...is that there has been this "Myth" that nothing can stop the internet. We've all heard the saying: the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.
Well I've always had a theory that it would only remain so until the powers that be sat around and figured out how to get the genie back in the bottle. There were those who claimed it could never happen, but I remember looking that the vast majority of the backbone of the internet is controlled by only a handful of companies.
I think a lot of countries have been waiting to see if countries like China and Iran can implement restrictions on the internet and frankly they've done so quite successfully. Has it been 100% successful. No. But it doesn't have to be. It just has to bee good enough to keep those that don't know technology trapped into a small little corner.
It's the fact countries like China and Iran have had enough success at it that we're now seeing it happen in the US, only we're calling it SOPA. Which is what I was predicting to friends and co-workers about 10 years ago that by 2020 the "internet" would become fractured and restricted most likely by law.
I'm just the opposite. With my work, some months are busier than others. Last winter we had a horrible winter. Too cold and icy to get out and do much with friends. So I started playing battlestar galactica online and would buy in game currency here or there with the $30 - $50 I would have been spending going out to the sports bar or a movie.
This past fall I was extremely busy. If I had been spending $15 a month that would have been $45 that would have been wasted. Yes I could have cancelled and renewed when I went to play again I guess, but that is still a hassle. With the free-to-play game I think of it as any other form of entertainment. I spent my $X and get the same instant gratification that I would with a movie or spending a few hours at a bar or going to a pro hockey or baseball game. Only difference is usually I get more than 2 - 4 hours worth of entertainment value.
Then if I need to walk away due to real life, it's a sunk cost and I can just walk away.
I'll back this up as we had the same problems with mobile Apps to the point of if customers want Android apps, the cost are usually 5x that of iOS simply because we have to test against 4 versions of the OS and we only certify compatibility with the Nexus and Nexus-S. If they want additional handsets tested and certified, there's an extra fee per handset. And again, it's the fact we have to maintain so many different build environments.
With iOS it's generally one repository and we just change the build settings depending on if we're compiling for iPhone, iPad, or for most of our apps the "either/or" option. Then it's pretty easy to test between the simulator and the 3G, 3GS, and 4.
Most of my friends who got Android Phones for Verizon because that was the best alternative to iPhone at the time on that carrier are either replacing their android phone with an iPhone or have already done so even buying an iPhone without the discount of a new contract. When I asked them, they all pretty much shrugged that Android was "okay", but originally what they WANTED was an iPhone, just not with AT&T.
I'm not sure with my friends on Sprint, but I've known people that have abandoned AT&T and gone to sprint for their next iPhone Contract.
My friends who bought Droid phones about 2 years ago as early adopters (about a dozen I know) have all switched to the iPhone. The none-techie ones had the main reason being is the iPhone is what they wanted 2 years ago, only they wanted Verizon instead of AT&T which wasn't an option. While they were "happy" with the Android phone it still wasn't what the wanted.
The techie friends have come to realize that Android just isn't being supported like they thought it would with the latest and greatest available to all. And while some found it fun to hack a while, the bottom line is they found that they didn't want to spend their time messing with their phone. They just wanted it to work.
Now with sprint as a carrier I imagine the next batch will be the same. I've known one or two that have opted to go from iPhone to Android phones, but one of them swears Android will dominate the phone land scape just like he predicted Gentoo would rule the Linux landscape about 8 years ago...
Up until my TV died last christmas eve and I replaced it with a new one that had netflix built in. Although now the Xbox has Hulu plus as well. I did let my XBL subscription lapse last spring. With netflix built in, no longer needed it and wasn't playing many games. Now that it's winter I've gotten a new 1 year XBL subscription along with Battlefield 3.
My TV, internet, phone bundle is $150 a month and that includes all the premium channels, HDTV, DVR, etc. I thought about just getting cable internet and then Hulu plus and netflix and MLB.tv. But I got to adding it up and without the bundle the total would still be around $100 per month. And there would be a few shows I like and would miss or else have to order via iTMS or another source. And I'm not really interested in Bit Torrenting.
