John's review was very thorough, as usual. While the Mac enthusiast is bound to disagree with his overall sentiment, I think the review is a must-read for the deeply entrenched Linux fan.
I do think that he began picking at nits somewhat (who cares if people call it Jag-Wire), and ultimately, he drew all of his 10.2 comparisons on a combination of the earlier incarnations of itself (like 10.1) and some unknown ethereal ideal (like "PerfectOS, version 3").
The charts on window server performance with Quartz Extreme were pretty neat, and while the review does not offer an exhaustive look at Jaguar's new features, the information offered was remarkably detailed and helpful, which allows readers to draw their own conclusions.
I was really hoping to see more comparisons of OS X versus other Linux flavors, or even Windows or Solaris. Instead, the review often sounded almost adversarial and at least reactionary, which I could personally do without. Whether or not he had an axe to grind, John is a very talented writer and computer savant. This lengthy review is worth your time to read.
Being in the "public sector" means more than working for a cash-strapped university or in the IT department of a free clinic. There really is a decent wage to be made in the public sector; the key is to make sure that the government is your customer as well as your employer. I'm talking about the incredible world of government contracts.
If you work for a gov't contractor or you bid on gov't contracts yourself, you have excellent chances of being paid top dollar for your position. You're kind of a hybrid cross between public and private sector; the government is your "employer," so you often get many of the perquisites, especially if you network appropriately; however, you're a private company, and once the contract has been fulfilled, you can move on to something else, if you'd like. Defense contracts can be especially attractive, and once you have a gov't project under your belt, you can be fairly confident to find future work.
I don't dispute anything you've said; in fact, I share your viewpoint. I am also deeply entrenched in the server-side world of web programming, and I tend to get a chuckle at the mindless banter of the uninformed when it comes to the whole "Mac versus PC" thing.
If I had an argument to offer in regard to webserver preference (which I really couldn't care less), I would say that when Grandma Newbie decides to try her hand at building and hosting her website, she would be much better off with WebSTAR than almost anything else. It's not a server that is easy to malign.
Here's a case-in-point--a Mac-savvy friend of mine decided to try learning Active Server Pages. He dusted off an old copy of Windows NT Server, and he configured ftp services and IIS. He called me after one week and said, "I think I've got some weird virus."
The free space on his 40GB RAID had all but disappeared. It turns out that a hacker group had turned his anonymous ftp server into a private partition and totally filled it with warez. I thought it was a pretty neat hack, if it hadn't been such a dirty thing for someone to do.:P
Now, this guy is not a computer newbie. He did just what you'd expect a beginner to do. It was a very common newbie mistake.
WebSTAR (or classic MacOS) simply won't allow that kind of malice. Grandma Newbie isn't going to ignorantly or accidentally configure a server with security holes, something that's dangerously easy to do with IIS, and slightly less so with Apache.
The point that I would argue is that WebSTAR on MacOS is much more secure than any other mainstream web server. It's not for everyone, but it really is the perfect solution for nearly every web enfant-- including, apparently, the United States Army.
...a big problem with the original message I responded to was the implication that other servers couldn't be configured to be as secure. That, I dispute strongly. None of the servers I maintain have ever been hacked, even when boxes on either side of them have been. I know of many other servers that have never been hacked. The way to be secure is to have an understanding of what makes you secure...
There. You just proved my point. Serving over the public net is a game not for the timid, and your personal cache of knowledge protects you from mindless or careless misconfiguration. The ones that aren't armed with your knowledge are gonna get hurt. It's kind of like a freestyle biker saying, "dude, those Cannondales suck." Well, they don't suck, but they won't perform the way that the radical exhibitionist is expecting.
Just because you can perform freestyle backflips with your server doesn't mean that everyone could, or should (a point that I'm confident you stipulate).
Mac OS web servers have extremely limited functionality, therefore are more secure by default.
Please give me a list--or even one example--of the "limited functionality" of MacOS 9.1 running WebSTAR, versus, say Red Hat running Apache. I want to know which features don't exist between the two. Hell, I'll even make it easy for you. Compare the differences of the Macintosh server that I described to a Netscape Enterprise server on Solaris. You seem like you're just mindlessly bashing Macs. If that's true, it's okay with me; I just want to know if this is an informed opinion or a troll.
Mac OS web servers are not widely used, and are thus not targets for attacks.
Are Mac OS web servers common? Not even. I think that there are something like 0.06% of the market uses WebSTAR. We're talking maybe 30-100,000 servers worldwide. So, I don't dispute that point. Are they secure? There is only one U.S. Gold Depository, not a hundred million. That doesn't make it any more or less easy to break in. However, many have made the claim that the Treasury vault in Fort Knox, Kentucky is impenetrable. My point is that the numbers have no relevance at all. Whether there is one Mac webserver or one hundred million, secure is secure is secure.
Try coming up with a way to hack a Mac webserver. Go ahead. Get a team of script kiddies together and go after a Mac running WebSTAR. Dude, I spent six months in college trying to defeat a hacker challenge posted on a Finnish newsgroup, and I couldn't get that mother to break. I'm still quite bitter about it, actually.
