I started in web design back in 1997 and that evolved into web programing in PERL, which evolved into learning how Linux/Unix worked and then I tried different distros and found FBSD as my favorite option to administrate. Ports back in the day was light years ahead of most distros not called Red-Hat. Even had a summer job helping to port some tools from IRIX to linux.
Video and 3D CGI were hobby interest sort of things that grew. I played with blender and then Lightwave and 3D Max in the labs as a release. Eventually I became the goto guy for setting up render grids in a lab when the architecture students needed to render an animation.
At the time I was using a dual boot Windows 2k Pro and SuSE 6.4 Linux. I did design, games, and office stuff in Windows, *AMP development in Linux. Windows was unstable and things like my sound card never worked in Linux. About that time Mac OS 10.1 was out and 10.2 on the way, I needed a new laptop and I saw: "Hey I can do *AMP stack development AND run photoshop on the same machine."
Bought a Mac and never looked back. After I graduated, I went to work for an IT consulting company. It was a small company in a small city (~150k people), but they dealt with a lot of photographers and videographers. They had a Mac guy on staff who knew Classic far better than I ever did (or will thank god. Before OSX, I made fun of Mac). But I had enough background in *iux that I understood how the core of OSX worked much better than the other guy.
This was when a lot of Mac users were upgrading as well as a lot more people migrating from other editing platforms to Mac OSX and Final Cut Pro. The company sent me to all the Apple training courses, etc. I got my Apple Certified Consultant thing and I worked at the job for about 3 years until it was bought out by the partner I didn't like so I left. That was 2005.
An engagement had been broken off, I was tired of traveling, and tired of IT in general and felt if I wanted to go back to grad school, that was the time. I needed to take some time to study for GRE, some of my former clients knew the situation and several were 1 man shops. They came to me asking if I wanted to edit videos for them when they got backed up. So I did. I would edit videos in the morning, set it to render in the afternoon and study for the LSAT in the afternoons.
Kept me fed and a roof over my head. In addition, I would take on some small web programing jobs for the graphics artists I knew to make some extra cash. Slowly over that year they started telling others and I started getting bigger and bigger projects.
Started law school, finished the first year when someone came to me with a project that happened to be both video related and web related. Happened to be the right person for the job.
doubtful, verifed the checksums before burning and then verified the burns on the install DVD's from my MacBook Pro. The Ubuntu disk was burned from his Dell laptop and he probably skipped the error check. So that may have been a bad burn.
The fact that 3 distros had issues is why I thought something else was bad hardware wise. But, FBSD installed without a hitch, detected everything, and was up and running. But the text-based installer was scary.
I believe the server does run on Gentoo, but I'm not 100% positive. Someone else handled that project. All I know is that the developer didn't put in code to clean the log files, so the 20GB drive will fill up every few weeks and cause the system to crash.
Upon further review, that specific intel chip set and Linux seems to have issues. Which if it was a home machine and had time to fuss with it, maybe a different story. But for him, it was a mission critical machine. It had to be up by a certain time. In that regards, Linux on the Desktop failed. It didn't just boot up and install. Windows did, BSD did, Linux did not.
Last week I had a client with an XP pro box that crashed hard. (The HDD physically broke and the needle scratched the crap out of the platters). He had an extra SATA drive and said, "I'm not married to XP, let's install Linux".
Their wifi access system was already running linux and *iux would make the final step of deploying the online ordering system I built for them a bit easier implement. I was up for it. It had been a while since I had dealt with installing Linux for a desktop. I figured things had improved.
Here is how that went: downloaded Fedora 9. Would not install, Kernel panic on boot from DVD. Apparently Fedora and the Intel 945GC chipset hate each other. Saw this "well known issue with DVD install and 945GC". May be an issue, but bottom line: it didn't work out of the box. STRIKE 1
OpenSuSE 11: Would install, but would freeze on hardware probe. Could boot up, but got an error that kernel modules were unable to load and thus the ethernet card would not work, etc.. STRIKE 2
Ubuntu: Owner downloaded and tried installing. Kept pressing enter at the install screen, but it did nothing. We could view the other menus, but try to do an install and it wouldn't let us for some reason. (This may have been a bad burn on the CD) He had read about how great Ubuntu was and decided to see if he could install it. STRIKE 3.
After that, I was thinking there was something else wrong hardware wise with the box. So I took out a FreeBSD 7-0 release disc and it installed, no problems, no hardware errors reported.
It was now the end of the day and the evening shift was getting ready to come in. They needed a box that worked so they could grant wifi access to customers (this is a coffee shop). We had wasted and afternoon, nothing accomplished.
XP Pro went back on the box. It worked. Linux lost a client on the desktop side. And if someone asks about it at the local chamber meeting, guess what he's going to say. "Well we tried 3 different versions of linux, none of them worked. They wouldn't even install."