Sat broadcasts fall outside of FCC regulation. There was a reason that Howard Stern moved to Sirius and it was so he could use whatever language he wanted without running afoul of the FCC.
Take your idea, print it out in hard copy, seal it in an envelope and then mail it to yourself and file away in a fire proof safe or bank vault and never open it. Postmark can then be used to establish "prior art" inside a court room.
Problem the USPS has is the fact that it has a lot of legacy costs. It got used to doing business one way and like a lot of large bureaucratic organizations has a problem changing to adapt. Especially when it had no incentive to do so as it was a government backed monopoly and one defined in the "postal clause" of the constitution.. And while it is not a "traditional" business , it is going to have to adapt for a new age. An age where the federal government is going to have to get smaller across the board.
For instance, we have a lot of post offices in small towns. It costs a lot of money to keep those facilities maintained and staffed. Thing is allowing other local businesses to sell stamps and accept parcels for post can and do offer the same service. It's worked for UPS and FedEx the past 20+ years. I know the USPS has started doing the same in the past few years, but it was something that should have started 15 years ago. But that does mean fewer postal workers in general, which has been opposed by the union at every turn.
With that being said, the USPS have been getting better with things like the ability to order stamps for delivery online as well as the flat rate shipping boxes have been extremely handy. But those have been services don't require a building with staff in my town operated 320 days a year.
Advertising != Marketing. The distinction was pretty clear at the college I went to: Marketing was taught in the business school. Advertising was taught in the Communication/Journalism School. This was something my marketing professor made clear day 1 of class.
What I learned in Marketing was "How to kill your competition with research". That was my professor's approach to marketing and it was interesting semester. Have business stats, strategy, and organizational behavior were perquisites for the class and I found out why. Because marketing as he taught it meant two things: researching everything about your competitors so you know how they function and meanwhile learn everything you can from your customers to learn how to make your product/service better.
Greetings. I am the Monitor of Installation 04. I am 343 Guilty Spark. Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed. There is no choice. We must activate the ring.
Libraries at their core are places where knowledge and learning could be shared. Why does that have to be limited to distribution via dead trees? I for one think this is a brilliant idea.
If it's because more *iux developers have moved to Mac, especially on laptops. 10 years ago I knew more "switchers" who switched from Linux to MacOSX for development including myself. Mainly because all the hardware worked and I had the same software stack for the projects I was working on even if the final deployment would be to linux servers.
Every year since I've watched the number of developers using macs increase at conferences so much so that in the past couple years non-mac laptop users really stood out at the three conferences I attend every year.
You mean a corrupt governments who knew the sea walls and levies needed to be vastly improved to withstand a category 4 or 5 storm for the past 30+ years and yet did nothing and chose to spend the money to do so on other things may have had a little part to play in what happened to New Orleans? I mean that would have nothing to do with the fact that billions of dollars worth of infrastructure was destroyed.
There was plenty of blame to go around in New Orleans, but climate change was not the root cause of that disaster being as bad as it was. Everyone knew that large hurricanes had happened before, although be it rare, and would happen again, but most were betting "not on my watch" and didn't do anything about it. So they kicked the can down the road and eventually one of those perfect storms came and...
If they would goto war it would have more to do with minerals than population as Siberia has a lot of natural resources that a country hell bent on the growth on manufacturing need. There is also an argument that the peoples in Siberia share more in common with the Chinese than the more european Russians west of the Ural. Not to mention they both fought a little known skirmish in 1969 over their border. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinoâ"Soviet_border_conflict
However, if you had a Russian regime that was relatively weak like the one of Yeltsin I'd think it would be more of a possibility than with Putin in charge. I really don't think the Chinese would want a war with Putin still in charge.
I think a lot of the "skeptics" ask the questions: "Can we really do anything about it?" or "What about the cost of doing something about global warming vs spending the time and resources on cleaning up other types of pollution we know is dangerous and can do something about to improve our environment?"
