Apple was the white knight of OSS land from circa 2001 - 2005 on/. Google slowly replaced them as the white night by 2007, so we're starting to see the pendulum shift. Give Google another year and they'll be the "NEW EVIL COMPANY THAT MUST DIE" around here. Not sure who is going to replace Google as the new white knight....
I live and work in a college town. I've been there about 5 years and when I first arrived I was one of thee few on a Mac when I visited the local coffee shops or bread co. Most people had cheaper HP's and Dell. Well something happened to a generation of HP laptops. Just about every time I was at Bread co or a coffee shop, someone with an HP was having problems with their wifi card and as it turns out HP had an extremely high failure rate on their motherboards. They would get go buy a USB wifi card, that would get them by another couple months, then the whole MB would pretty much fry. I also saw a number of people complaining about their cheap dells having similar quality control problems. Yeah, they were $600, but they lasted just over a year before they broke. Just after their warranties expired. Second time around, almost all the people I knew bought MacBooks/MacBook Pros and so far they've not had the complaints. Furthermore, they've told friends, and they've bought Macs and today when I go into Bread Co or a coffee shop, it's not unusual for the majority of students to be on Macs. I know a lot of a students that work for me or from church that are on their second Windows laptop in their undergrad. I guess you could afford to throw away the laptop every year for $450 a pop if you don't include time and the hassle of loosing files or having to do back ups/restores, and getting things back to where you were.
I switched to Mac OSX in 2001 so I could have a Unix based laptop that had a working modem/network card/sound card and powered down correctly. That was not something easily doable with Linux back then. But something I have noticed over the past 9 years now is how few Macs I've had to own. My first iBook had a logic board problem, got sent back to the shop once, fixed, and back within 2 days. It lasted 4 years. Then I bought the 12.1" powerbook. I've had it 6 years and it still works and I still use it everyday. My PowerMac G5 got destroyed over a year ago when 6 trees fell on my house after a storm. I got a good 4 years out of it and it showed no signs of wearing out. It was PPC which was going to limit it in the future, but at the time I was big into HD video production and I got my money's worth out of it. I bought a MacBook pro to replace it with the insurance money.
Maybe I've just been lucky. But Apple seems to put the same Quality controls on their laptops as the others do their business lines. And I know folks in the business world who are saying they are lucky to get 3 years out of a laptop any more. And the prices for those laptops are usually on par with the Apple machines.
What you want for a heavy analytical load is something like Teradata, not oracle. Or I guess Greenplum as it was based on PostgreSQL a long time ago, but they just got acquired by EMC
My big problem with this is that FreeBSD is an operating system, kernel + userland. If you are just using the Kernel and not the userland, don't call it FreeBSD. It's just like OSX isn't FreeBSD because it used the BSD userland with a mach kernel.
"Linux" is just a kernel. When combined with the GNU userland tools you end up with a complete OS typically known as "distros" such as Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc., but it's quite possible to have Linux without the userland, i.e. many embedded uses of Linux.
In 12 years of using various *iux's, I've used 4 Linux distros(Red Hat, CentOS, SuSE, Debain), but only one FreeBSD OS (different versions since 2.2.7).
When was the last time you saw a toll road go away after the 10/15/20 years period where the road was to be "paid off"? Same reason why the states will find a way to replace the revenue generated by a fuel tax for "roads".
Ever driven in Chicago? How much does it cost for the city/county/state to install and upkeep all those scanning stations on the roads. How much would it cost in the future when most cars sold today already have GPS standard and ability to access the cell network? What do you think OnStar is?
Think about it. Right now people are taxed @ ~$.20 - $.30 cents a gallon in fuel taxes that in most states is already figured into the list price of the gas at pump. And gasoline taxes don't go to pay for cleaning up the environment. They go to building/maintaining roads (or at least that what the politicos say...whether it does or not is another debate)
Very few people think about the fact that the gallon of gas is really $2.30 plus $.25 in tax. No, they just see $2.55, pump and go. The cost of the tax is hidden to most peoples eyes. So they pay $3 - $5 every time they fill up their tank in taxes x number of times per month without even thinking about it. Probably amounts to $700 - $1000 per driver per year depending on the type of car and number of miles driven.
Well if suddenly you're asking those people to fork over $1000 at one time when they go to register the car, you're going to really piss people off when they see it in one lump sum. Voters won't go for it because suddenly they see it as another big chunk of tax. Yes, they were paying about the same before, but at $5 a pop, they never paid any attention to it before. But when you have to write a check for 4 figures, suddenly people notice.