Hacking a Mac webserver ranks up there with proving Fermat's Last Theorem, or inventing tabletop fusion. It's likely possible, but challenging enough that only the seriosly insane need apply.
Which flavor of Lisp would you like me to lecture on? CLOS? Dylan? Scheme? Some little vignettes on origins, maybe, like MacLisp, or eLisp?
The similarities that I find between Lisp and Objective-C are some really nifty things like dynamic typing (although Objective-C permits both dynamic and static typing of objects), RMI, single inheritance, blah, blah...
Generally speaking, the hybrid languages such as Objective-C, C++, and, oh yes, Lisp, underly a wide swath of extensions that go fairly unnoticed to the novice, but they become exceptionally handy to the advanced programmer. This is great for a couple of reasons. First, the language is exceptionally easy to learn. Second, it is quite easy to extend the power of the language.
Some of the handiest features of a language like Smalltalk, Java, or Objective-C are the useful thread safety mechanisms, such as public and private methods and variables. This is exceptionally useful when trying to profile the memory of a large, multithreaded application. Since Lisp doesn't privatize data or functions, I give a slight edge to some of the other OO languages in this regard.
But don't take offense at this. I think Lisp is great for just about anything, but the scope of this thread was concerning Macintosh development where there really isn't a place for Lisp, considering that other worthwhile tools make much more sense.
Here is a much better explanation of what OS X is. It is most correct to say that OS X is based on FreeBSD, which is the BSD reference platform. There are many flavors of BSD, but the main ingredient of Darwin is Free. If you really want to get down to the nits, download a FreeBSD project and then download Darwin. Do a file compare. It will be pretty clear then.
Occam's razor is the principle of simplification and minimalism taught by a Fransciscan monk named William of Ockham in the 14th century. It basically stated, "The profoundly simple is simply profound." In short, the simpler explanation, the better. Are you arguing for some sort of parsimony in attributing blame to the garbage in the music industry?
I totally agree with you about the "good taste" argument, but I'm curious about the connection to Occam.
But I'm thinking you've already made up your mind.
...now that they got rid of their OS which was awful (for what I needed), and are now OpenBSD, I'm more likely to switch.
Ummm, it's FreeBSD. There's a difference.
I have seen it, and it is really just window dressing as far as I'm concerned.
I have heard that the command line stuff is slower now...
Hmmm. Well, it's just window dressing wrapped around a Mach kernel. It has native (I said NATIVE) open technologies, like Java, OpenGL, and the Cocoa API. And for what it's worth, I will stack Apple's API's, written in Objective-C, against Win32 or MFC any day of the week. But then, you've already made up your mind. I'm sure you think that Objective-C is a complete waste of time, but I see the best of C++, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Java in Objective-C. It's beautiful to use. If you have to look up the word "erudite" in the dictionary, you probably don't know what I mean. As far as the command utils being slower, I have been running a developer seed of Jaguar for over a month, and it compares very nicely to earlier versions of OS X. I haven't noticed a slowdown.
Things I care about are price to performance ratio. Ease of programming (tools available - need mySQL, php, Perl, Java, C/C++, etc). Cost of maintenance (software and hardware upgrades), etc etc.
Apple's stuff is hard to steal. So, you're gonna have to pay $129 for an OS. You will need a machine to run it on. You can get an iMac for $800. So, for around $1000, you get a list of features longer than your arm. You get a development tools CD that comes with everything you need for serious development. Java 1.3.1 is pre-installed. The gcc compiler is pre-installed. OS X loves perl. Apache 1.3.1 is pre-installed. Tomcat is a simple download. I develop cross-platform applications for x86, Moto, and SPARC. And I'll even agree with you that programming for the "classic" MacOS was pretty painful. I love OS X, because it is the most efficient development platform that I own, and I'm pretty sure I've tried them all. (I must admit, I do love many things about Visual Studio).
As far as upgrades go, on a G3/G4 tower, just pop the hatch and install your RAID. I did a toolless install of a 512GB RAID two weeks ago. It took ten minutes, literally. The most recent machines use DDR ram, Ultra-ATA drives, AGP4x, PCI. What upgrades do you want?? It comes with gigabit ethernet. It comes with a very nice video card, and many of the towers come "dual-head-ready."
Oh, one more thing. The reason that sliced bread is great is because it's convenient. Someone did the annoying cutting for me. The result is a product that contains less waste and saves me time. Speaking of time, I'm so convinced that you don't care, that I'm not going to waste any more.
I'm sure that should have been formatted. Oh, well...nothing is as fun as an ugly haiku!
Stop the madness now!
Do not send my maill address
To anyone, please.
The above may be copied, used, or redistributed freely. However, if you store any part of this intellectual matter on digital media or in digital format, you must agree to destroy, delete, reformat and discard all digital media that contains this material within 24 hours.
A haiku, or what you will
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 1
Stop the madness now!
Do not send my mail address
To anyone, please.
In fact, it is in keeping with Apple's other partnerships in the digital hub strategy. Apple doesn't make digital cameras; instead, they forged a partnership with Canon. Interestingly, this is partly because of Canon's quick adoption of authentic FireWire, something which Sony refused to do.