Yesterday was Round 2. The owner decided to purchase an AMD barebones kit to replace the Intel machine. (He was going to take the XP box home for his kids).
OpenSuSE 11: Would boot, select install, then just a black screen. RESULT: Intentional Pass on Linux, went straight to BSD. This time PC-BSD. The owner had been reluctant on BSD because he had never heard of it and the text base installer scared him a bit with vanilla FBSD.
PC-BSD installed flawlessly and he liked the GUI installer. So easy even he could do it. Flash worked out of the box (a bit choppy on playback), but it works. Only problem was the NV driver would only allow 800x600 screen resolution, so had to use VESA. Not that important since all they are doing is using FireFox and Google Docs. So technically that is a failure as we are unable to use higher resolutions than 1024x768. Even on a wide screen monitor. But it works well enough.
Hell, I was able even able to load their label printer via CUPS and get it to work. In fact, I was really impressed with PC-BSD. It's 2 CD's to download and burn, had everything I needed to get up and running in less than 20 minutes. They have their PBI installer system or you can use the traditional BSD ports system.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like every time I give Linux another shot I am reminded to why I switched to BSD in 2000 and Mac in 2002 for the desktop.
As far as the memo it's self. It may not have been written by Gates hands, but by someone on his staff and then signed off on. But it can be hard to dictate things to a large development team. I now run a company that does custom development work. A lot of the developers are kids right out of college with CS degrees with technical leads having graduate degrees in CS. Technically, they know their stuff, but left to their own devices can come back with some of the worst stuff from a user stand point you've
Actually, when it comes to song royalties from radio play and record sales, it's not the bands that get hurt, its typically the back-up vocalists and studio musicians who get hurt. Many of these people earn royality checks as well. It may be a scant amount, but I do know a couple studio musicians and those royalty checks help by providing a constant pay check in between gigs. Usually they stay pretty busy, but with things like the writers strike happen, they aren't worrying where their next meal is coming from.
I bought the last generation of PPC macs when the Intels came out for 2 reasons:
1) None of my major applications were going to be out in Universial for at least 12 - 18 months (Final Cut Pro, Adobe et. al.)
2) I had no idea how this transition was going to go. It was either going to be smooth as could be or an unmitagated disaster. So I played it safe.
I bought an intel iMac for my Dad about a year and a half ago for christmas. It was absolutely amazing how well things went, but I did spend close $7k all said and done on my Quad-Core G5. It's still a powerful machine, with 8GB of Ram, for video editing and compositing using Shake as well as the limited 3D work I do in Lightwave.
That being said, I'm still on OSX 10.4 as well. My laptop is the last 12.1" powerbook G4 and I still love this machine for traveling as it fits on any airplane tray table. (I just shoved out another $80 for a new battery).
Now I have plans to get a MacBook Pro by the end of the year, but still i plan to keep this little machine for traveling as well I have no plans to upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro for another couple years.
The guy who founded MP3.com (IIRC) wrote a book entitled "The Cult of the Amatuer", which he basically talks about going on a weekend get away with O'Reiley and has an interesting critique of Web 2.0. So much so, I bought a couple extra copies and have given a couple copies to PHB when I'm hired to do consulting work.
The thing is about socialized medicine is that, as it's practiced throughout much of Europe, once you hit the age of 64/65, the level of coverage you qualify for is cut dramatically. 64 and need an organ transplant, too bad. At 64 you are no longer as seen as contributing to the economy. Even then, countries in Europe were having trouble keeping the programs funded, along with all the other entitlement problems they have.
As far as I can tell, a certain percentage of the population gets screwed by health care coverage whether state or private controlled. The only thing we're debating is by whom and by how much do people get screwed.
I used linux on the desktop around 2000 - 2001. It was usable for the basic applications I needed back then, other than my sound card never did work and the only modem I had that would work was an old 33.6k that had jumpers. But it worked for my main task of developing LAMP projects back when it could take a while to upload a large site with a lot files. It did teach me the basics of how *iux works. But I still had to keep a drive with windows 2000 loaded so I could use Photoshop and a few other applciations that just didn't exist for Linux.
In 2002 I was getting ready to leave the country. My Viao laptop was 3 years old and frankly I was getting tired of fiddling with Linux and not have things like video cards and soundcards work and I was tired it crashing and viruses, etc..
Apple came out with OSX, then OS 10.1 which I took a look at and said, "Hmmm, a Unix based operating system with photoshop...." So I bought an iBook as did a lot of people who were trying linux at the time. Over 80% of the people I knew who were "switchers" came from Linux to OSX, not windows. Why? We weren't zeloats for Opensource. It was pragmatic. We developed for and deployed on Linux servers, later FBSD actually, but when it came to our desktops, Apple gave us cake and we ate it.