Hence, if you replace that fuel tax with a "road use tax" via tolls or GPS tracking of how much you drove and split those bills up into a monthly tab at $30 - $50 per month, then people once again start to consider a monthly bill just like their utilities, cell phone, etc. and less as a "tax". Plus this method also gives the government the ability to place a tracking device on your car. The republican voting base likes it because it can be used to track "evil people" (Terrorist/Gangs/Drug Dealers/Child Molesters/Commies/whomeverisevilatthemomet). The Democratic base likes it because it can be used to tax people, especially people driving a lot of miles. Because those electric cars are going to be powered predominately by coal for the next 20 - 25 years.
I volunteered in college for a couple state reps/senators and a US congressmen. And we were having this very same discussion only replace electric cars with natural gas powered cars back then. They did pass a "a natural gas powered car costs you $600 per year to register." Even that was enough of a turn off to keep all but the proponents of such technology from converting their vehicle to propane/LNG.
Eventually it will be *DOT (with the * being your state). Got to come up with some way of taxing electric car users to use the road if they aren't paying for it in fuel taxes.
Most drivers I know in Chicago willfully place such devices in their windshields for paying tolls. I know they aren't GPS yet, but probably future versions will be and people will use them and sign away on whatever forms in the name of connivence.
Just wait until more electric cars are on the road requiring some type of toll or other form of tracking so that people can be sent "use taxes/road taxes" since folks aren't fueling up with liquid fuels that are normally taxed for this purpose. Then if they want to know where you've been, it's just a sopeana away. Or more than likely, the laws will be written to where all law enforcement has to do is file a request of information.
Outpost did release a patch that added a few of the features, like the monorail, but the management AI never happened and the ability to build additionally colony sites just never worked. All the cool features got stripped out just before launch. i can't remember if it was to make a deadline or what exactly.
I remember playing it for a while many years ago and it was an extremely fun game up until the point you realized it was missing a bunch of the features that would have made it great.
That's because 10 years ago with the release of OSX we geeks finally had a unix based OS that worked in laptops AND had COMMERCIAL software available for it including MS OFFICE, Adobe Products, and back then Macromedia. Linux was a pain in the ass, I was still running an ISA modem with jumpers, I never could get my sound card to work in my tower, and I had enough. Myself and most other unix geeks who could care less about the zealotry bought Macs. And most of us haven't regretted it. At some point you get past the "look at what I can do" and get into the "Dammit I just need this to work so I can solve other problems". Slowly I've sold my friends on mac. After the first couple weeks, I usually don't hear from them for technical support any more.
Re:One Of The Best Things About Being A Mac User
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The Recovery Disc Rip-Off
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Depends, how much is your time worth? Before I bought my dad an iMac, it was 3 - 4 hours every time I visited cleaning crap off his computer and usually 6 hours around christmas every year to wipe the drive and reinstall. So probably around 15 hours a year. Since I bought him the iMac and he got over the initial how to questions in the first weeks, I've spent a grand total of 2 hours in 3 years upgrading from OS 10.5 to 10.6 on his machine last christmas.
Not having to deal with that crap when I visit, worth every penny of the apple tax.
Say what you want, but I've never had a Mac give me less than 5 years of use. The only exception to that were my last PowerMac G5 and mac minis I had in a house that got destroyed by a storm. (6 100+ year old trees fell on the house. Thankfully I wasn't there at the time.). Even then I had 4 solid years out of them. I still have a PowerBook 12" sitting next to me that has pretty much been on every day for the past 5 years and is still going. Only thing I've replaced was the battery once and a couple power supplies due to a puppy chewing through the cable. Two costs with any laptop you keep over 3 years. (unless you don't have a puppy). I did one OS upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5. Total cost $40 (family pack).
I know the PowerBook was like $2500 new, but considering the amount of time I've saved in the past 5 years not having to deal with the virus of the week and reinstall of the quarter, it's saved me far more in time than any premium I paid for it up front.
For anyone not Apple. Look at what happened with Dell. Basically since 2005 they made almost nothing on PC sales. Something like 70% of their operating income came from kick backs from Intel. It's one of the reasons why I don't buy PC's these days. It's been a race to the bottom and to see who can cut the most corners without completely going under.
No, it was the pictures of the Highway of Death that largely upset the Arab allies when they were shown around the world that pretty much put an end to the war. If military operations had continued another couple days and basically eliminated the Republican guard,, the Shiites would have dealt with Saddam. Although at the risk of then becoming an Iranian puppet state.