Apple also doesn't make printers anymore. I kind of miss Apple-branded printers, even if they were being made by Canon and HP and stamped with an Apple logo. Apple dropped the Apple-branded printers in order to tighten the screws on Apple-authorized service and support, and it was a great cost-cutting move, in my opinion
Apple knows very well what overhead is involved in supporting a product that wears that cute little apple logo. I think they will choose their players very carefully.
Other things that could have originated the form "Zilla":
Zoo Gorilla
Zeus Pilla
Shortening of Priscilla
Z-Index Layers Lose All
ZILch LAtitude
Zero Internet Lan Lag Access
I like creative names, and if a product name happens to pay homage to a famous fire-breathing dinosaur, so be it. Besides, Mozilla sounds a lot cooler than Moceratops or Morannosaurus or Mobarney.
I find it interesting that this move has been made so soon after recent announcements that Apple is considering a move to an x86 architecture.
I felt those claims were groundless, but they gave me a really good laugh. This new product release is much more like the Apple that I have come to expect and love.:)
Where IT fails is when people start throwing around the pie-in-the-sky goals of "creating new marketplaces" and believing in the myth of "cyberspace" without having a mature plan before rolling out "the next new thing."
Let's face it--marketers love hype. They love those guru types who can jingle little bottles of snake-oil technobabble, producing a glassy hypnosis in the eyes of the corporate decision-makers. All the marketers hear is the sound of the till bell. Ch-ching. Unfortunately, some of us closet geeks really like the attention, and we can get caught up in the hype, too.
Maybe I'm cynical, and maybe my view is pretty short-sighted. But I think that information technology simply exists to cause an efficiency of the information infrastructure of an enterprise. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that the "value" of IT is proportional to some factor of the company's value and the worth they place on their data. IT is more immediately important to a banker than it would be to a construction worker. Or better yet, IT serves a great purpose to the librarian, but could go totally unnoticed by the bakery chef.
That's one of the failures of the dot-coms--failure to realize the spurious and fickle expectations of the at-large consumer. Aside from not being able to create the consumer experience of a traditional storefront, the virtual world couldn't fully engage the consumer's confidence and euphoria. A quick personal testimony: I love to buy on impulse. It's a great feeling. However, I never bought on impulse when shopping online, which I do a great deal. Multiply my experience by whatever factor that you think is relevant, and that is the rate of growth that the dot-com world never matured enough to reach.
I hope that the lesson learned from recent years is that no product "just sells itself." The success of the IT factor of a company is going to be only as success of the enterprise that surrounds it. This means that it takes more than just knowledgeable engineers to make the thing fly; the executives have to be knowledgeable and make informed decisions. And they have to spend money. A lot of money.
A successful IT infrastructure is probably more valuable than its assets. A very efficient, mission-critical system like the one that runs the trading floor on NYSE is probably much more valuable than the assets/manpower that it took to create it. However, take that same scenario and make the IT solution very inefficient. In fact, make it somehow less efficient than the pencil-pushing system that it replaced. Suddenly, the value plummets from "invaluable" to "worthless."
There were many immature IT strategies in the last decade, and they failed to succeed. Hopefully, the successful IT stories will last long enough to convince another group of hypnotized executives to buy a bottle of snake-oil.
Re:Necessary conditions and causal factors
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Genome
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· Score: 1
A vast quantity of time is a necessary conditon for an evolutionary process to produce meaningful results.
See, that's the very claim that I dispute. As the late Stephen Jay Gould proposed in his treatise on punctuated equilibrium, the actual evolutionary process may occur in bursts over a short span of time. Therefore, in any given evolutionary event, time is neither causal nor necessary for an evolutionary mutation to occur. Time is merely a passive observer, providing no qualifying catalysts or, as you termed it, "conditions."
I'm willing to concede to you on the point of probability. People who argue against evolution based purely on its low probabilities are constructing straw men out of half-assumptions. I agree that literally anything is possible given enough time. But time is not at all a necessary ingredient in evolution any more than a refrigerator is a necessary ingredient for a cake.
As you said, statistics can be a harsh mistress. If my odds of winning a lottery are 1x10^23, the first ticket may be the winner, and the 1x10^23 ticket may not be the winner. In fact, given that the lottery numbers are truly randomly generated, there is a statistical chance that the correct set of numbers never occurs, even at double or triple the rate of probability. Plotting the odds of "winning" in the evolution game is a mathematical stalemate. My point is that the probability of a successful evolutionary mutation is irrelevant. The fact is that it happens to occur. In mutations of a genome, you're looking at several millions of possible mutations per generation, compounded by the base-pair matching during sexual reproduction of the parents for their offspring, the actual genetic potential for successful mutations would far exceed those required for evolution to occur.
If you take punctuated equilibrium to some of its logical applications, alligators may hatch chickens. I know that the conclusion sounds absurd, but if the parents meet the genetic pre-conditions for sexually reproducing that offspring, that's what's going to happen. And they might even have the ability to walk through steel walls. Given some of the premises of the parent article, perhaps fruit flies will start hatching humans.
