SuSE/OpenSuSE is the only linux I halfway like. It was the first desktop based distro I was able to install and use functionally circa 1999/2000. Hell I even bought 6.4 retail because we had dial up back then. Even then, I'd also take a look at PCBSD as well depending on how married to the "idea of Linux". From our experience, we've actually had better luck with PCBSD than Linux installed and up and running quickly.
Our last Linux machine went like this:
Fedora: Kernel Panic on boot Ubuntu: Couldn't get past the install screen OpenSuSE: Actually installed, but had some problems with the Hardware that caused kernel panic. PC-BSD: Installed and everything worked.
Turns out later that there was a bad piece of hardware in the machine. (Video Card was bad), but yet PC-BSD installed and worked for all the tasks such as surfing the internet and OpenOffice. And everything was there out of the box too. Took about 20 minutes to set up and install and start using.
My time is no longer worth nothing and the last thing I want to do is spend time dicking around with a computer for everyday use. At work it costs money and at home, it's the last thing I want to do when I get home. And every time I attempt to use Linux in a desktop environment, I still have to fuck around with some piece of hardware to get it to work. Hell even when I did research this last time on wireless hardware, all the sites said it would work and the card was a couple years old. So I bought it and turned out it was the one revision that linux wouldn't support with an NDIS wrapper. It cost me about a half days worth of work to get everything configured correctly. At my billable hours rate those 4 hours was an opportunity cost of $340. That easily makes up the price difference between a barebones kit and the price of a Mac Mini.
That's why when OSX 10.2 came out I said the hell with it and bought a mac and never looked back. OSX stays the hell out of my way. If something comes up, and since we're in development things do, I can always open up terminal and I got just as much power as would in Linux.
I turned the heat down at my old apartment to 60 and my Quad-core Powermac G5 kept it at a comfortable 68 so long as the outside temp wasn't less than 20 degrees.
See, what we are dealing with are neo-luddites calling themselves "environmentalists". Such as solar project was proposed. Then Pelosi et. al. decided to make the areas in the desert "protected lands" to protect some turtle or wolf or something.
And as far as nuclear fuel goes, we've got at least 500 years worth of fuel WITH WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE if we would just REPROCESS IT.
Except long term I have a feeling the carriers are going to be hijacking Android and only allowing apps from "their" app stores. There is simply too much money in apps and the carriers are going to muscle their way in some how. They don't want to be just dump pipes. We've finally seen unlimited voice plans fall to what I had been paying for 700 minutes of family talk.
In the US, they want your SSN in order to run a credit check. Want to know where the real privacy problem is: credit. It's virtually everywhere. Want cable, they run a credit check. Go to a new dentist/doctor, they run a credit check. And then try reminding these businesses that by law they have to offer another way around it. By law, the only people you are supposed to give out your SSN to is the government for Social Security and tax purposes. No one else is supposed to have access to it. The credit system is broken and required by just about everyone these days.
Oh, and god forbid you pay cash for everything and live within your means. I have 1 credit card, but I've carried a balance of a few hundred dollars for 3 months out of 10 years. Apparently that doesn't help your credit score. I paid cash for my last car and now drive "company" cars. Company provides my cell phone and cell card and I've always rented. Even then I've tended to pay the lease upfront just so I don't have to bother with it.
Wireless companies are trying not to be dumb pipes. And increasingly that's what they are becoming. Before Droid, on Verizon if you wanted a feature you had to pay more per month. The Wireless companies at first were happy about the smart phones because everyone had to buy a dataplan. Great, more revenue per customer. And that is the measure in the industry: how much can we suck from our customers.
Well Apple came along and launched their app store for the iPhone. And how much does ATT see from the app store? $0.
I've often wondered when the Carriers would hijack Android and do what they've done to other phones in the past and implement a "on our network, you use our Appstore."
The carriers see Apple earning hundreds of millions and now want their share of the pie.
Then I would be very worried if I were Mozilla. Because if it no longer works with web videos users will flock to Chrome, Safari, Opera, or IE which are available as free downloads to them and so long as it is free as in beer, most people don't care if it's free as in opensource.
