Because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes in OSX...and yet you run Linux on home servers. I find that interesting because behind the scenes OSX is Unix. And it's not much different really from any other Unix or Unix-like OS I've used in the past 15 years.
Open up terminal and you can find out exactly what is going on "behind the scenes" the same way you can on any other BSD or Linux machine.
There is also Console and a host of other tools in the OSX Applications/Utilities folder as well that will tell you exactly what is going on in your system down to every error message that is logged including those silently logged and Activity Monitor...which will tell you pretty much every process that is running, how often your HDD is being read/written to, memory allocation, and what your internet connection is doing as far as sending/receiving packets.
So to say that you "Can't see what is happening behind the scenes" on OSX is something I find odd coming from someone having used Linux for 15 years.
Hell the reason I switched to OSX a decade ago was the fact I had my Unix with MS Office and Photoshop too plus hardware that worked. Didn't have this problem of needing to write drivers or spend countless hours trying to get a modem or sound card to work.
And I develop on OSX because it stays out of my way and lets me get work done. But if I need to, I can always go into said utilities and see exactly what is going on no different than any other BSD/Linux that I've used in the past.
I've had mine since 93. Still works and I still used it as my main calculator up until a little over 18 months ago when I downloaded the m48 app for my iPhone. I use it with the iPhone calc skin, but it still gives me a mock up of the HP48 screen, still used RPN, and since I used basic math most of the time works wonders for quick calculations.
The best part is when I give it to friends and they try to add 1+1 by typing One, Plus, One and get an error instead of 1 enter, 1 enter, +
In the past few wars, by far the most effective air craft have been the B-52 and the A-10. Most of the combat sorties have been air to ground. Problem is there really isn't anything to replace the A-10 in terms of being able to fly low, slow, take a lot of hits, and dish it out. An A-10 can loiter around a kill box for a couple hours for on call close air support. I believe the loiter time for an F-16 is about 30 minutes before they have to go tank up again with fuel.
Drones are starting to fufill this role, but they can't carry the sheer amount of bombs, rockets, missiles, and the 30mm anti-tank gun the A-10's could.
Thing is about the A-10 is the generals never wanted it because it ain't a sleek sexy fighter jet.
The major problem is the airframes the airforce are flying are between 25 - 40 years old. There are only so many hours you can long on one before it has to be retired. While most have be refitted and upgraded, the fighters them selves are 1960's/early 70's design.
Still I don't see a massive number of F-35's being built. A few will be needed to replaced aging F-16 airframes, but the future are drones and everyone knows it. You may need a few piloted air craft for certain missions, but a lot of it can be done with drones these days.
My first job out of college was at a consulting firm that primarily dealt with computer set ups for small/medium video production shops. This was during the transition from OS9 to OSX and the big thing people were discussing was the move to HD.
One of the biggest questions I got back then was "Should I get a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray burner?". Back in circa 2003 my answer was neither. The future was going to be digital content downloaded from the internet and/or the use of something like Compact Flash/SD/USB thumb drives. What I didn't know was whether the delivery of content would be via services like iTunes Store where you downloaded to a local hard drive, some kind of more traditional set top box, internet streaming or some combination of all three.
It looks like it is going to be video streaming. In 2005 I bought a Mac Mini and hooked it up to my 32" LCD TV's DVI port and cancelled my cable TV subscription. The few TV shows I watched was cheaper to by on iTunes than the $60 a month TV was costing me.
In 2009 I started streaming Netflx to my TV via Xbox for $8 a month. The new TV I just bought last christmas now has Netflix and Hulu built in.
In all that time I've never even considered getting a Blu-Ray other than considering getting a PS3. But I barely used my Xbox for gaming. I used it for streaming Netflix.
Any modern military can easily trample any insurrection if the gloves are allowed to come off. Just look at Libya before the west started air strikes or Iran any time in the past decade when they've had large protests.
The Libyan rebels would have been dead in a trench by now if not for NATO airstrikes.
I saw it personally with a couple small apps I built and released for iPhone and Android. Despite more downloads of the free version on androids, over 85% of my sales were for iPhone. Given the time tweaking for the different versions of Android vs iOS, the apps I'm building this year are all for the iPhone.
Which makes sense when you make your money from selling the hardware. If I'm a hardware maker, I want everyone able to use my hardware so I sell more units. So I create the SDK and say "here ya go" and then provide support for it. I know that's why at my last company we ended up using certain hardware over others because the ones we chose had good SDK, good documentation, and finally good development support. For one label printer manufacture, that resulted in at least 13500 units of their label printer sold just because of us.