What the opportunity cost of putting all these resources into global warming vs. other forms of pollution controls/clean up?
A great OS? Maybe. With a product I've been working on for about a month we were looking at the hardware side of the house. The interface to the application is written in HTML5 with jQuery Mobile. It interfaces with our servers via web services because it gave the best flexibility. It will run on anything that has a webkit browser whether a desktop or with phone gap can be compiled into native apps for iOS, Android, and blackberry. Initially it was a selling point we could tell people "hey will work with existing stuff or any of these wide range of devices". Which is true, except that a lot of our clients will be wanting to use the software with bluetooth barcode scanners. And most we've talked to don't want to source hardware from a separate vendor. They want us to provide both. The price point per scanner & tablet we've been aiming for is $1000 each.
So we've spent the last few weeks looking at buying android tablets vs the iPad 2. And something that we noticed when talking with suppliers was could we get the same thing six months from now as are today with most android devices and the answer was largely no. Not with the production runs we were looking at. The ones we could were priced within $50 of an iPad. The other problem is this software is replacing a system that never quite worked right and ran on proprietary hardware. That was expensive and if they needed a replacement unit there was exactly one place they could go and no one we've talked to had good experiences dealing with that company's support.
Something the support guys noted is that if we advertise "works with android" there are a lot of Android OS devices. Not all the devices are the same and most of the people we are dealing with can't make that distinction. What happens when they decide to source some devices to try and save a buck, they arrive and say don't have bluetooth. Then they flood the support lines with "You said it works with android" even though there is no way to make it work with the particular hardware they purchased.
iPad on the other hand was a different story. If the iPad breaks, they can run to Wal-mart and get a replacement. For our clients this is important. Also we were dealing with a lot fewer hardware configurations when it came to the iPad. Plus it's a name most people know and recognize. Saying we supply 'XYZ' Android tablet from china or taiwan isn't a selling point. Especially given their past experiences vs going with a COTS option like the iPad.
That's not to say in a year or two something better isn't available. Maybe Google starts issuing stricter hardware guidelines in the future, but until then we're deploying the first clients with iPads.
We have a similar situation and what we did was create the control interface to our blackbox using HTML/Javascript and JQuery Mobile. The blackbox hosts a simple web server with a services API written in Perl. The control interface now can be loaded as a Chrome app on a desktop or laptop, packaged as an installable app for Android or iPad using PhoneGap, or function as a "web app" on pretty much any mobile device that is wifi capable. Granted our "blackbox" resides as part of a wireless hotspot running OpenBSD and was designed to allow other devices to connect to it from the ground up.
Our first customer is using the $500 iPad 2's as their interface device of choice, but the fact that the controls are HTML/JS and worked on any smart phone they tried during the demo phase was a huge plus. Our system is replacing a system they deployed 10 years ago that never really worked all that well, mainly because most of the hardware and software was proprietary. And it was a huge problem because a lot of the equipment was frankly outdated before they even went live. This time around we got the contract simply because we took the "workstation" part out of the equation. So long as it can run a webkit browser our system will work.
Thing is 3D Studio Max did have a macintosh OS 9 version back before they were purchased by Autodesk. (I believe the last version of 3D studio max for Mac was 3.5 iirc). Lightwave still has an OSX version as does Maya (which is owned by Autodesk as well now). But there's been some rumblings that Maya's support for Mac maybe discontinued in the near future. (Which I think would have more to do with Autodesk)
Maya has really eclipsed Lightwave in recent years, especially for Film work. Lightwave has always been used more in television, probably due to Newtek's products going back to Toaster for Amiga.
However, Apple's been moving away from the Video production market for a few years. Shake used to be a defacto standard compositing application for a lot of small and mid sized shops, but then apple discontinued the software. That market is now being filled by Nuke, Fusion, and After Effects.
These days you can download the M48 emulator for iOS, I have it on my iPhone. I still have my HP48G and it still works after close to 20 years, but I rarely have use for most of it's advanced features these days. It's been a while since calculus.