When Apple switched to intel chips, just about everyone I know that does anytype of developement are running on MacBook Pro's. They use OSX and also boot up XP pro in VMware or Parralells all on one machine.
It's always been about applications. I just spent the past 6 months using FreeBSD on an older dell laptop I have for a project. I was impressed as hell at the fact that it reconized my generic Atheros card, had no problems connecting to the internet, KDE et. al had matured a lot over the years, all the basics were there for me to use, and there were things I really liked. I also recently used SuSE 10.x for a couple weeks, as a general OS for just surfing, it's not too bad and there are a lot of people who just check email and surf the net and need a basic office suite. Linux can work for that.
But at the end of the day, Apple has the apps and on the new MacBook*'s I can boot into windows if I need it.
Famine: Well, there's a lot of Africans who still don't get enough to eat.
And that is a result more of political unrest and NGO's as a lack of food or inablity to grow food due to climate.
Floods: Might as well include storms, so think about the number of hurricanes in the last couple of years, and many people in Europe have been experiencing SOME flooding.
Last time I checked the number of Hurricanes, to make landfall at least, has been way below the "predictions" the past two years. The one that hit New Orleans was a big storm. While it sticks out in the mind because of the complete and total devistation it caused, that part of the US does get hit by hurricanes and sometimes they are extremely devistating. Think Hugo and Andrew before that. Is it climate change, or global warming, or choose your term, or just luck of the draw that 2005 happen to be a bad year for Atlantic storms. Only time will tell.
As far as floods, they've been known to happen from time to time in a lot of places. Question is, have there been periods like this before in history? I'm not sure, I've not had the time to look it up.
Eroding shorelines happen over long periods of time. No argument there. Look at the number of settlements that are found today 100 - 200 underwater that at one time used to be at the shoreline a 1000 years ago.
Droughts: You ask any Australian, and particularly, Melbournians, if they've had any drought!
Now that is a problem. But is it global warming, the Asian Brown Cloud effecting changes in weather patterns, cyclical...some combination of all the above? Don't know. As before, havn't had the time to look it up.
Unfortunately, try telling the client with a "vision" that. Especially those from marketing where the site has to have a certain "look". People go into web projects wanting things to work a "certain" way and you'd better give it to them "that way" or else you're refunding money and just wasted 200 hours of your life.
You don't use the latest and greatest consumer hardware on FBSD. That's why my primary computers are all Mac's. But I am typing this from an old Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop with FBSD 6.2 installed and it works like a charm on a 2.2Ghz Celeron and 256MB of Ram. I've found FBSD to run very snappy on older hardware. Makes for cheap development machines when I'm developing specific web applications.
I dev
The Linux people all want to know what distro I'm running KDE on. Half think it's Kubuntu. When I tell them it's FreeBSD, they look at me all googly eyed.
Another reason: JDAM. The B-52's can carry a lot of 500-lb bombs. I can't remember the exact number, but it's a bunch. That means that 1 B-52 hovering over an area can inflict a hell of a lot of accurately placed bombs on a bunch of targets.
Also, there is still nothing in the US inventory that has the psychological impact of a B-52 strike even if they are just dropping 500-lbs iron bombs leaving a 1/4 mile wide by 2 mile long path of destruction.
It still is not going to affect Linux on the desktop any time soon. Why? OSX is dominating that market. Those of us who were more pragmatic rather than dogmatic our software switched to OSX a long time ago. The most of the original "switchers" I knew back in the day were Linux users who flocked to OSX. And why not? Back in 2002, Linux still had driver issues, programs like OpenOffice were still a ways away, and GIMP had been stuck at 1.4.x for a couple years.
We had our cake and ate it all day long. Linux was great for someone like me to learn Unix. But it was something I tinkered with. Eventually, my time became worth something. Especially when I began billing by the hour for it. With OSX, I have a nice laptop that works. No driver XYZ issues with soundcards, videocards, wireless cards, it all just works. Software installs easily without dependancy hell. I dealt with a CentOS server last fall and ran across some things like no php5 build in the official repo. I took a step back and blinked with that "WTF" look and found away around it. Now people can say, try XYZ distro or ABC distro, and that's the problem I had with my first round with Linux in 2000 - 2003 with porting some software from Irix. (Long story short, we only support Red Hat, Linux was 3% of sales, around 20% of tech support request...mostly dealing with "WHY WON'T THIS WORK ON MY CUSTOM HACKED DEBIAN/SLACKWARE disto?". End of story: ported to OSX, dropped linux.)
All the photographers I know on the small and medium scale have gone to Apple this last upgrade cycle. Especially now that CS3 is out in Universial. Most replaced their desktops with MBP's and they all love them. Yeah, a few complained about the higher price up front, but once they are running batch jobs instead of virus scans, the start to see that they are a bit more productive, which the faster they work, the more they make (usually).