It is very hard to do QA for "linux". You can do QA for RHEL or SLES or Ubuntu, but it's rather hard to do it for "linux" unless it's a patch to the kernel.
And the amount of time and cost to do QA for different Linux OS's as a consumer client isn't worth it if 95% + of your users are either on Windows or Mac. Especially since a lot of linux users like to "tweak" their installs. So your install of Ubuntu maybe very different from my install of SuSE. Much easier saying it *should* work, use at your own risk then trying to make it *work* with all 1000+ distros of linux
We do the same with our server software. It is guaranteed to work on Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, RHEL and SLES. It *should* work with other linux distros, but we won't offer technical support if you call and are using Ubuntu and encounter a problem.
We also do the same thing for mobile applications. We give a QA guarantee for iOS 4.x and all devices running iOS 4.x as part of the contract, but only a QA guarantee for Android OS 2.2 running on the Nexus. We don't guarantee that any Android app we develop will work with any other version of Android OS or handset unless the client pays extra for each OS version and handset they want QA on. It was the only way to keep up with the costs of having a different version of android out 4 times a year and 2 - 4 new handsets a month.
Problem is, the gas tax is NOT a sin tax, it is a tax to fund roads. At least that is it's stated purpose. I have no problems paying a tax for roads whether it be gas or by mile. Governments need revenue to build and maintain roads. I understand that and willing to pay my share.
What I don't agree with are "SIN" taxes of any type. I see taxes as a way for the government to raise the funds they need to operate. Not a way for them to dictate how people should live and what they should or should not do.
I know down at the farm we can buy farm diesel and farm gas for those vehicles which exclude fuel taxes meant for improving roads. You don't often find it in the city and most people don't know you can buy fuel for your lawnmower that is circa 30 cents a gallon cheaper (in this state at least) since it doesn't go on the road.
So indeed, charging the tax on gas for cars AND charging a usage tax for cars is double dipping.
I didn't see anything about REPLACING the gas tax with a mileage tax. Just adding this on in addition to the gas tax. So those who drive gas or diesel powered cars looks like they'd be double taxed. Which is probably a hidden goal of this tax, to nudge people to buy hybrids or EV's.
But the fact is, cars today are getting better gas mileage ergo people are buying less gallons of gas per mile traveled so in somebody's mind this means less revenue for highway maintenance since EV's aren't taxed at all and hybrids use even less fuel.
They say this, but may DOT's waste a lot of funds. As an example, yesterday they were repainting lines on the interstate. It took the paint truck plus THREE dump trucks behind it to signal people to get over. Why does it take three? Why does it take large dump trucks (and pretty new ones at that)? Those things guzzle diesel. Couldn't the same purpose be served by a pickup truck with an arrow sign and flashing lights following the paint truck?
It's when I see stuff like that and the DOT asking for more money that I have to say they need to look at how they do operations and see how much they can save first instead just asking for more money.
From what I've seen the past few years, the federal government seems to be able to do what it wants, constitutionality be damned. I'm sure Apple and Blackberry find it easier to comply than to try and fight city hall (as the saying goes). Furthermore, if they throw them a bone, less likely it is to see Washington attempt to come in and meddle in their businesses. You make certain congress critters mad at you and they'll go on an almost holy crusade if they think it will buy them points for the next election crusade.
And they don't have to pass laws to do it. Let's say google refuses, depending on the congress critter, they could decide to hold hearings on say Google's online advertising monopoly or privacy or whatever topic makes for a good witch hunt and do so in public. That costs google time and money (lawyers) and costs shareholders (at least in the short term).
Yes, it uses the unity web player plug in, but you play it in your browser. So it's not a pure "html" game, but yet it's played in your browser. Graphics are on par with about 10 years ago on a regular desktop PC or console. At least at the lower graphics settings I use since this is an older machine. When I did have the settings up things looked pretty good.
To me it was amazing to see what could be done in a browser these days.
Drupal's backend management was confusing for me to use let alone trying to teach most typical users. For large, complex sites, yeah, it's something to consider. But if I'm building a personal site or a small site I can get wordpress up and running well in under 15 minutes. Even less if the account has a control panel with auto installer.
Everytime I've tried to use Drupal it seems like I spend just as much time figuring it out and performance tuning than I do actually creating content.