That being said I still love RPN. So I switched the skin to emulate the native iPhone calc only now it has the old HP48 screen and is RPN. Best of both worlds...
About 10 years I bought my first Mac. At the time I was having trouble getting my sound card and printer to work with linux, tired of reinstalling windows every six months and wanted something that worked. OSX gave me my unix environment that worked, stayed out of my way, and let me get stuff done.
Considering I get paid to make other people's tech stuff work, I've made up the increased initial price over the fact that I've not had to "fix" stuff over the years. And I've gotten an average of 4 years out of the laptops I've bought so far. (3 the first, 6 out of the second, on the third).
Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Our entire API framework is Perl and has been for a few years now. Seemed like every time we needed to add a new format to return values in (originally was XML) like JSON, there always seems to be a perl module "for that".
The best part of things is the fact that while we've added new functionality, we haven't had to do any maintenance work on the script in almost 5 years now.
Biggest change we made from 5.8.x to 5.10 was rewrite some nasty els if statements and made them switch statements.
The original web based management tool was originally written in PHP and that is what took all the time to maintain. It seemed like with each dot release of PHP some little thing broke and we were always fixing something every few weeks because of it.
I run OSX at home and the office is now 100% OSX as well. This morning I was greeted by the "Please restart your machine for software update" box when I walked in. I looked at the packages wanting updated, saw a security update, java update, so clicked "Restart and Install". The machine shutdown and I went to get a cup of coffee. By the time I had my cup of coffee and was back at my desk it was installed and ready to go.
And that is about the extent of the time it takes me to "manage" my computer on a typical basis. I mean in the past three years I think I've had 2 hours of down time to install OS 10.6. The rest of the time for "updates" it's a matter of click the button and get up and use the restroom, stretch the legs a minute and grab a snack. And usually by the time I get back, everything is back up and ready to keep going.
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...is that there has been this "Myth" that nothing can stop the internet. We've all heard the saying: the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.
Well I've always had a theory that it would only remain so until the powers that be sat around and figured out how to get the genie back in the bottle. There were those who claimed it could never happen, but I remember looking that the vast majority of the backbone of the internet is controlled by only a handful of companies.
I think a lot of countries have been waiting to see if countries like China and Iran can implement restrictions on the internet and frankly they've done so quite successfully. Has it been 100% successful. No. But it doesn't have to be. It just has to bee good enough to keep those that don't know technology trapped into a small little corner.
It's the fact countries like China and Iran have had enough success at it that we're now seeing it happen in the US, only we're calling it SOPA. Which is what I was predicting to friends and co-workers about 10 years ago that by 2020 the "internet" would become fractured and restricted most likely by law.
I'm just the opposite. With my work, some months are busier than others. Last winter we had a horrible winter. Too cold and icy to get out and do much with friends. So I started playing battlestar galactica online and would buy in game currency here or there with the $30 - $50 I would have been spending going out to the sports bar or a movie.
This past fall I was extremely busy. If I had been spending $15 a month that would have been $45 that would have been wasted. Yes I could have cancelled and renewed when I went to play again I guess, but that is still a hassle. With the free-to-play game I think of it as any other form of entertainment. I spent my $X and get the same instant gratification that I would with a movie or spending a few hours at a bar or going to a pro hockey or baseball game. Only difference is usually I get more than 2 - 4 hours worth of entertainment value.
Then if I need to walk away due to real life, it's a sunk cost and I can just walk away.
I'll back this up as we had the same problems with mobile Apps to the point of if customers want Android apps, the cost are usually 5x that of iOS simply because we have to test against 4 versions of the OS and we only certify compatibility with the Nexus and Nexus-S. If they want additional handsets tested and certified, there's an extra fee per handset. And again, it's the fact we have to maintain so many different build environments.
With iOS it's generally one repository and we just change the build settings depending on if we're compiling for iPhone, iPad, or for most of our apps the "either/or" option. Then it's pretty easy to test between the simulator and the 3G, 3GS, and 4.