If you look back, the Power chips are RISC basic processors as opposed to CISC on the Intels. Throughout the 1990's, the PPC's were superior to vastly superior for the graphics and and audio worlds. The last time I knew anything, submarines used PPC chips for sonar analysis (not Apples, made by somebody else to custom specs) for that reason.
Although things began to change in the early 2000's. For one, companies like Newtek began optimizing their renderers for x86 and it lead to the Intel chips to become the favorite. Also, at the same time, IBM and Motorola/Freescale kept making promises they couldn't deliver on the PPC side things. The G5 (PowerPC 970 series) simply produced too much heat and sucked down too much power to be used in Laptops. They also had problems delivering increased clock speeds. This was about the time that Intel announced their goal of performance per watt and IBM was demanding that Apple pony up $$$ for continued R&D of PPC line.
So Apple made the decision to move to Intel, which worked out extremely well. I didn't know how well it was going to work and bought one of the last Quadcore PowerMac G5's off the line. I was heavily in the video world at the time and got my use out of the $8k machine. But once all the software was ported over to Intel, I've been extremely happy with my Intel iMac and Macbook.
That being said, I am typing this from my 6 year old 12.1" Powerbook.
Yeah, the problem is the Constitution expressly states that if you want to modify it, you have to add these things called Amendments. And it's a pretty strict process to do so. Kind of hard too. And done so on purpose.
The "living document" argument is the one used by people who wish to "modify" the constitution without having to go through the process mentioned in the legal document.
That may have been true until OSX. Once it turned into a desktop Unix with commercial application support and coupled with the switch to Intel processors, it has turned into something else.
Almost all the developers I know are now using OSX and MacBook Pros for development. Even a lot of the.Net people I know. With Bootcamp and one of the VM packages out there its perfectly suited for the task. I know when we do product demos and people ask, "But we run windows..." we can fire up XP or Win 7 in Parallels and demo it for them. (We're a Java shop).
Expensive? Only if your time is worth nothing. Believe me, in the business world, the higher upfront cost is quickly recovered due to the fact that my OS stays the hell out of my way and lets me get my work done.
I have an older consumer digital camera made by sony that had rechargeable batteries that were AA's. Worked extremely well as long as I owned the camera. The nice thing was in a pinch, say a long day of pictures or forgetting to recharge the batteries, I could run into any store and grab a pack of AA and keep on going. Granted, only got about 3 hours of shooting time on 2AA's, but it was handy.
I imagine this would be the same way, some kind of rechargeable that are in the same form factor as AA and then you can pop in AA's in a pinch.
Really, for people like me. I don't do a lot of coding anymore. I don't need to lug around a laptop and a cell card ($60 per month for 5GB). What I need is the ability to do email, product demos (of a web based product), and occasionally make minor document edits. And be able to SSH into a server if things go really bad. I've been using my iPhone. It works well for the email and to demo the mobile version of our app, but editing documents and while I've used SSH in a real pinch, let's just say it's not ideal.
iPad is exactly what I need. Then I can keep the laptop in the car and cancel the cell card and get one of these. It's about time to replace my nearly 6 year old 12.1" powerbook.
And with a VNC app, I can't see why I can't remote in to my laptop or desktop with the thing. I can do it on my iPhone, should be better on the iPad.
It fits our needs. We have a web-based application that our sales people need to demo. A cell card for each rep is $60 a month for 5GB. Laptop is another $850 - $1300 depending on what they get. The iPad has unlimited data for $30 per month and has everything we need for sales reps to do demos. We already have an iPhone app for them to process sales.
1) Put a cap on punitive damages for malpractice at $500,000. This is not a cap on economic damages.
2) Hospitals and Doctors must have a 1 Price policy and have those prices publicly available. None of this Open Heart Surgery for Insurance A is $18,000, Insurance B $24,000, but if you walk in off the street with no insurance it's $45,000.
3) Government Defines 5 health insurance plans that insurance companies must offer and it is nationwide. Each plan will have a different level of features so you can have economy/minimum coverage all the way up to the Cadillac plan. The model for this is Medicare Advantage. Supplement B covers the same things no matter the company, the only differences between companies are premiums and co-pays. Then we're comparing Apples to Apples.
4) Defined plans must include pre-existing conditions. Again, shared risk pool is the point of insurance.