Unless Apple really screws up royally, I don't see that changing anytime soon. When I switched from desktop linux (SuSE 6.x series) to OSX it was night and day. Sound cards worked, wireless cards worked, and I never looked back. Most photographers are paid to produce photos, not worry about their IT infrastructure. It has to work, out of the box, and not require a geek to operate it. Apple does that.
Don't get me wrong, if Google wants to pay for better support/development of PS on Linux, go for it. But thinking that a lot of people are going to switch from Windows to Linux on the desktop still isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I started with Slackware 2, compile your own drivers, and all that jazz. It was great when I was a kid and landed me some early jobs while I was in college just as Linux in the server room was starting to be used because I knew what it was. But as time went on, I found my personal time became worth something and was tired of nothing ever fully working. Yeah, Linux on the desktop was useable, but my modem didn't work. (Had to use an old 33.6 with jumpers) My sound card never worked either.)
What really soured me was when I worked for a company porting their Irix Applications to Linux. We ported the software and said specifically "Will only work with Red Hat 5" (this was a few years ago). That application made up less than 5% of sales and almost 40% of tech support inquiries because "OMG, it won't work on my custom hacked slackware/debian install why not!". Tell them, "Sorry, we only support RH" and then we'd get blogged on how bad we were on not being "Open".
Well, OSX came along, we ported to mac and dropped Linux support all together. Personally, at OS 10.2 is when I switched to OSX and never looked back. Most of those "switchers" I knew back then were Linux users who jumped to Mac OSX.
When my time became worth something to me personally, the fact that I could have MS Office, Photoshop, a complete Unix-based development environment all on one machine. Including use of tools like Quickbooks, when I started out as a consultant, and all the ProTools.
When my clients give me the choice, I deploy on BSD. When I don't get the choice I still stratch my head at how simple things like the MySQL start command are located in different locations depending on the distro. It's this lack of standardization that was annoying back then and while better, is still annoying now.
Maybe paper and pencil might be the best tools for the job?
Anyone ever stop to consider that. I know it's blasphemous to say new technology isn't the solution to every problem at the High Citadel of Cowboy Neal, so burn me at the Karma steak...
It's slashdot. Anytime you mix linux=bad/notperfect/hippiecommunistOS, Apple=good/gotthingsright, BSD(is not dead)>linux, and Windows Vista=Glad it works for you, finally...fireworks are bound to happen.
-Mobile phones (multiple, incompatible networks)
-Health care
-Data infrastructure How is choice between different networks and network technologies supported by multiple vendors a bad thing again? Where I live, the GSM coverage is spotty at best. Not a problem, switched to the provider that carried on CDMA, problem solved. And I had a choice of 3 providers that offer CDMA service in this area.
Health care - Granted, I'm young and healthy, but I work for myself and provide my own health insurance for $180 per month including dental. I've switched providers twice in the past 5 years, mainly due because I moved to another state. I liked the old insurance a little better, same coverage @ $140 a month, but move to a new state, different rules, etc.. (I'm with the same company, different branch basically). I'm conflicted. Yes I see where national competition could be a bit better, but at the same time I like states keep things local...
Data Infrastructure - Everyone forgets that the United States is a big country. I've lived in Europe before, have a lot of European friends, very few can fathom driving through Kansas and seeing 8 hours of farmland. With the exception of wireless technologies, any type of cord (fiber/copper/whatever), is damned expensive to install. Especially in rural areas. I remember my grandmother still had a party line up until the late 1980's, maybe even the early 1990's.
Plus we were one of the first to put in this infrastructure. When it takes 30 years to wire the country with 50 year old technology. By the time we finish wiring up the country with what we got today, something 10x's better will be out......
We have choice where I am now. We can get naked DSL without having a local phone from about 4 providers, 3 of which are small local firms. And I'm not in a big city.
In other areas, we are quite happy to nationalize,
Railway services
Interstate highways. "free" too.
Social Security (just try being the elected Grinch that cuts that program)
and most recently, education with no child left behind.
Hats off to Ike on the Interstate system, but even then, the argument can be made that the Interstate system is an extension of the industrial/military complex since they are a strategic asset as well as being damned nice for traveling. But states are putting in more and more toll roads and I've seen the states I've lived in waste a lot of money on road projects as well.
Rail system? Maybe for passenger/light-rail service. But even then It's rather spotty anywhere outside of the New England. All the freight rail is owned and operated by private businesses. And, yes, we can argue about tax breaks and all the rest.
Social Security: Currently is broken, will require major changes sooner or later. I work as though it won't be there for me when I retire in 40 years.