Most of my friends who got Android Phones for Verizon because that was the best alternative to iPhone at the time on that carrier are either replacing their android phone with an iPhone or have already done so even buying an iPhone without the discount of a new contract. When I asked them, they all pretty much shrugged that Android was "okay", but originally what they WANTED was an iPhone, just not with AT&T.
I'm not sure with my friends on Sprint, but I've known people that have abandoned AT&T and gone to sprint for their next iPhone Contract.
My friends who bought Droid phones about 2 years ago as early adopters (about a dozen I know) have all switched to the iPhone. The none-techie ones had the main reason being is the iPhone is what they wanted 2 years ago, only they wanted Verizon instead of AT&T which wasn't an option. While they were "happy" with the Android phone it still wasn't what the wanted.
The techie friends have come to realize that Android just isn't being supported like they thought it would with the latest and greatest available to all. And while some found it fun to hack a while, the bottom line is they found that they didn't want to spend their time messing with their phone. They just wanted it to work.
Now with sprint as a carrier I imagine the next batch will be the same. I've known one or two that have opted to go from iPhone to Android phones, but one of them swears Android will dominate the phone land scape just like he predicted Gentoo would rule the Linux landscape about 8 years ago...
Up until my TV died last christmas eve and I replaced it with a new one that had netflix built in. Although now the Xbox has Hulu plus as well. I did let my XBL subscription lapse last spring. With netflix built in, no longer needed it and wasn't playing many games. Now that it's winter I've gotten a new 1 year XBL subscription along with Battlefield 3.
My TV, internet, phone bundle is $150 a month and that includes all the premium channels, HDTV, DVR, etc. I thought about just getting cable internet and then Hulu plus and netflix and MLB.tv. But I got to adding it up and without the bundle the total would still be around $100 per month. And there would be a few shows I like and would miss or else have to order via iTMS or another source. And I'm not really interested in Bit Torrenting.
Sat broadcasts fall outside of FCC regulation. There was a reason that Howard Stern moved to Sirius and it was so he could use whatever language he wanted without running afoul of the FCC.
Take your idea, print it out in hard copy, seal it in an envelope and then mail it to yourself and file away in a fire proof safe or bank vault and never open it. Postmark can then be used to establish "prior art" inside a court room.
Problem the USPS has is the fact that it has a lot of legacy costs. It got used to doing business one way and like a lot of large bureaucratic organizations has a problem changing to adapt. Especially when it had no incentive to do so as it was a government backed monopoly and one defined in the "postal clause" of the constitution.. And while it is not a "traditional" business , it is going to have to adapt for a new age. An age where the federal government is going to have to get smaller across the board.
For instance, we have a lot of post offices in small towns. It costs a lot of money to keep those facilities maintained and staffed. Thing is allowing other local businesses to sell stamps and accept parcels for post can and do offer the same service. It's worked for UPS and FedEx the past 20+ years. I know the USPS has started doing the same in the past few years, but it was something that should have started 15 years ago. But that does mean fewer postal workers in general, which has been opposed by the union at every turn.
With that being said, the USPS have been getting better with things like the ability to order stamps for delivery online as well as the flat rate shipping boxes have been extremely handy. But those have been services don't require a building with staff in my town operated 320 days a year.
suddenly visions of light cycles and disc wars came to mind....
Advertising != Marketing. The distinction was pretty clear at the college I went to: Marketing was taught in the business school. Advertising was taught in the Communication/Journalism School. This was something my marketing professor made clear day 1 of class.
What I learned in Marketing was "How to kill your competition with research". That was my professor's approach to marketing and it was interesting semester. Have business stats, strategy, and organizational behavior were perquisites for the class and I found out why. Because marketing as he taught it meant two things: researching everything about your competitors so you know how they function and meanwhile learn everything you can from your customers to learn how to make your product/service better.