Depends on who is actually running the charge. If it's B&N, for instance, who runs the transaction and then gives the $$$ to the 3rd party minus B&N's kickback, then there is really nothing there against PCI rules. If B&N is giving the 3rd party client all the card info, then there could be some problems. But even then, the big no-no is how the CVV code is handled. So long as it isn't stored anywhere outside of ram and that it is discarded once the transaction is made, the PCI folks don't give a damn as far as I can tell.
I'll give an example. We run a system where each one of our merchant has their own processing account. Usually we charge the merchant a flat annual hosting fee, but some of our clients wanted to move to a different model where we added in a $1.00 per order service fee to their customers instead of paying the annual rate. Our clients cited the economy, blah, blah, blah, and it's not something we wanted to do, but it was either that or loose the revenue from that client period. So we basically run card twice, once under our gateway for the $1.00 fee, then again under the merchant's gateway for the total bill.
Server room, depends. Desktop, BSD is still beating Linux (Thanks to Apple.) Where BSD has found a niche is in Network appliances such as routers and firewalls. FBSD still has a superior networking stack from what I've seen. I know we use pfSense around here and Monowall before that. We also deploy Juniper networking equipment and JunOS is based on FreeBSD.
We actually deploy all our production servers on FreeBSD including our PostgreSQL and MySQL database servers. And they do so with rock solid realiability. The only time I can think of boxes crashing had to do with hardware failures. Including a couple boxes that were still running FBSD 6.x. We didn't bother taking them offline to upgrade until we replaced the hardware.
We developed a solution in PHP because that is what the servers we had two years ago supported, I knew it fairly well, and things had to be done quickly to get a product out to market. As we went back and started to rebuild the product we ended up choosing Perl because Perl wasn't changing much, already had a module that supported almost anything we wanted to do, and we could compile it and increase the load our servers could take by a good 20%.
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Every think the tea baggers with signs that say "MORAN" might mean this guy:
http://moran.house.gov/
SuSE/OpenSuSE is the only linux I halfway like. It was the first desktop based distro I was able to install and use functionally circa 1999/2000. Hell I even bought 6.4 retail because we had dial up back then. Even then, I'd also take a look at PCBSD as well depending on how married to the "idea of Linux". From our experience, we've actually had better luck with PCBSD than Linux installed and up and running quickly.
Our last Linux machine went like this:
Fedora: Kernel Panic on boot
Ubuntu: Couldn't get past the install screen
OpenSuSE: Actually installed, but had some problems with the Hardware that caused kernel panic.
PC-BSD: Installed and everything worked.
Turns out later that there was a bad piece of hardware in the machine. (Video Card was bad), but yet PC-BSD installed and worked for all the tasks such as surfing the internet and OpenOffice. And everything was there out of the box too. Took about 20 minutes to set up and install and start using.
My time is no longer worth nothing and the last thing I want to do is spend time dicking around with a computer for everyday use. At work it costs money and at home, it's the last thing I want to do when I get home. And every time I attempt to use Linux in a desktop environment, I still have to fuck around with some piece of hardware to get it to work. Hell even when I did research this last time on wireless hardware, all the sites said it would work and the card was a couple years old. So I bought it and turned out it was the one revision that linux wouldn't support with an NDIS wrapper. It cost me about a half days worth of work to get everything configured correctly. At my billable hours rate those 4 hours was an opportunity cost of $340. That easily makes up the price difference between a barebones kit and the price of a Mac Mini.
That's why when OSX 10.2 came out I said the hell with it and bought a mac and never looked back. OSX stays the hell out of my way. If something comes up, and since we're in development things do, I can always open up terminal and I got just as much power as would in Linux.
I turned the heat down at my old apartment to 60 and my Quad-core Powermac G5 kept it at a comfortable 68 so long as the outside temp wasn't less than 20 degrees.
See, what we are dealing with are neo-luddites calling themselves "environmentalists". Such as solar project was proposed. Then Pelosi et. al. decided to make the areas in the desert "protected lands" to protect some turtle or wolf or something.
And as far as nuclear fuel goes, we've got at least 500 years worth of fuel WITH WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE if we would just REPROCESS IT.
I'm sorry, but I've always found the lack of flash support on my iPhone to be feature, not a bug....