If we go to all electric cars or mostly electric cars get ready for toll roads everywhere. Right now it's the tax on fuel that pays for roads (well at least is *supposed* to pay for roads, whether it does or just goes into the general funds is a debate for another day). As soon as people stop buying gas and diesel, they government(s) (state and federal) will be crying fowl and we'll see some sort of black box required on electric cars to see how many miles you drive and sending you a "road use" tax bill at the end of the year. Either that electronic tags on the windshields with passive sensors over the road like current toll booths.
Both solutions have that great added feature of tracking. And it won't take long for there to be automatic "speeding" tickets issues as an excuse for local governments to make an extra buck in the name "Public safety".
Email, Skype, Pandora, MLB at Bat streaming of games, apps, it all adds up. I average around 460MB per month on my iPhone. Probably closer to 600 in the summer time since I listen to a lot of day baseball games via MLB at Bat and I stream Pandora in my car driving around.
Let's wind back the clock about 8 - 10 years ago when a lot of these apps were being built. The available browsers under active development were MSIE and Opera. Netscape by that time was a dead duck with AOL not sure what to do with it and Mozilla wasn't much better and FireFox didn't even exist yet. And frankly Netscape/Mozilla had their own quirks.
MSIE offered ActiveX support which allowed companies to basically develop desktop like web apps using something very close to Visual Basic. And a lot of companies and other entities had VB programmers on staff or were easy to find. VB was the PHP of its day 10 - 15 years ago when you needed in house apps and frontends to databases.
By that time it looked to most as though Netscape was dead and MSIE was the internet for most companies, people, and places. And it didn't appear as though anyone was going to challenge them either and the browser wars were over.
What nobody saw coming wasn't FireFox, but Safari and Webkit. Apple not only created a browser for their platform, but then they went to banks and other places and helped (paid) them to make their sites more standards compliant so they would work with macs/safari. This helped FireFox as well since both browsers were standards based.
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Apple was the white knight of OSS land from circa 2001 - 2005 on /. Google slowly replaced them as the white night by 2007, so we're starting to see the pendulum shift. Give Google another year and they'll be the "NEW EVIL COMPANY THAT MUST DIE" around here. Not sure who is going to replace Google as the new white knight....
I live and work in a college town. I've been there about 5 years and when I first arrived I was one of thee few on a Mac when I visited the local coffee shops or bread co. Most people had cheaper HP's and Dell. Well something happened to a generation of HP laptops. Just about every time I was at Bread co or a coffee shop, someone with an HP was having problems with their wifi card and as it turns out HP had an extremely high failure rate on their motherboards. They would get go buy a USB wifi card, that would get them by another couple months, then the whole MB would pretty much fry. I also saw a number of people complaining about their cheap dells having similar quality control problems. Yeah, they were $600, but they lasted just over a year before they broke. Just after their warranties expired. Second time around, almost all the people I knew bought MacBooks/MacBook Pros and so far they've not had the complaints. Furthermore, they've told friends, and they've bought Macs and today when I go into Bread Co or a coffee shop, it's not unusual for the majority of students to be on Macs. I know a lot of a students that work for me or from church that are on their second Windows laptop in their undergrad. I guess you could afford to throw away the laptop every year for $450 a pop if you don't include time and the hassle of loosing files or having to do back ups/restores, and getting things back to where you were.
I switched to Mac OSX in 2001 so I could have a Unix based laptop that had a working modem/network card/sound card and powered down correctly. That was not something easily doable with Linux back then. But something I have noticed over the past 9 years now is how few Macs I've had to own. My first iBook had a logic board problem, got sent back to the shop once, fixed, and back within 2 days. It lasted 4 years. Then I bought the 12.1" powerbook. I've had it 6 years and it still works and I still use it everyday. My PowerMac G5 got destroyed over a year ago when 6 trees fell on my house after a storm. I got a good 4 years out of it and it showed no signs of wearing out. It was PPC which was going to limit it in the future, but at the time I was big into HD video production and I got my money's worth out of it. I bought a MacBook pro to replace it with the insurance money.
Maybe I've just been lucky. But Apple seems to put the same Quality controls on their laptops as the others do their business lines. And I know folks in the business world who are saying they are lucky to get 3 years out of a laptop any more. And the prices for those laptops are usually on par with the Apple machines.