People may read these statements and laugh at their absurdity. Suddenly, our minds require some fairy tale factors of astronomical gazillion-times-gazillion math. Then, we can wrest our minds from doubt and place our faith in the "long, long ago" story of this large amount of time.
In 6,000 years of recorded human history, no transpeciation has been observed. The absence of "missing links" is one of the gaps that punctuated equilibrium seeks to cover. And for the uniformitarians who believe that evolution occurs little-by-little over generations of time, the large scale of time since the origins of the universe provides a useful placebo of comfort to the doubtful.
Re:The problem of magnitude
on
Genome
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· Score: 1
I agree with the "x factor" that you identify as magnitude; however, if I understand the logic correctly, you are saying, because of magnitude, thus evolution.
This assumes that one of the factors required for the "Monkeys to write Hamlet," is time, and bygod a lot of it.
Where I differ with your conclusion is that I don't think time is ever causal. Time is like a passive fabric. It doesn't "cause" anything to happen, it is just a medium that contains events of occurance. My point is that although time will most certainly dictate "how" events occur (see General Theory of Relativity), it can't influence "why" they occur.
The researchers suggest that in regions with crowded skies, contrails work just like artificial cirrus clouds...
Okay, I can see that.
...locally, contrails are equally as significant as greenhouse gases
Baloney.
First of all, if the analogy holds any water at all (excuse the pun), then locally, contrails are equally as significant as a really cloudy day.
The destructive nature of greenhouse gases has been piped loud and clear regarding the CFC-Ozone reactions that allegedly occur in emitted fossil fuels in the high atmosphere. Here is a decent description of the process.
Also, I noticed something about NPR in the blurb. Not to just spit raspberries, but I often hear things on NPR that are downright absurd. Just this morning, I caught the end of an interview on Morning Edition about a medical doctor's findings regarding the "Eight 8-oz Glasses A Day" theory. I personally don't care one way or the other, but I thought it was incredulous to hear a doctor say that a sedentary person shouldn't drink water when thirsty.
After pondering for a few moments, I decided that maybe it's better to go for a beer the next time I feel the urge to raid the water cooler.
Well, hmmm. I thought the speech was actually fairly poetic. And I thought it was what I would expect from a self-admitted novelist and a self-deprecating non-programmer-type.
As I read and re-read the speech text, I noticed a parallelism in his metaphors. He compared Open Source with nearly everything:
Open Source And Religion
Open Source And Microsoft
Open Source And Politics
Open Source And Sex
Open Source and Noam Chomsky
The last comparison is particularly revealing, since Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political dissident. And he's an MIT professor. Perhaps the speech was more of a rhetorical homage to Chomsky rather than a relevant discourse on the state of Open Source. The title of the speech does mention contrarianism.
Hype has its place.
on
What, Me Worry?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I suppose my take on it is something like this: given that truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely...
Yes, but consider what hype can do. A man can learn to skillfully place a leather ball into a metal hoop and become a millionaire legend. A talented group of teenagers can cut a couple of albums and fill a stadium with frenzied prepubescent teenagers. Hype can overthrow governments. It can dictate the norms of a culture. Every fad has its day because of it. I don't like hype, because it distorts reality. But then again, if engineers sold software, I'd probably be looking for a job.
My point is that, although I admit my idealism twinges in pain at the misuse of hype, I can see that it has a role to play. The "hype" of a large rock blowing away half of the world's population, which could fuel an intense public demand for more funding for the thirsty desert of scientific research and discovery.
The internal combustion engine is an incredibly efficient source of power...
Since when!? Consider all of the friction-impacted power transfer points of your standard internal-combustion engine. Pistons, rods, valves, lifters, camshaft. Lots of moving parts. And none are frictionless, hence a loss of efficiency.
Now, take that standard internal combustion engine and attach it to a transfer case so that the torque of that rotating cam can be transfered laterally to the wheels of the car. The power lost in the transfer is considerable.
I would agree that the sum of the force of power of those thousands of tiny little explosions produces some remarkable output in terms of horsepower, but "efficient" would not be the correct word to describe such a lossy system.
Just to clarify, Level3 isn't in debt because of junk bonds; they're in debt because they're leveraging their infrastructure on credit. Their stock rating is "junk," but if you'll check where the pickers have positioned every other stock in the telecom sector, you'll see that of any 10 small-cap telecom companies in the industry, 9 of them currently have a junk rating. It's more of an artifact of the market-wide downturn than an actual picture of how this stock can perform. Check out their stock chart, and you can quickly see that depending on how they ride out the current storms in the sector, this could be a really attractive, albeit risky, buy.
It seems that Buffet's investment in Level3 Communications is more like $100 million. The other slice of the half-billion-dollar pie is coming from partner investors, Legg Mason and Longleaf Partners. They bought the stock on the cheap, feeling that they would survive the shake-out in the telecom sector.
Here's a good article that details the nuts and bolts of the deal.
Slashdot Mirror
John's review was very thorough, as usual. While the Mac enthusiast is bound to disagree with his overall sentiment, I think the review is a must-read for the deeply entrenched Linux fan.