Greetings. I am the Monitor of Installation 04. I am 343 Guilty Spark. Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed. There is no choice. We must activate the ring.
Libraries at their core are places where knowledge and learning could be shared. Why does that have to be limited to distribution via dead trees? I for one think this is a brilliant idea.
If it's because more *iux developers have moved to Mac, especially on laptops. 10 years ago I knew more "switchers" who switched from Linux to MacOSX for development including myself. Mainly because all the hardware worked and I had the same software stack for the projects I was working on even if the final deployment would be to linux servers.
Every year since I've watched the number of developers using macs increase at conferences so much so that in the past couple years non-mac laptop users really stood out at the three conferences I attend every year.
You mean a corrupt governments who knew the sea walls and levies needed to be vastly improved to withstand a category 4 or 5 storm for the past 30+ years and yet did nothing and chose to spend the money to do so on other things may have had a little part to play in what happened to New Orleans? I mean that would have nothing to do with the fact that billions of dollars worth of infrastructure was destroyed.
There was plenty of blame to go around in New Orleans, but climate change was not the root cause of that disaster being as bad as it was. Everyone knew that large hurricanes had happened before, although be it rare, and would happen again, but most were betting "not on my watch" and didn't do anything about it. So they kicked the can down the road and eventually one of those perfect storms came and...
If they would goto war it would have more to do with minerals than population as Siberia has a lot of natural resources that a country hell bent on the growth on manufacturing need. There is also an argument that the peoples in Siberia share more in common with the Chinese than the more european Russians west of the Ural. Not to mention they both fought a little known skirmish in 1969 over their border. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinoâ"Soviet_border_conflict
However, if you had a Russian regime that was relatively weak like the one of Yeltsin I'd think it would be more of a possibility than with Putin in charge. I really don't think the Chinese would want a war with Putin still in charge.
I think a lot of the "skeptics" ask the questions: "Can we really do anything about it?" or "What about the cost of doing something about global warming vs spending the time and resources on cleaning up other types of pollution we know is dangerous and can do something about to improve our environment?"
What the opportunity cost of putting all these resources into global warming vs. other forms of pollution controls/clean up?
A great OS? Maybe. With a product I've been working on for about a month we were looking at the hardware side of the house. The interface to the application is written in HTML5 with jQuery Mobile. It interfaces with our servers via web services because it gave the best flexibility. It will run on anything that has a webkit browser whether a desktop or with phone gap can be compiled into native apps for iOS, Android, and blackberry. Initially it was a selling point we could tell people "hey will work with existing stuff or any of these wide range of devices". Which is true, except that a lot of our clients will be wanting to use the software with bluetooth barcode scanners. And most we've talked to don't want to source hardware from a separate vendor. They want us to provide both. The price point per scanner & tablet we've been aiming for is $1000 each.
So we've spent the last few weeks looking at buying android tablets vs the iPad 2. And something that we noticed when talking with suppliers was could we get the same thing six months from now as are today with most android devices and the answer was largely no. Not with the production runs we were looking at. The ones we could were priced within $50 of an iPad. The other problem is this software is replacing a system that never quite worked right and ran on proprietary hardware. That was expensive and if they needed a replacement unit there was exactly one place they could go and no one we've talked to had good experiences dealing with that company's support.
Something the support guys noted is that if we advertise "works with android" there are a lot of Android OS devices. Not all the devices are the same and most of the people we are dealing with can't make that distinction. What happens when they decide to source some devices to try and save a buck, they arrive and say don't have bluetooth. Then they flood the support lines with "You said it works with android" even though there is no way to make it work with the particular hardware they purchased.
iPad on the other hand was a different story. If the iPad breaks, they can run to Wal-mart and get a replacement. For our clients this is important. Also we were dealing with a lot fewer hardware configurations when it came to the iPad. Plus it's a name most people know and recognize. Saying we supply 'XYZ' Android tablet from china or taiwan isn't a selling point. Especially given their past experiences vs going with a COTS option like the iPad.