What you want for a heavy analytical load is something like Teradata, not oracle. Or I guess Greenplum as it was based on PostgreSQL a long time ago, but they just got acquired by EMC
My big problem with this is that FreeBSD is an operating system, kernel + userland. If you are just using the Kernel and not the userland, don't call it FreeBSD. It's just like OSX isn't FreeBSD because it used the BSD userland with a mach kernel.
"Linux" is just a kernel. When combined with the GNU userland tools you end up with a complete OS typically known as "distros" such as Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc., but it's quite possible to have Linux without the userland, i.e. many embedded uses of Linux.
In 12 years of using various *iux's, I've used 4 Linux distros(Red Hat, CentOS, SuSE, Debain), but only one FreeBSD OS (different versions since 2.2.7).
I'm just waiting for Wikileaks to do something to tick off Israel. They'll deal with Julian Assange the same way they dealt with Gerald Bull.
When was the last time you saw a toll road go away after the 10/15/20 years period where the road was to be "paid off"? Same reason why the states will find a way to replace the revenue generated by a fuel tax for "roads".
Ever driven in Chicago? How much does it cost for the city/county/state to install and upkeep all those scanning stations on the roads. How much would it cost in the future when most cars sold today already have GPS standard and ability to access the cell network? What do you think OnStar is?
Think about it. Right now people are taxed @ ~$.20 - $.30 cents a gallon in fuel taxes that in most states is already figured into the list price of the gas at pump. And gasoline taxes don't go to pay for cleaning up the environment. They go to building/maintaining roads (or at least that what the politicos say...whether it does or not is another debate)
Very few people think about the fact that the gallon of gas is really $2.30 plus $.25 in tax. No, they just see $2.55, pump and go. The cost of the tax is hidden to most peoples eyes. So they pay $3 - $5 every time they fill up their tank in taxes x number of times per month without even thinking about it. Probably amounts to $700 - $1000 per driver per year depending on the type of car and number of miles driven.
Well if suddenly you're asking those people to fork over $1000 at one time when they go to register the car, you're going to really piss people off when they see it in one lump sum. Voters won't go for it because suddenly they see it as another big chunk of tax. Yes, they were paying about the same before, but at $5 a pop, they never paid any attention to it before. But when you have to write a check for 4 figures, suddenly people notice.
Hence, if you replace that fuel tax with a "road use tax" via tolls or GPS tracking of how much you drove and split those bills up into a monthly tab at $30 - $50 per month, then people once again start to consider a monthly bill just like their utilities, cell phone, etc. and less as a "tax". Plus this method also gives the government the ability to place a tracking device on your car. The republican voting base likes it because it can be used to track "evil people" (Terrorist/Gangs/Drug Dealers/Child Molesters/Commies/whomeverisevilatthemomet). The Democratic base likes it because it can be used to tax people, especially people driving a lot of miles. Because those electric cars are going to be powered predominately by coal for the next 20 - 25 years.
I volunteered in college for a couple state reps/senators and a US congressmen. And we were having this very same discussion only replace electric cars with natural gas powered cars back then. They did pass a "a natural gas powered car costs you $600 per year to register." Even that was enough of a turn off to keep all but the proponents of such technology from converting their vehicle to propane/LNG.
Eventually it will be *DOT (with the * being your state). Got to come up with some way of taxing electric car users to use the road if they aren't paying for it in fuel taxes.
Most drivers I know in Chicago willfully place such devices in their windshields for paying tolls. I know they aren't GPS yet, but probably future versions will be and people will use them and sign away on whatever forms in the name of connivence.
Just wait until more electric cars are on the road requiring some type of toll or other form of tracking so that people can be sent "use taxes/road taxes" since folks aren't fueling up with liquid fuels that are normally taxed for this purpose. Then if they want to know where you've been, it's just a sopeana away. Or more than likely, the laws will be written to where all law enforcement has to do is file a request of information.
I always thought of Dave & Busters as Showbiz with liquor.
Precedent isn't set until it's been upheld on appeal.
Outpost did release a patch that added a few of the features, like the monorail, but the management AI never happened and the ability to build additionally colony sites just never worked. All the cool features got stripped out just before launch. i can't remember if it was to make a deadline or what exactly.
I remember playing it for a while many years ago and it was an extremely fun game up until the point you realized it was missing a bunch of the features that would have made it great.