I do think that he began picking at nits somewhat (who cares if people call it Jag-Wire), and ultimately, he drew all of his 10.2 comparisons on a combination of the earlier incarnations of itself (like 10.1) and some unknown ethereal ideal (like "PerfectOS, version 3").
The charts on window server performance with Quartz Extreme were pretty neat, and while the review does not offer an exhaustive look at Jaguar's new features, the information offered was remarkably detailed and helpful, which allows readers to draw their own conclusions.
I was really hoping to see more comparisons of OS X versus other Linux flavors, or even Windows or Solaris. Instead, the review often sounded almost adversarial and at least reactionary, which I could personally do without. Whether or not he had an axe to grind, John is a very talented writer and computer savant. This lengthy review is worth your time to read.
Being in the "public sector" means more than working for a cash-strapped university or in the IT department of a free clinic. There really is a decent wage to be made in the public sector; the key is to make sure that the government is your customer as well as your employer. I'm talking about the incredible world of government contracts.
If you work for a gov't contractor or you bid on gov't contracts yourself, you have excellent chances of being paid top dollar for your position. You're kind of a hybrid cross between public and private sector; the government is your "employer," so you often get many of the perquisites, especially if you network appropriately; however, you're a private company, and once the contract has been fulfilled, you can move on to something else, if you'd like. Defense contracts can be especially attractive, and once you have a gov't project under your belt, you can be fairly confident to find future work.
Breathe deeply; you can get through this.
Try one of the following:
Stayin' Alive, Bee Gees
Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot
MacArthur Park, Donna Summer
Disco Duck, Rick Dees
I'm Too Sexy, Right Said Fred
Blue (Da Ba Dee), Eiffel 65
Baby One More Time, Britney Spears
Optionally, just listen to "The Transformed Man," by William Shatner. You may never want to hear another song again.
I really appreciate the time you took to clarify.
:P
...a big problem with the original message I responded to was the implication that other servers couldn't be configured to be as secure. That, I dispute strongly. None of the servers I maintain have ever been hacked, even when boxes on either side of them have been. I know of many other servers that have never been hacked. The way to be secure is to have an understanding of what makes you secure...
I don't dispute anything you've said; in fact, I share your viewpoint. I am also deeply entrenched in the server-side world of web programming, and I tend to get a chuckle at the mindless banter of the uninformed when it comes to the whole "Mac versus PC" thing.
If I had an argument to offer in regard to webserver preference (which I really couldn't care less), I would say that when Grandma Newbie decides to try her hand at building and hosting her website, she would be much better off with WebSTAR than almost anything else. It's not a server that is easy to malign.
Here's a case-in-point--a Mac-savvy friend of mine decided to try learning Active Server Pages. He dusted off an old copy of Windows NT Server, and he configured ftp services and IIS. He called me after one week and said, "I think I've got some weird virus."
The free space on his 40GB RAID had all but disappeared. It turns out that a hacker group had turned his anonymous ftp server into a private partition and totally filled it with warez. I thought it was a pretty neat hack, if it hadn't been such a dirty thing for someone to do.
Now, this guy is not a computer newbie. He did just what you'd expect a beginner to do. It was a very common newbie mistake.
WebSTAR (or classic MacOS) simply won't allow that kind of malice. Grandma Newbie isn't going to ignorantly or accidentally configure a server with security holes, something that's dangerously easy to do with IIS, and slightly less so with Apache.
The point that I would argue is that WebSTAR on MacOS is much more secure than any other mainstream web server. It's not for everyone, but it really is the perfect solution for nearly every web enfant-- including, apparently, the United States Army.
There. You just proved my point. Serving over the public net is a game not for the timid, and your personal cache of knowledge protects you from mindless or careless misconfiguration. The ones that aren't armed with your knowledge are gonna get hurt. It's kind of like a freestyle biker saying, "dude, those Cannondales suck." Well, they don't suck, but they won't perform the way that the radical exhibitionist is expecting.
Just because you can perform freestyle backflips with your server doesn't mean that everyone could, or should (a point that I'm confident you stipulate).
Mac OS web servers have extremely limited functionality, therefore are more secure by default.
Please give me a list--or even one example--of the "limited functionality" of MacOS 9.1 running WebSTAR, versus, say Red Hat running Apache. I want to know which features don't exist between the two. Hell, I'll even make it easy for you. Compare the differences of the Macintosh server that I described to a Netscape Enterprise server on Solaris. You seem like you're just mindlessly bashing Macs. If that's true, it's okay with me; I just want to know if this is an informed opinion or a troll.
Mac OS web servers are not widely used, and are thus not targets for attacks.
Are Mac OS web servers common? Not even. I think that there are something like 0.06% of the market uses WebSTAR. We're talking maybe 30-100,000 servers worldwide. So, I don't dispute that point. Are they secure? There is only one U.S. Gold Depository, not a hundred million. That doesn't make it any more or less easy to break in. However, many have made the claim that the Treasury vault in Fort Knox, Kentucky is impenetrable. My point is that the numbers have no relevance at all. Whether there is one Mac webserver or one hundred million, secure is secure is secure.