Except long term I have a feeling the carriers are going to be hijacking Android and only allowing apps from "their" app stores. There is simply too much money in apps and the carriers are going to muscle their way in some how. They don't want to be just dump pipes. We've finally seen unlimited voice plans fall to what I had been paying for 700 minutes of family talk.
In the US, they want your SSN in order to run a credit check. Want to know where the real privacy problem is: credit. It's virtually everywhere. Want cable, they run a credit check. Go to a new dentist/doctor, they run a credit check. And then try reminding these businesses that by law they have to offer another way around it. By law, the only people you are supposed to give out your SSN to is the government for Social Security and tax purposes. No one else is supposed to have access to it. The credit system is broken and required by just about everyone these days.
Oh, and god forbid you pay cash for everything and live within your means. I have 1 credit card, but I've carried a balance of a few hundred dollars for 3 months out of 10 years. Apparently that doesn't help your credit score. I paid cash for my last car and now drive "company" cars. Company provides my cell phone and cell card and I've always rented. Even then I've tended to pay the lease upfront just so I don't have to bother with it.
Wireless companies are trying not to be dumb pipes. And increasingly that's what they are becoming. Before Droid, on Verizon if you wanted a feature you had to pay more per month. The Wireless companies at first were happy about the smart phones because everyone had to buy a dataplan. Great, more revenue per customer. And that is the measure in the industry: how much can we suck from our customers.
Well Apple came along and launched their app store for the iPhone. And how much does ATT see from the app store? $0.
I've often wondered when the Carriers would hijack Android and do what they've done to other phones in the past and implement a "on our network, you use our Appstore."
The carriers see Apple earning hundreds of millions and now want their share of the pie.
Then I would be very worried if I were Mozilla. Because if it no longer works with web videos users will flock to Chrome, Safari, Opera, or IE which are available as free downloads to them and so long as it is free as in beer, most people don't care if it's free as in opensource.
If you look back, the Power chips are RISC basic processors as opposed to CISC on the Intels. Throughout the 1990's, the PPC's were superior to vastly superior for the graphics and and audio worlds. The last time I knew anything, submarines used PPC chips for sonar analysis (not Apples, made by somebody else to custom specs) for that reason.
Although things began to change in the early 2000's. For one, companies like Newtek began optimizing their renderers for x86 and it lead to the Intel chips to become the favorite. Also, at the same time, IBM and Motorola/Freescale kept making promises they couldn't deliver on the PPC side things. The G5 (PowerPC 970 series) simply produced too much heat and sucked down too much power to be used in Laptops. They also had problems delivering increased clock speeds. This was about the time that Intel announced their goal of performance per watt and IBM was demanding that Apple pony up $$$ for continued R&D of PPC line.
So Apple made the decision to move to Intel, which worked out extremely well. I didn't know how well it was going to work and bought one of the last Quadcore PowerMac G5's off the line. I was heavily in the video world at the time and got my use out of the $8k machine. But once all the software was ported over to Intel, I've been extremely happy with my Intel iMac and Macbook.
That being said, I am typing this from my 6 year old 12.1" Powerbook.
Yeah, the problem is the Constitution expressly states that if you want to modify it, you have to add these things called Amendments. And it's a pretty strict process to do so. Kind of hard too. And done so on purpose.
The "living document" argument is the one used by people who wish to "modify" the constitution without having to go through the process mentioned in the legal document.
That may have been true until OSX. Once it turned into a desktop Unix with commercial application support and coupled with the switch to Intel processors, it has turned into something else.
Almost all the developers I know are now using OSX and MacBook Pros for development. Even a lot of the .Net people I know. With Bootcamp and one of the VM packages out there its perfectly suited for the task. I know when we do product demos and people ask, "But we run windows..." we can fire up XP or Win 7 in Parallels and demo it for them. (We're a Java shop).
Expensive? Only if your time is worth nothing. Believe me, in the business world, the higher upfront cost is quickly recovered due to the fact that my OS stays the hell out of my way and lets me get my work done.
I have an older consumer digital camera made by sony that had rechargeable batteries that were AA's. Worked extremely well as long as I owned the camera. The nice thing was in a pinch, say a long day of pictures or forgetting to recharge the batteries, I could run into any store and grab a pack of AA and keep on going. Granted, only got about 3 hours of shooting time on 2AA's, but it was handy.