And don't get me started on education. I remember looking at the school districts budget when I was in high school for a business class. IIRC, almost 60% had to be spent government (either state or federal) mandated programs with another 15% to cover fixed costs (building maintenance, etc.. The other 25% what was left to fund things like teachers, programs, books, etc.. I sound like an ass, but about 45% of the mandated programs went to support maybe 5% of the students with "special needs". Since I was in school, the definition of "Special needs" has expanded dramatically to include just about everyone it seems.
And that doesn't include wasteful items like buying the maintance people new pick-up trucks that get trashed before the end of the school year, or fire chiefs getting brand new huge 4x4 SUV's every year, and a million other wasteful items. Especially when the fire board is run by the wives and family of the fireboards. So if, the government actually spent money effeicently and effective, I'll won't bitch about taxes.
At least with private industry I have the option NOT TO use/buy the product/service they are selling.
Most of the original "Switchers" to OSX back cira 2001/2002 where guess what: Linux users. Can linux do all those things? Yes, but after how many hours of fuddling with drivers that maybe work some of the time and compiling, then recompiling programs only to still have only half the advertised feature set actually work (and even less work well). I never did get Linux to play nicely with my soundcard on my last beige box.
Now I know things have changed and are better than they were six years ago. (Hell, even BSD automatically detects my wireless card settings these days.)
Can it be done with Linux? Yes. Easily, not in my experience.
Sorry, but anytime I get around to administrating Linux, I get quickly reminds me why I ditched it for BSD and Mac in the first place. (I mean no php5 build in repository for CentOS, because php5 is "Still in development", I mean really WTF!)
That being said, welcome to the club. I've been downloading and streaming movies and TV from via iTunes from my Powermac to the Mini hooked up to my LCD TV's DVI port for a couple years now. Coupled with a 360GB external FW HDD and it's a pretty effective DVR too.
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I started in web design back in 1997 and that evolved into web programing in PERL, which evolved into learning how Linux/Unix worked and then I tried different distros and found FBSD as my favorite option to administrate. Ports back in the day was light years ahead of most distros not called Red-Hat. Even had a summer job helping to port some tools from IRIX to linux.
Video and 3D CGI were hobby interest sort of things that grew. I played with blender and then Lightwave and 3D Max in the labs as a release. Eventually I became the goto guy for setting up render grids in a lab when the architecture students needed to render an animation.
At the time I was using a dual boot Windows 2k Pro and SuSE 6.4 Linux. I did design, games, and office stuff in Windows, *AMP development in Linux. Windows was unstable and things like my sound card never worked in Linux. About that time Mac OS 10.1 was out and 10.2 on the way, I needed a new laptop and I saw: "Hey I can do *AMP stack development AND run photoshop on the same machine."
Bought a Mac and never looked back. After I graduated, I went to work for an IT consulting company. It was a small company in a small city (~150k people), but they dealt with a lot of photographers and videographers. They had a Mac guy on staff who knew Classic far better than I ever did (or will thank god. Before OSX, I made fun of Mac). But I had enough background in *iux that I understood how the core of OSX worked much better than the other guy.
This was when a lot of Mac users were upgrading as well as a lot more people migrating from other editing platforms to Mac OSX and Final Cut Pro. The company sent me to all the Apple training courses, etc. I got my Apple Certified Consultant thing and I worked at the job for about 3 years until it was bought out by the partner I didn't like so I left. That was 2005.
An engagement had been broken off, I was tired of traveling, and tired of IT in general and felt if I wanted to go back to grad school, that was the time. I needed to take some time to study for GRE, some of my former clients knew the situation and several were 1 man shops. They came to me asking if I wanted to edit videos for them when they got backed up. So I did. I would edit videos in the morning, set it to render in the afternoon and study for the LSAT in the afternoons.
Kept me fed and a roof over my head. In addition, I would take on some small web programing jobs for the graphics artists I knew to make some extra cash. Slowly over that year they started telling others and I started getting bigger and bigger projects.
Started law school, finished the first year when someone came to me with a project that happened to be both video related and web related. Happened to be the right person for the job.
doubtful, verifed the checksums before burning and then verified the burns on the install DVD's from my MacBook Pro. The Ubuntu disk was burned from his Dell laptop and he probably skipped the error check. So that may have been a bad burn.
The fact that 3 distros had issues is why I thought something else was bad hardware wise. But, FBSD installed without a hitch, detected everything, and was up and running. But the text-based installer was scary.
I believe the server does run on Gentoo, but I'm not 100% positive. Someone else handled that project. All I know is that the developer didn't put in code to clean the log files, so the 20GB drive will fill up every few weeks and cause the system to crash.
Upon further review, that specific intel chip set and Linux seems to have issues. Which if it was a home machine and had time to fuss with it, maybe a different story. But for him, it was a mission critical machine. It had to be up by a certain time. In that regards, Linux on the Desktop failed. It didn't just boot up and install. Windows did, BSD did, Linux did not.