Try coming up with a way to hack a Mac webserver. Go ahead. Get a team of script kiddies together and go after a Mac running WebSTAR. Dude, I spent six months in college trying to defeat a hacker challenge posted on a Finnish newsgroup, and I couldn't get that mother to break. I'm still quite bitter about it, actually.
Hacking a Mac webserver ranks up there with proving Fermat's Last Theorem, or inventing tabletop fusion. It's likely possible, but challenging enough that only the seriosly insane need apply.
But, dammit, you make me mad.
Which flavor of Lisp would you like me to lecture on? CLOS? Dylan? Scheme? Some little vignettes on origins, maybe, like MacLisp, or eLisp?
The similarities that I find between Lisp and Objective-C are some really nifty things like dynamic typing (although Objective-C permits both dynamic and static typing of objects), RMI, single inheritance, blah, blah...
Generally speaking, the hybrid languages such as Objective-C, C++, and, oh yes, Lisp, underly a wide swath of extensions that go fairly unnoticed to the novice, but they become exceptionally handy to the advanced programmer. This is great for a couple of reasons. First, the language is exceptionally easy to learn. Second, it is quite easy to extend the power of the language.
Some of the handiest features of a language like Smalltalk, Java, or Objective-C are the useful thread safety mechanisms, such as public and private methods and variables. This is exceptionally useful when trying to profile the memory of a large, multithreaded application. Since Lisp doesn't privatize data or functions, I give a slight edge to some of the other OO languages in this regard.
But don't take offense at this. I think Lisp is great for just about anything, but the scope of this thread was concerning Macintosh development where there really isn't a place for Lisp, considering that other worthwhile tools make much more sense.
Now, stop being an idiot.
Here is a much better explanation of what OS X is. It is most correct to say that OS X is based on FreeBSD, which is the BSD reference platform. There are many flavors of BSD, but the main ingredient of Darwin is Free. If you really want to get down to the nits, download a FreeBSD project and then download Darwin. Do a file compare. It will be pretty clear then.
Occam's razor is the principle of simplification and minimalism taught by a Fransciscan monk named William of Ockham in the 14th century. It basically stated, "The profoundly simple is simply profound." In short, the simpler explanation, the better. Are you arguing for some sort of parsimony in attributing blame to the garbage in the music industry?
I totally agree with you about the "good taste" argument, but I'm curious about the connection to Occam.
But I'm thinking you've already made up your mind.
...now that they got rid of their OS which was awful (for what I needed), and are now OpenBSD, I'm more likely to switch.
Ummm, it's FreeBSD. There's a difference.
I have seen it, and it is really just window dressing as far as I'm concerned. I have heard that the command line stuff is slower now...
Hmmm. Well, it's just window dressing wrapped around a Mach kernel. It has native (I said NATIVE) open technologies, like Java, OpenGL, and the Cocoa API. And for what it's worth, I will stack Apple's API's, written in Objective-C, against Win32 or MFC any day of the week. But then, you've already made up your mind. I'm sure you think that Objective-C is a complete waste of time, but I see the best of C++, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Java in Objective-C. It's beautiful to use. If you have to look up the word "erudite" in the dictionary, you probably don't know what I mean. As far as the command utils being slower, I have been running a developer seed of Jaguar for over a month, and it compares very nicely to earlier versions of OS X. I haven't noticed a slowdown.
Things I care about are price to performance ratio. Ease of programming (tools available - need mySQL, php, Perl, Java, C/C++, etc). Cost of maintenance (software and hardware upgrades), etc etc.
Apple's stuff is hard to steal. So, you're gonna have to pay $129 for an OS. You will need a machine to run it on. You can get an iMac for $800. So, for around $1000, you get a list of features longer than your arm. You get a development tools CD that comes with everything you need for serious development. Java 1.3.1 is pre-installed. The gcc compiler is pre-installed. OS X loves perl. Apache 1.3.1 is pre-installed. Tomcat is a simple download. I develop cross-platform applications for x86, Moto, and SPARC. And I'll even agree with you that programming for the "classic" MacOS was pretty painful. I love OS X, because it is the most efficient development platform that I own, and I'm pretty sure I've tried them all. (I must admit, I do love many things about Visual Studio).
As far as upgrades go, on a G3/G4 tower, just pop the hatch and install your RAID. I did a toolless install of a 512GB RAID two weeks ago. It took ten minutes, literally. The most recent machines use DDR ram, Ultra-ATA drives, AGP4x, PCI. What upgrades do you want?? It comes with gigabit ethernet. It comes with a very nice video card, and many of the towers come "dual-head-ready."
Oh, one more thing. The reason that sliced bread is great is because it's convenient. Someone did the annoying cutting for me. The result is a product that contains less waste and saves me time. Speaking of time, I'm so convinced that you don't care, that I'm not going to waste any more.
I'm sure that should have been formatted. Oh, well...nothing is as fun as an ugly haiku!
Stop the madness now!
Do not send my maill address
To anyone, please.