I imagine this would be the same way, some kind of rechargeable that are in the same form factor as AA and then you can pop in AA's in a pinch.
Really, for people like me. I don't do a lot of coding anymore. I don't need to lug around a laptop and a cell card ($60 per month for 5GB). What I need is the ability to do email, product demos (of a web based product), and occasionally make minor document edits. And be able to SSH into a server if things go really bad. I've been using my iPhone. It works well for the email and to demo the mobile version of our app, but editing documents and while I've used SSH in a real pinch, let's just say it's not ideal.
iPad is exactly what I need. Then I can keep the laptop in the car and cancel the cell card and get one of these. It's about time to replace my nearly 6 year old 12.1" powerbook.
And with a VNC app, I can't see why I can't remote in to my laptop or desktop with the thing. I can do it on my iPhone, should be better on the iPad.
It fits our needs. We have a web-based application that our sales people need to demo. A cell card for each rep is $60 a month for 5GB. Laptop is another $850 - $1300 depending on what they get. The iPad has unlimited data for $30 per month and has everything we need for sales reps to do demos. We already have an iPhone app for them to process sales.
I'm not sure, but their pre-lease benchmarks on Duke Nuke'em forever was off the chart. No. Really. True story.
Here is what needs to be done:
1) Put a cap on punitive damages for malpractice at $500,000. This is not a cap on economic damages.
2) Hospitals and Doctors must have a 1 Price policy and have those prices publicly available. None of this Open Heart Surgery for Insurance A is $18,000, Insurance B $24,000, but if you walk in off the street with no insurance it's $45,000.
3) Government Defines 5 health insurance plans that insurance companies must offer and it is nationwide. Each plan will have a different level of features so you can have economy/minimum coverage all the way up to the Cadillac plan. The model for this is Medicare Advantage. Supplement B covers the same things no matter the company, the only differences between companies are premiums and co-pays. Then we're comparing Apples to Apples.
4) Defined plans must include pre-existing conditions. Again, shared risk pool is the point of insurance.
Emacs finally got a decent text editor *ducks and runs*
Depends on who is actually running the charge. If it's B&N, for instance, who runs the transaction and then gives the $$$ to the 3rd party minus B&N's kickback, then there is really nothing there against PCI rules. If B&N is giving the 3rd party client all the card info, then there could be some problems. But even then, the big no-no is how the CVV code is handled. So long as it isn't stored anywhere outside of ram and that it is discarded once the transaction is made, the PCI folks don't give a damn as far as I can tell.
I'll give an example. We run a system where each one of our merchant has their own processing account. Usually we charge the merchant a flat annual hosting fee, but some of our clients wanted to move to a different model where we added in a $1.00 per order service fee to their customers instead of paying the annual rate. Our clients cited the economy, blah, blah, blah, and it's not something we wanted to do, but it was either that or loose the revenue from that client period. So we basically run card twice, once under our gateway for the $1.00 fee, then again under the merchant's gateway for the total bill.
debunked? Really? It's "Busted". You must be new here.
"Want a simple fact about privacy? Privacy's Dead!" - Shepard Smith.
Server room, depends. Desktop, BSD is still beating Linux (Thanks to Apple.) Where BSD has found a niche is in Network appliances such as routers and firewalls. FBSD still has a superior networking stack from what I've seen. I know we use pfSense around here and Monowall before that. We also deploy Juniper networking equipment and JunOS is based on FreeBSD.
We actually deploy all our production servers on FreeBSD including our PostgreSQL and MySQL database servers. And they do so with rock solid realiability. The only time I can think of boxes crashing had to do with hardware failures. Including a couple boxes that were still running FBSD 6.x. We didn't bother taking them offline to upgrade until we replaced the hardware.
the real question is: Has Netcraft confirmed it?
We developed a solution in PHP because that is what the servers we had two years ago supported, I knew it fairly well, and things had to be done quickly to get a product out to market. As we went back and started to rebuild the product we ended up choosing Perl because Perl wasn't changing much, already had a module that supported almost anything we wanted to do, and we could compile it and increase the load our servers could take by a good 20%.