Last week I had a client with an XP pro box that crashed hard. (The HDD physically broke and the needle scratched the crap out of the platters). He had an extra SATA drive and said, "I'm not married to XP, let's install Linux".
Their wifi access system was already running linux and *iux would make the final step of deploying the online ordering system I built for them a bit easier implement. I was up for it. It had been a while since I had dealt with installing Linux for a desktop. I figured things had improved.
Here is how that went: downloaded Fedora 9. Would not install, Kernel panic on boot from DVD. Apparently Fedora and the Intel 945GC chipset hate each other. Saw this "well known issue with DVD install and 945GC". May be an issue, but bottom line: it didn't work out of the box. STRIKE 1
OpenSuSE 11: Would install, but would freeze on hardware probe. Could boot up, but got an error that kernel modules were unable to load and thus the ethernet card would not work, etc.. STRIKE 2
Ubuntu: Owner downloaded and tried installing. Kept pressing enter at the install screen, but it did nothing. We could view the other menus, but try to do an install and it wouldn't let us for some reason. (This may have been a bad burn on the CD) He had read about how great Ubuntu was and decided to see if he could install it. STRIKE 3.
After that, I was thinking there was something else wrong hardware wise with the box. So I took out a FreeBSD 7-0 release disc and it installed, no problems, no hardware errors reported.
It was now the end of the day and the evening shift was getting ready to come in. They needed a box that worked so they could grant wifi access to customers (this is a coffee shop). We had wasted and afternoon, nothing accomplished.
XP Pro went back on the box. It worked. Linux lost a client on the desktop side. And if someone asks about it at the local chamber meeting, guess what he's going to say. "Well we tried 3 different versions of linux, none of them worked. They wouldn't even install."
Yesterday was Round 2. The owner decided to purchase an AMD barebones kit to replace the Intel machine. (He was going to take the XP box home for his kids).
OpenSuSE 11: Would boot, select install, then just a black screen. RESULT: Intentional Pass on Linux, went straight to BSD. This time PC-BSD. The owner had been reluctant on BSD because he had never heard of it and the text base installer scared him a bit with vanilla FBSD.
PC-BSD installed flawlessly and he liked the GUI installer. So easy even he could do it. Flash worked out of the box (a bit choppy on playback), but it works. Only problem was the NV driver would only allow 800x600 screen resolution, so had to use VESA. Not that important since all they are doing is using FireFox and Google Docs. So technically that is a failure as we are unable to use higher resolutions than 1024x768. Even on a wide screen monitor. But it works well enough.
Hell, I was able even able to load their label printer via CUPS and get it to work. In fact, I was really impressed with PC-BSD. It's 2 CD's to download and burn, had everything I needed to get up and running in less than 20 minutes. They have their PBI installer system or you can use the traditional BSD ports system.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like every time I give Linux another shot I am reminded to why I switched to BSD in 2000 and Mac in 2002 for the desktop.
As far as the memo it's self. It may not have been written by Gates hands, but by someone on his staff and then signed off on. But it can be hard to dictate things to a large development team. I now run a company that does custom development work. A lot of the developers are kids right out of college with CS degrees with technical leads having graduate degrees in CS. Technically, they know their stuff, but left to their own devices can come back with some of the worst stuff from a user stand point you've
Actually, when it comes to song royalties from radio play and record sales, it's not the bands that get hurt, its typically the back-up vocalists and studio musicians who get hurt. Many of these people earn royality checks as well. It may be a scant amount, but I do know a couple studio musicians and those royalty checks help by providing a constant pay check in between gigs. Usually they stay pretty busy, but with things like the writers strike happen, they aren't worrying where their next meal is coming from.
1) None of my major applications were going to be out in Universial for at least 12 - 18 months (Final Cut Pro, Adobe et. al.)
2) I had no idea how this transition was going to go. It was either going to be smooth as could be or an unmitagated disaster. So I played it safe.
I bought an intel iMac for my Dad about a year and a half ago for christmas. It was absolutely amazing how well things went, but I did spend close $7k all said and done on my Quad-Core G5. It's still a powerful machine, with 8GB of Ram, for video editing and compositing using Shake as well as the limited 3D work I do in Lightwave.
That being said, I'm still on OSX 10.4 as well. My laptop is the last 12.1" powerbook G4 and I still love this machine for traveling as it fits on any airplane tray table. (I just shoved out another $80 for a new battery).
Now I have plans to get a MacBook Pro by the end of the year, but still i plan to keep this little machine for traveling as well I have no plans to upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro for another couple years.
The guy who founded MP3.com (IIRC) wrote a book entitled "The Cult of the Amatuer", which he basically talks about going on a weekend get away with O'Reiley and has an interesting critique of Web 2.0. So much so, I bought a couple extra copies and have given a couple copies to PHB when I'm hired to do consulting work.