The above may be copied, used, or redistributed freely. However, if you store any part of this intellectual matter on digital media or in digital format, you must agree to destroy, delete, reformat and discard all digital media that contains this material within 24 hours.
Stop the madness now! Do not send my mail address To anyone, please.
In fact, it is in keeping with Apple's other partnerships in the digital hub strategy. Apple doesn't make digital cameras; instead, they forged a partnership with Canon. Interestingly, this is partly because of Canon's quick adoption of authentic FireWire, something which Sony refused to do.
Apple also doesn't make printers anymore. I kind of miss Apple-branded printers, even if they were being made by Canon and HP and stamped with an Apple logo. Apple dropped the Apple-branded printers in order to tighten the screws on Apple-authorized service and support, and it was a great cost-cutting move, in my opinion
Apple knows very well what overhead is involved in supporting a product that wears that cute little apple logo. I think they will choose their players very carefully.
Zoo Gorilla
Zeus Pilla
Shortening of Priscilla
Z-Index Layers Lose All
ZILch LAtitude
Zero Internet Lan Lag Access
I like creative names, and if a product name happens to pay homage to a famous fire-breathing dinosaur, so be it. Besides, Mozilla sounds a lot cooler than Moceratops or Morannosaurus or Mobarney.
I find it interesting that this move has been made so soon after recent announcements that Apple is considering a move to an x86 architecture.
:)
I felt those claims were groundless, but they gave me a really good laugh. This new product release is much more like the Apple that I have come to expect and love.
Where IT fails is when people start throwing around the pie-in-the-sky goals of "creating new marketplaces" and believing in the myth of "cyberspace" without having a mature plan before rolling out "the next new thing."
Let's face it--marketers love hype. They love those guru types who can jingle little bottles of snake-oil technobabble, producing a glassy hypnosis in the eyes of the corporate decision-makers. All the marketers hear is the sound of the till bell. Ch-ching. Unfortunately, some of us closet geeks really like the attention, and we can get caught up in the hype, too.
Maybe I'm cynical, and maybe my view is pretty short-sighted. But I think that information technology simply exists to cause an efficiency of the information infrastructure of an enterprise. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that the "value" of IT is proportional to some factor of the company's value and the worth they place on their data. IT is more immediately important to a banker than it would be to a construction worker. Or better yet, IT serves a great purpose to the librarian, but could go totally unnoticed by the bakery chef.
That's one of the failures of the dot-coms--failure to realize the spurious and fickle expectations of the at-large consumer. Aside from not being able to create the consumer experience of a traditional storefront, the virtual world couldn't fully engage the consumer's confidence and euphoria. A quick personal testimony: I love to buy on impulse. It's a great feeling. However, I never bought on impulse when shopping online, which I do a great deal. Multiply my experience by whatever factor that you think is relevant, and that is the rate of growth that the dot-com world never matured enough to reach.
I hope that the lesson learned from recent years is that no product "just sells itself." The success of the IT factor of a company is going to be only as success of the enterprise that surrounds it. This means that it takes more than just knowledgeable engineers to make the thing fly; the executives have to be knowledgeable and make informed decisions. And they have to spend money. A lot of money.
A successful IT infrastructure is probably more valuable than its assets. A very efficient, mission-critical system like the one that runs the trading floor on NYSE is probably much more valuable than the assets/manpower that it took to create it. However, take that same scenario and make the IT solution very inefficient. In fact, make it somehow less efficient than the pencil-pushing system that it replaced. Suddenly, the value plummets from "invaluable" to "worthless."
There were many immature IT strategies in the last decade, and they failed to succeed. Hopefully, the successful IT stories will last long enough to convince another group of hypnotized executives to buy a bottle of snake-oil.
A vast quantity of time is a necessary conditon for an evolutionary process to produce meaningful results.
See, that's the very claim that I dispute. As the late Stephen Jay Gould proposed in his treatise on punctuated equilibrium, the actual evolutionary process may occur in bursts over a short span of time. Therefore, in any given evolutionary event, time is neither causal nor necessary for an evolutionary mutation to occur. Time is merely a passive observer, providing no qualifying catalysts or, as you termed it, "conditions."
I'm willing to concede to you on the point of probability. People who argue against evolution based purely on its low probabilities are constructing straw men out of half-assumptions. I agree that literally anything is possible given enough time. But time is not at all a necessary ingredient in evolution any more than a refrigerator is a necessary ingredient for a cake.
As you said, statistics can be a harsh mistress. If my odds of winning a lottery are 1x10^23, the first ticket may be the winner, and the 1x10^23 ticket may not be the winner. In fact, given that the lottery numbers are truly randomly generated, there is a statistical chance that the correct set of numbers never occurs, even at double or triple the rate of probability. Plotting the odds of "winning" in the evolution game is a mathematical stalemate. My point is that the probability of a successful evolutionary mutation is irrelevant. The fact is that it happens to occur. In mutations of a genome, you're looking at several millions of possible mutations per generation, compounded by the base-pair matching during sexual reproduction of the parents for their offspring, the actual genetic potential for successful mutations would far exceed those required for evolution to occur.