That's because 10 years ago with the release of OSX we geeks finally had a unix based OS that worked in laptops AND had COMMERCIAL software available for it including MS OFFICE, Adobe Products, and back then Macromedia. Linux was a pain in the ass, I was still running an ISA modem with jumpers, I never could get my sound card to work in my tower, and I had enough. Myself and most other unix geeks who could care less about the zealotry bought Macs. And most of us haven't regretted it. At some point you get past the "look at what I can do" and get into the "Dammit I just need this to work so I can solve other problems". Slowly I've sold my friends on mac. After the first couple weeks, I usually don't hear from them for technical support any more.
Depends, how much is your time worth? Before I bought my dad an iMac, it was 3 - 4 hours every time I visited cleaning crap off his computer and usually 6 hours around christmas every year to wipe the drive and reinstall. So probably around 15 hours a year. Since I bought him the iMac and he got over the initial how to questions in the first weeks, I've spent a grand total of 2 hours in 3 years upgrading from OS 10.5 to 10.6 on his machine last christmas.
Not having to deal with that crap when I visit, worth every penny of the apple tax.
Say what you want, but I've never had a Mac give me less than 5 years of use. The only exception to that were my last PowerMac G5 and mac minis I had in a house that got destroyed by a storm. (6 100+ year old trees fell on the house. Thankfully I wasn't there at the time.). Even then I had 4 solid years out of them. I still have a PowerBook 12" sitting next to me that has pretty much been on every day for the past 5 years and is still going. Only thing I've replaced was the battery once and a couple power supplies due to a puppy chewing through the cable. Two costs with any laptop you keep over 3 years. (unless you don't have a puppy). I did one OS upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5. Total cost $40 (family pack).
I know the PowerBook was like $2500 new, but considering the amount of time I've saved in the past 5 years not having to deal with the virus of the week and reinstall of the quarter, it's saved me far more in time than any premium I paid for it up front.
For anyone not Apple. Look at what happened with Dell. Basically since 2005 they made almost nothing on PC sales. Something like 70% of their operating income came from kick backs from Intel. It's one of the reasons why I don't buy PC's these days. It's been a race to the bottom and to see who can cut the most corners without completely going under.
MYOB, I've found it much easier and cheaper than Quickbooks for a small business . And if you buy it, they'll give a copy free to your CPA.
No, it was the pictures of the Highway of Death that largely upset the Arab allies when they were shown around the world that pretty much put an end to the war. If military operations had continued another couple days and basically eliminated the Republican guard,, the Shiites would have dealt with Saddam. Although at the risk of then becoming an Iranian puppet state.
India wants a RIM NOC in their country like the Chinese got.
If we go to all electric cars or mostly electric cars get ready for toll roads everywhere. Right now it's the tax on fuel that pays for roads (well at least is *supposed* to pay for roads, whether it does or just goes into the general funds is a debate for another day). As soon as people stop buying gas and diesel, they government(s) (state and federal) will be crying fowl and we'll see some sort of black box required on electric cars to see how many miles you drive and sending you a "road use" tax bill at the end of the year. Either that electronic tags on the windshields with passive sensors over the road like current toll booths.
Both solutions have that great added feature of tracking. And it won't take long for there to be automatic "speeding" tickets issues as an excuse for local governments to make an extra buck in the name "Public safety".
It's not the education system as much as the standardized testing system. Well, unless things have changed in the past 15 years.
Email, Skype, Pandora, MLB at Bat streaming of games, apps, it all adds up. I average around 460MB per month on my iPhone. Probably closer to 600 in the summer time since I listen to a lot of day baseball games via MLB at Bat and I stream Pandora in my car driving around.
Let's wind back the clock about 8 - 10 years ago when a lot of these apps were being built. The available browsers under active development were MSIE and Opera. Netscape by that time was a dead duck with AOL not sure what to do with it and Mozilla wasn't much better and FireFox didn't even exist yet. And frankly Netscape/Mozilla had their own quirks.
MSIE offered ActiveX support which allowed companies to basically develop desktop like web apps using something very close to Visual Basic. And a lot of companies and other entities had VB programmers on staff or were easy to find. VB was the PHP of its day 10 - 15 years ago when you needed in house apps and frontends to databases.
By that time it looked to most as though Netscape was dead and MSIE was the internet for most companies, people, and places. And it didn't appear as though anyone was going to challenge them either and the browser wars were over.
What nobody saw coming wasn't FireFox, but Safari and Webkit. Apple not only created a browser for their platform, but then they went to banks and other places and helped (paid) them to make their sites more standards compliant so they would work with macs/safari. This helped FireFox as well since both browsers were standards based.