As far as I can tell, a certain percentage of the population gets screwed by health care coverage whether state or private controlled. The only thing we're debating is by whom and by how much do people get screwed.
I used linux on the desktop around 2000 - 2001. It was usable for the basic applications I needed back then, other than my sound card never did work and the only modem I had that would work was an old 33.6k that had jumpers. But it worked for my main task of developing LAMP projects back when it could take a while to upload a large site with a lot files. It did teach me the basics of how *iux works. But I still had to keep a drive with windows 2000 loaded so I could use Photoshop and a few other applciations that just didn't exist for Linux.
In 2002 I was getting ready to leave the country. My Viao laptop was 3 years old and frankly I was getting tired of fiddling with Linux and not have things like video cards and soundcards work and I was tired it crashing and viruses, etc..
Apple came out with OSX, then OS 10.1 which I took a look at and said, "Hmmm, a Unix based operating system with photoshop...." So I bought an iBook as did a lot of people who were trying linux at the time. Over 80% of the people I knew who were "switchers" came from Linux to OSX, not windows. Why? We weren't zeloats for Opensource. It was pragmatic. We developed for and deployed on Linux servers, later FBSD actually, but when it came to our desktops, Apple gave us cake and we ate it.
When Apple switched to intel chips, just about everyone I know that does anytype of developement are running on MacBook Pro's. They use OSX and also boot up XP pro in VMware or Parralells all on one machine.
It's always been about applications. I just spent the past 6 months using FreeBSD on an older dell laptop I have for a project. I was impressed as hell at the fact that it reconized my generic Atheros card, had no problems connecting to the internet, KDE et. al had matured a lot over the years, all the basics were there for me to use, and there were things I really liked. I also recently used SuSE 10.x for a couple weeks, as a general OS for just surfing, it's not too bad and there are a lot of people who just check email and surf the net and need a basic office suite. Linux can work for that.
But at the end of the day, Apple has the apps and on the new MacBook*'s I can boot into windows if I need it.
In the newspaper world, tabloid is type of layout/format. It has nothing to do with the contents inside.
And that is a result more of political unrest and NGO's as a lack of food or inablity to grow food due to climate.
Floods: Might as well include storms, so think about the number of hurricanes in the last couple of years, and many people in Europe have been experiencing SOME flooding.Last time I checked the number of Hurricanes, to make landfall at least, has been way below the "predictions" the past two years. The one that hit New Orleans was a big storm. While it sticks out in the mind because of the complete and total devistation it caused, that part of the US does get hit by hurricanes and sometimes they are extremely devistating. Think Hugo and Andrew before that. Is it climate change, or global warming, or choose your term, or just luck of the draw that 2005 happen to be a bad year for Atlantic storms. Only time will tell.
As far as floods, they've been known to happen from time to time in a lot of places. Question is, have there been periods like this before in history? I'm not sure, I've not had the time to look it up.
Eroding shorelines happen over long periods of time. No argument there. Look at the number of settlements that are found today 100 - 200 underwater that at one time used to be at the shoreline a 1000 years ago.
Droughts: You ask any Australian, and particularly, Melbournians, if they've had any drought!Now that is a problem. But is it global warming, the Asian Brown Cloud effecting changes in weather patterns, cyclical...some combination of all the above? Don't know. As before, havn't had the time to look it up.
Unfortunately, try telling the client with a "vision" that. Especially those from marketing where the site has to have a certain "look". People go into web projects wanting things to work a "certain" way and you'd better give it to them "that way" or else you're refunding money and just wasted 200 hours of your life.
You don't use the latest and greatest consumer hardware on FBSD. That's why my primary computers are all Mac's. But I am typing this from an old Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop with FBSD 6.2 installed and it works like a charm on a 2.2Ghz Celeron and 256MB of Ram. I've found FBSD to run very snappy on older hardware. Makes for cheap development machines when I'm developing specific web applications.
I dev
The Linux people all want to know what distro I'm running KDE on. Half think it's Kubuntu. When I tell them it's FreeBSD, they look at me all googly eyed.
Rendering my latest blender project....
Another reason: JDAM. The B-52's can carry a lot of 500-lb bombs. I can't remember the exact number, but it's a bunch. That means that 1 B-52 hovering over an area can inflict a hell of a lot of accurately placed bombs on a bunch of targets.
Also, there is still nothing in the US inventory that has the psychological impact of a B-52 strike even if they are just dropping 500-lbs iron bombs leaving a 1/4 mile wide by 2 mile long path of destruction.