Solution: Dymo. Company I worked at was dealing with retail POS software written in Java. We were able to get our standard offering up and running on OpenSuSE and SLED without any problems for use with HP rp7000 and NCR POS systems. For label printing we used the Dymo LabelWriter series which are A: cheaper than Zebra and B: has CUPS drivers and many builds have them included by default.
Problem there is if it's broke you don't know about it until shit has hit the fan and now you could facing a bunch of problems that are compounded by other problems. When I ran Ecommerce system, we'd take servers down at least once a month just to make sure. Usually it would be after applying any patch having to do with PCI compliance just to make damn sure it didn't break anything.
Of course I had the luxury the last few years of having redundant systems. Mileage may vary.
Bingo. This is why a lot of geeks on/. are wondering why devices like the kindle and iPad are getting extremely popular with the masses since such devices don't have 50 ports abilities to upgrade etc.. It's because most people consume and only do light creating (emails). I'm buying my dad an iPad for his birthday. He's retired and travels a lot. All he does is read the wall street journal online, check his email, play solitaire. He doesn't need a computer for that. And he is also traveling a lot while he still can (he'll be 70). For the once a year he needs to do taxes, he can stop by my place and use my computer for turbotax.
What this is the fact that apple and other devices have H.264 decoding chips embedded in the hardware. H.264 doesn't require a flash container. You'll find it a lot of places as a.m4v in a mpeg 4 container. For video that is all Flash is was a container. It just happened to be the container that was nearly universal for both mac and pc for many years.
I'm not so sure on the developers front. My experience this past year releasing apps for both Android and iOS was that sure I had more downloads of the free "lite" app from android, but iOS accounted for well over 80% of my revenue. And the type of apps I produced really don't work for advertising. I used Admob for both platforms. They are utility apps, not content apps so you don't get a lot of impressions. Problem is, Android takes more of my time to sort out minor problems between OS versions and handset hardware issues. And now add to that Amazon jumping in I would have to get another developers account and play by another set of rules.
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Because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes in OSX...and yet you run Linux on home servers. I find that interesting because behind the scenes OSX is Unix. And it's not much different really from any other Unix or Unix-like OS I've used in the past 15 years.
Open up terminal and you can find out exactly what is going on "behind the scenes" the same way you can on any other BSD or Linux machine.
There is also Console and a host of other tools in the OSX Applications/Utilities folder as well that will tell you exactly what is going on in your system down to every error message that is logged including those silently logged and Activity Monitor...which will tell you pretty much every process that is running, how often your HDD is being read/written to, memory allocation, and what your internet connection is doing as far as sending/receiving packets.
So to say that you "Can't see what is happening behind the scenes" on OSX is something I find odd coming from someone having used Linux for 15 years.
Hell the reason I switched to OSX a decade ago was the fact I had my Unix with MS Office and Photoshop too plus hardware that worked. Didn't have this problem of needing to write drivers or spend countless hours trying to get a modem or sound card to work.
And I develop on OSX because it stays out of my way and lets me get work done. But if I need to, I can always go into said utilities and see exactly what is going on no different than any other BSD/Linux that I've used in the past.
Yeah, they wouldn't have had that problem if they were running NetBSD on that toaster.
http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php
I've had mine since 93. Still works and I still used it as my main calculator up until a little over 18 months ago when I downloaded the m48 app for my iPhone. I use it with the iPhone calc skin, but it still gives me a mock up of the HP48 screen, still used RPN, and since I used basic math most of the time works wonders for quick calculations.
The best part is when I give it to friends and they try to add 1+1 by typing One, Plus, One and get an error instead of 1 enter, 1 enter, +
In the past few wars, by far the most effective air craft have been the B-52 and the A-10. Most of the combat sorties have been air to ground. Problem is there really isn't anything to replace the A-10 in terms of being able to fly low, slow, take a lot of hits, and dish it out. An A-10 can loiter around a kill box for a couple hours for on call close air support. I believe the loiter time for an F-16 is about 30 minutes before they have to go tank up again with fuel.
Drones are starting to fufill this role, but they can't carry the sheer amount of bombs, rockets, missiles, and the 30mm anti-tank gun the A-10's could.
Thing is about the A-10 is the generals never wanted it because it ain't a sleek sexy fighter jet.
The major problem is the airframes the airforce are flying are between 25 - 40 years old. There are only so many hours you can long on one before it has to be retired. While most have be refitted and upgraded, the fighters them selves are 1960's/early 70's design.
