everyone having the same config (redhat susue, united linux encourage highly modified configurations). and 2) because of this and their large commercial market share they have an excellent pathc distribution system that does not seem to break your computer.
thus macs I think actually have reasons they are more secure. and I believe apple is managing security better than MS.
Next time I'll just steal them.
Its not really stealing y'know, cause if I like them then next time i'll pay for them so really the twinky folks will make money this way. It costs them almost nothing to kake those things y'know so its really not stealling since I think they over charge. The fact that I'm willing to pay that much for them doesn't really mean they are worth that. common sense.
Oh and the reason I had to eat the whole box I did buy was that since I had already paid my money I did not want to stop in the middle of it even though I already know I would not like it.
what was my point. Oh yeah everything should be free, I dont need to use my judgement, I never learn from my mistakes or take steps to avoid them, and its all about me. music video and twinkies all free to me. yeah that's it.
if people cant make stuff I like it should be free.
Can some informed person speculate as to what the purpose of a PC card is in the day of Firewire800? Does a PC card have better bus access or something? Is it a form factor issue (e.g. its not dangling but is sort of part of the laptop?) With laptops getting smaller and PC-cards tending to get larger and bulging outside the chasis, the form factor issue looks less distinct to me. so why PC cards?
X11 is not a modern windows system. and its not approriate to the apple model either with all its hidden text file tweaks. In use its pretty good but quartz is much better it would appear (I only can observe the finished product not the nuts and bolts).
as for mach-O they have laready proven their worth in the seemless portability of next code across multiple platforms and cpu. ELF was not as mature as it is now when NeXT was derived from BSD, so its not a evil conspiracy but a rational choice they made to free themselves to make a seemless platform without having to keep it compatible with a hodgepodge of non standard ELF binaries. why should apple abandon a proven success now.