If you take punctuated equilibrium to some of its logical applications, alligators may hatch chickens. I know that the conclusion sounds absurd, but if the parents meet the genetic pre-conditions for sexually reproducing that offspring, that's what's going to happen. And they might even have the ability to walk through steel walls. Given some of the premises of the parent article, perhaps fruit flies will start hatching humans.
People may read these statements and laugh at their absurdity. Suddenly, our minds require some fairy tale factors of astronomical gazillion-times-gazillion math. Then, we can wrest our minds from doubt and place our faith in the "long, long ago" story of this large amount of time.
In 6,000 years of recorded human history, no transpeciation has been observed. The absence of "missing links" is one of the gaps that punctuated equilibrium seeks to cover. And for the uniformitarians who believe that evolution occurs little-by-little over generations of time, the large scale of time since the origins of the universe provides a useful placebo of comfort to the doubtful.
I agree with the "x factor" that you identify as magnitude; however, if I understand the logic correctly, you are saying, because of magnitude, thus evolution.
This assumes that one of the factors required for the "Monkeys to write Hamlet," is time, and bygod a lot of it.
Where I differ with your conclusion is that I don't think time is ever causal. Time is like a passive fabric. It doesn't "cause" anything to happen, it is just a medium that contains events of occurance. My point is that although time will most certainly dictate "how" events occur (see General Theory of Relativity), it can't influence "why" they occur.
The researchers suggest that in regions with crowded skies, contrails work just like artificial cirrus clouds...
...locally, contrails are equally as significant as greenhouse gases
Okay, I can see that.
Baloney.
First of all, if the analogy holds any water at all (excuse the pun), then locally, contrails are equally as significant as a really cloudy day.
The destructive nature of greenhouse gases has been piped loud and clear regarding the CFC-Ozone reactions that allegedly occur in emitted fossil fuels in the high atmosphere. Here is a decent description of the process.
Also, I noticed something about NPR in the blurb. Not to just spit raspberries, but I often hear things on NPR that are downright absurd. Just this morning, I caught the end of an interview on Morning Edition about a medical doctor's findings regarding the "Eight 8-oz Glasses A Day" theory. I personally don't care one way or the other, but I thought it was incredulous to hear a doctor say that a sedentary person shouldn't drink water when thirsty.
After pondering for a few moments, I decided that maybe it's better to go for a beer the next time I feel the urge to raid the water cooler.
As I read and re-read the speech text, I noticed a parallelism in his metaphors. He compared Open Source with nearly everything:
Open Source And Religion
Open Source And Microsoft
Open Source And Politics
Open Source And Sex
Open Source and Noam Chomsky
The last comparison is particularly revealing, since Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political dissident. And he's an MIT professor. Perhaps the speech was more of a rhetorical homage to Chomsky rather than a relevant discourse on the state of Open Source. The title of the speech does mention contrarianism.
I suppose my take on it is something like this: given that truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely...
Yes, but consider what hype can do. A man can learn to skillfully place a leather ball into a metal hoop and become a millionaire legend. A talented group of teenagers can cut a couple of albums and fill a stadium with frenzied prepubescent teenagers. Hype can overthrow governments. It can dictate the norms of a culture. Every fad has its day because of it. I don't like hype, because it distorts reality. But then again, if engineers sold software, I'd probably be looking for a job.
My point is that, although I admit my idealism twinges in pain at the misuse of hype, I can see that it has a role to play. The "hype" of a large rock blowing away half of the world's population, which could fuel an intense public demand for more funding for the thirsty desert of scientific research and discovery.
I have provided some interesting links that may help to answer your questions. Enjoy.
How Fuel Cells Work
Will Fuel Cells Power Homes?
The internal combustion engine is an incredibly efficient source of power...
Since when!? Consider all of the friction-impacted power transfer points of your standard internal-combustion engine. Pistons, rods, valves, lifters, camshaft. Lots of moving parts. And none are frictionless, hence a loss of efficiency.
Now, take that standard internal combustion engine and attach it to a transfer case so that the torque of that rotating cam can be transfered laterally to the wheels of the car. The power lost in the transfer is considerable.
I would agree that the sum of the force of power of those thousands of tiny little explosions produces some remarkable output in terms of horsepower, but "efficient" would not be the correct word to describe such a lossy system.
Q: What do you call a computer that sells for under $10?
A: An abacus.
Just to clarify, Level3 isn't in debt because of junk bonds; they're in debt because they're leveraging their infrastructure on credit. Their stock rating is "junk," but if you'll check where the pickers have positioned every other stock in the telecom sector, you'll see that of any 10 small-cap telecom companies in the industry, 9 of them currently have a junk rating. It's more of an artifact of the market-wide downturn than an actual picture of how this stock can perform. Check out their stock chart, and you can quickly see that depending on how they ride out the current storms in the sector, this could be a really attractive, albeit risky, buy.
It seems that Buffet's investment in Level3 Communications is more like $100 million. The other slice of the half-billion-dollar pie is coming from partner investors, Legg Mason and Longleaf Partners. They bought the stock on the cheap, feeling that they would survive the shake-out in the telecom sector.
Here's a good article that details the nuts and bolts of the deal.