Still I don't see a massive number of F-35's being built. A few will be needed to replaced aging F-16 airframes, but the future are drones and everyone knows it. You may need a few piloted air craft for certain missions, but a lot of it can be done with drones these days.
My first job out of college was at a consulting firm that primarily dealt with computer set ups for small/medium video production shops. This was during the transition from OS9 to OSX and the big thing people were discussing was the move to HD.
One of the biggest questions I got back then was "Should I get a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray burner?". Back in circa 2003 my answer was neither. The future was going to be digital content downloaded from the internet and/or the use of something like Compact Flash/SD/USB thumb drives. What I didn't know was whether the delivery of content would be via services like iTunes Store where you downloaded to a local hard drive, some kind of more traditional set top box, internet streaming or some combination of all three.
It looks like it is going to be video streaming. In 2005 I bought a Mac Mini and hooked it up to my 32" LCD TV's DVI port and cancelled my cable TV subscription. The few TV shows I watched was cheaper to by on iTunes than the $60 a month TV was costing me.
In 2009 I started streaming Netflx to my TV via Xbox for $8 a month. The new TV I just bought last christmas now has Netflix and Hulu built in.
In all that time I've never even considered getting a Blu-Ray other than considering getting a PS3. But I barely used my Xbox for gaming. I used it for streaming Netflix.
Any modern military can easily trample any insurrection if the gloves are allowed to come off. Just look at Libya before the west started air strikes or Iran any time in the past decade when they've had large protests.
The Libyan rebels would have been dead in a trench by now if not for NATO airstrikes.
I saw it personally with a couple small apps I built and released for iPhone and Android. Despite more downloads of the free version on androids, over 85% of my sales were for iPhone. Given the time tweaking for the different versions of Android vs iOS, the apps I'm building this year are all for the iPhone.
Which makes sense when you make your money from selling the hardware. If I'm a hardware maker, I want everyone able to use my hardware so I sell more units. So I create the SDK and say "here ya go" and then provide support for it. I know that's why at my last company we ended up using certain hardware over others because the ones we chose had good SDK, good documentation, and finally good development support. For one label printer manufacture, that resulted in at least 13500 units of their label printer sold just because of us.
Repeat after me: Linux is a kernel not an OS.
It is very hard to do QA for "linux". You can do QA for RHEL or SLES or Ubuntu, but it's rather hard to do it for "linux" unless it's a patch to the kernel.
And the amount of time and cost to do QA for different Linux OS's as a consumer client isn't worth it if 95% + of your users are either on Windows or Mac. Especially since a lot of linux users like to "tweak" their installs. So your install of Ubuntu maybe very different from my install of SuSE. Much easier saying it *should* work, use at your own risk then trying to make it *work* with all 1000+ distros of linux
We do the same with our server software. It is guaranteed to work on Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, RHEL and SLES. It *should* work with other linux distros, but we won't offer technical support if you call and are using Ubuntu and encounter a problem.
We also do the same thing for mobile applications. We give a QA guarantee for iOS 4.x and all devices running iOS 4.x as part of the contract, but only a QA guarantee for Android OS 2.2 running on the Nexus. We don't guarantee that any Android app we develop will work with any other version of Android OS or handset unless the client pays extra for each OS version and handset they want QA on. It was the only way to keep up with the costs of having a different version of android out 4 times a year and 2 - 4 new handsets a month.
Problem is, the gas tax is NOT a sin tax, it is a tax to fund roads. At least that is it's stated purpose. I have no problems paying a tax for roads whether it be gas or by mile. Governments need revenue to build and maintain roads. I understand that and willing to pay my share.
What I don't agree with are "SIN" taxes of any type. I see taxes as a way for the government to raise the funds they need to operate. Not a way for them to dictate how people should live and what they should or should not do.
I know down at the farm we can buy farm diesel and farm gas for those vehicles which exclude fuel taxes meant for improving roads. You don't often find it in the city and most people don't know you can buy fuel for your lawnmower that is circa 30 cents a gallon cheaper (in this state at least) since it doesn't go on the road.
So indeed, charging the tax on gas for cars AND charging a usage tax for cars is double dipping.
I didn't see anything about REPLACING the gas tax with a mileage tax. Just adding this on in addition to the gas tax. So those who drive gas or diesel powered cars looks like they'd be double taxed. Which is probably a hidden goal of this tax, to nudge people to buy hybrids or EV's.