That's not to say in a year or two something better isn't available. Maybe Google starts issuing stricter hardware guidelines in the future, but until then we're deploying the first clients with iPads.
We have a similar situation and what we did was create the control interface to our blackbox using HTML/Javascript and JQuery Mobile. The blackbox hosts a simple web server with a services API written in Perl. The control interface now can be loaded as a Chrome app on a desktop or laptop, packaged as an installable app for Android or iPad using PhoneGap, or function as a "web app" on pretty much any mobile device that is wifi capable. Granted our "blackbox" resides as part of a wireless hotspot running OpenBSD and was designed to allow other devices to connect to it from the ground up.
Our first customer is using the $500 iPad 2's as their interface device of choice, but the fact that the controls are HTML/JS and worked on any smart phone they tried during the demo phase was a huge plus. Our system is replacing a system they deployed 10 years ago that never really worked all that well, mainly because most of the hardware and software was proprietary. And it was a huge problem because a lot of the equipment was frankly outdated before they even went live. This time around we got the contract simply because we took the "workstation" part out of the equation. So long as it can run a webkit browser our system will work.
Thing is 3D Studio Max did have a macintosh OS 9 version back before they were purchased by Autodesk. (I believe the last version of 3D studio max for Mac was 3.5 iirc). Lightwave still has an OSX version as does Maya (which is owned by Autodesk as well now). But there's been some rumblings that Maya's support for Mac maybe discontinued in the near future. (Which I think would have more to do with Autodesk)
Maya has really eclipsed Lightwave in recent years, especially for Film work. Lightwave has always been used more in television, probably due to Newtek's products going back to Toaster for Amiga.
However, Apple's been moving away from the Video production market for a few years. Shake used to be a defacto standard compositing application for a lot of small and mid sized shops, but then apple discontinued the software. That market is now being filled by Nuke, Fusion, and After Effects.
Say what you will about Apple and Steve Jobs, but at least Jobs gave a damn about the products his company made.
These days you can download the M48 emulator for iOS, I have it on my iPhone. I still have my HP48G and it still works after close to 20 years, but I rarely have use for most of it's advanced features these days. It's been a while since calculus.
That being said I still love RPN. So I switched the skin to emulate the native iPhone calc only now it has the old HP48 screen and is RPN. Best of both worlds...
About 10 years I bought my first Mac. At the time I was having trouble getting my sound card and printer to work with linux, tired of reinstalling windows every six months and wanted something that worked. OSX gave me my unix environment that worked, stayed out of my way, and let me get stuff done.
Considering I get paid to make other people's tech stuff work, I've made up the increased initial price over the fact that I've not had to "fix" stuff over the years. And I've gotten an average of 4 years out of the laptops I've bought so far. (3 the first, 6 out of the second, on the third).
Our entire API framework is Perl and has been for a few years now. Seemed like every time we needed to add a new format to return values in (originally was XML) like JSON, there always seems to be a perl module "for that".
The best part of things is the fact that while we've added new functionality, we haven't had to do any maintenance work on the script in almost 5 years now.
Biggest change we made from 5.8.x to 5.10 was rewrite some nasty els if statements and made them switch statements.
The original web based management tool was originally written in PHP and that is what took all the time to maintain. It seemed like with each dot release of PHP some little thing broke and we were always fixing something every few weeks because of it.
I run OSX at home and the office is now 100% OSX as well. This morning I was greeted by the "Please restart your machine for software update" box when I walked in. I looked at the packages wanting updated, saw a security update, java update, so clicked "Restart and Install". The machine shutdown and I went to get a cup of coffee. By the time I had my cup of coffee and was back at my desk it was installed and ready to go.
And that is about the extent of the time it takes me to "manage" my computer on a typical basis. I mean in the past three years I think I've had 2 hours of down time to install OS 10.6. The rest of the time for "updates" it's a matter of click the button and get up and use the restroom, stretch the legs a minute and grab a snack. And usually by the time I get back, everything is back up and ready to keep going.