But the fact is, cars today are getting better gas mileage ergo people are buying less gallons of gas per mile traveled so in somebody's mind this means less revenue for highway maintenance since EV's aren't taxed at all and hybrids use even less fuel.
They say this, but may DOT's waste a lot of funds. As an example, yesterday they were repainting lines on the interstate. It took the paint truck plus THREE dump trucks behind it to signal people to get over. Why does it take three? Why does it take large dump trucks (and pretty new ones at that)? Those things guzzle diesel. Couldn't the same purpose be served by a pickup truck with an arrow sign and flashing lights following the paint truck?
It's when I see stuff like that and the DOT asking for more money that I have to say they need to look at how they do operations and see how much they can save first instead just asking for more money.
From what I've seen the past few years, the federal government seems to be able to do what it wants, constitutionality be damned. I'm sure Apple and Blackberry find it easier to comply than to try and fight city hall (as the saying goes). Furthermore, if they throw them a bone, less likely it is to see Washington attempt to come in and meddle in their businesses. You make certain congress critters mad at you and they'll go on an almost holy crusade if they think it will buy them points for the next election crusade.
And they don't have to pass laws to do it. Let's say google refuses, depending on the congress critter, they could decide to hold hearings on say Google's online advertising monopoly or privacy or whatever topic makes for a good witch hunt and do so in public. That costs google time and money (lawyers) and costs shareholders (at least in the short term).
Those who play politics see it as a game.
This is already happening with COTS and programs like SpaceX. It's just it's going to be another 5 years or so before it's ready.
Yes, it uses the unity web player plug in, but you play it in your browser. So it's not a pure "html" game, but yet it's played in your browser. Graphics are on par with about 10 years ago on a regular desktop PC or console. At least at the lower graphics settings I use since this is an older machine. When I did have the settings up things looked pretty good.
To me it was amazing to see what could be done in a browser these days.
Drupal's backend management was confusing for me to use let alone trying to teach most typical users. For large, complex sites, yeah, it's something to consider. But if I'm building a personal site or a small site I can get wordpress up and running well in under 15 minutes. Even less if the account has a control panel with auto installer.
Everytime I've tried to use Drupal it seems like I spend just as much time figuring it out and performance tuning than I do actually creating content.
Solution: Dymo. Company I worked at was dealing with retail POS software written in Java. We were able to get our standard offering up and running on OpenSuSE and SLED without any problems for use with HP rp7000 and NCR POS systems. For label printing we used the Dymo LabelWriter series which are A: cheaper than Zebra and B: has CUPS drivers and many builds have them included by default.
Problem there is if it's broke you don't know about it until shit has hit the fan and now you could facing a bunch of problems that are compounded by other problems. When I ran Ecommerce system, we'd take servers down at least once a month just to make sure. Usually it would be after applying any patch having to do with PCI compliance just to make damn sure it didn't break anything.
Of course I had the luxury the last few years of having redundant systems. Mileage may vary.
Kindles are for consumers, laptops for creators.
Bingo. This is why a lot of geeks on /. are wondering why devices like the kindle and iPad are getting extremely popular with the masses since such devices don't have 50 ports abilities to upgrade etc.. It's because most people consume and only do light creating (emails). I'm buying my dad an iPad for his birthday. He's retired and travels a lot. All he does is read the wall street journal online, check his email, play solitaire. He doesn't need a computer for that. And he is also traveling a lot while he still can (he'll be 70). For the once a year he needs to do taxes, he can stop by my place and use my computer for turbotax.
What this is the fact that apple and other devices have H.264 decoding chips embedded in the hardware. H.264 doesn't require a flash container. You'll find it a lot of places as a .m4v in a mpeg 4 container. For video that is all Flash is was a container. It just happened to be the container that was nearly universal for both mac and pc for many years.
They will be demanding ONE MILLION DOLLARS...and sharks with freak'n laser beams...
I'm not so sure on the developers front. My experience this past year releasing apps for both Android and iOS was that sure I had more downloads of the free "lite" app from android, but iOS accounted for well over 80% of my revenue. And the type of apps I produced really don't work for advertising. I used Admob for both platforms. They are utility apps, not content apps so you don't get a lot of impressions. Problem is, Android takes more of my time to sort out minor problems between OS versions and handset hardware issues. And now add to that Amazon jumping in I would have to get another developers account and play by another set of rules.
Certainly you can choose not to use it: don't buy an iPhone if you don't like their walled garden approach.
Really? Because the last time I checked, most Android phones had to be rooted if you wanted to install the latest versions of the OS.