We had our cake and ate it all day long. Linux was great for someone like me to learn Unix. But it was something I tinkered with. Eventually, my time became worth something. Especially when I began billing by the hour for it. With OSX, I have a nice laptop that works. No driver XYZ issues with soundcards, videocards, wireless cards, it all just works. Software installs easily without dependancy hell. I dealt with a CentOS server last fall and ran across some things like no php5 build in the official repo. I took a step back and blinked with that "WTF" look and found away around it. Now people can say, try XYZ distro or ABC distro, and that's the problem I had with my first round with Linux in 2000 - 2003 with porting some software from Irix. (Long story short, we only support Red Hat, Linux was 3% of sales, around 20% of tech support request...mostly dealing with "WHY WON'T THIS WORK ON MY CUSTOM HACKED DEBIAN/SLACKWARE disto?". End of story: ported to OSX, dropped linux.)
All the photographers I know on the small and medium scale have gone to Apple this last upgrade cycle. Especially now that CS3 is out in Universial. Most replaced their desktops with MBP's and they all love them. Yeah, a few complained about the higher price up front, but once they are running batch jobs instead of virus scans, the start to see that they are a bit more productive, which the faster they work, the more they make (usually).
Unless Apple really screws up royally, I don't see that changing anytime soon. When I switched from desktop linux (SuSE 6.x series) to OSX it was night and day. Sound cards worked, wireless cards worked, and I never looked back. Most photographers are paid to produce photos, not worry about their IT infrastructure. It has to work, out of the box, and not require a geek to operate it. Apple does that.
Don't get me wrong, if Google wants to pay for better support/development of PS on Linux, go for it. But thinking that a lot of people are going to switch from Windows to Linux on the desktop still isn't going to happen anytime soon.
This is sounding more and more like what he said would happen in his book. It's an interesting read.
Now I'll go back to waiting for KDE to compile.
What really soured me was when I worked for a company porting their Irix Applications to Linux. We ported the software and said specifically "Will only work with Red Hat 5" (this was a few years ago). That application made up less than 5% of sales and almost 40% of tech support inquiries because "OMG, it won't work on my custom hacked slackware/debian install why not!". Tell them, "Sorry, we only support RH" and then we'd get blogged on how bad we were on not being "Open".
Well, OSX came along, we ported to mac and dropped Linux support all together. Personally, at OS 10.2 is when I switched to OSX and never looked back. Most of those "switchers" I knew back then were Linux users who jumped to Mac OSX.
When my time became worth something to me personally, the fact that I could have MS Office, Photoshop, a complete Unix-based development environment all on one machine. Including use of tools like Quickbooks, when I started out as a consultant, and all the ProTools.
When my clients give me the choice, I deploy on BSD. When I don't get the choice I still stratch my head at how simple things like the MySQL start command are located in different locations depending on the distro. It's this lack of standardization that was annoying back then and while better, is still annoying now.
Did anyone else read that as ENOUGH with the ROMULANS?
Maybe paper and pencil might be the best tools for the job?
Anyone ever stop to consider that. I know it's blasphemous to say new technology isn't the solution to every problem at the High Citadel of Cowboy Neal, so burn me at the Karma steak...
Schuland Partner AG is more popularly known as 1and1.com
It's slashdot. Anytime you mix linux=bad/notperfect/hippiecommunistOS, Apple=good/gotthingsright, BSD(is not dead)>linux, and Windows Vista=Glad it works for you, finally...fireworks are bound to happen.
Health care - Granted, I'm young and healthy, but I work for myself and provide my own health insurance for $180 per month including dental. I've switched providers twice in the past 5 years, mainly due because I moved to another state. I liked the old insurance a little better, same coverage @ $140 a month, but move to a new state, different rules, etc.. (I'm with the same company, different branch basically). I'm conflicted. Yes I see where national competition could be a bit better, but at the same time I like states keep things local...
Data Infrastructure - Everyone forgets that the United States is a big country. I've lived in Europe before, have a lot of European friends, very few can fathom driving through Kansas and seeing 8 hours of farmland. With the exception of wireless technologies, any type of cord (fiber/copper/whatever), is damned expensive to install. Especially in rural areas. I remember my grandmother still had a party line up until the late 1980's, maybe even the early 1990's.
Plus we were one of the first to put in this infrastructure. When it takes 30 years to wire the country with 50 year old technology. By the time we finish wiring up the country with what we got today, something 10x's better will be out......
We have choice where I am now. We can get naked DSL without having a local phone from about 4 providers, 3 of which are small local firms. And I'm not in a big city.
In other areas, we are quite happy to nationalize, Railway services Interstate highways. "free" too. Social Security (just try being the elected Grinch that cuts that program) and most recently, education with no child left behind.Hats off to Ike on the Interstate system, but even then, the argument can be made that the Interstate system is an extension of the industrial/military complex since they are a strategic asset as well as being damned nice for traveling. But states are putting in more and more toll roads and I've seen the states I've lived in waste a lot of money on road projects as well.
Rail system? Maybe for passenger/light-rail service. But even then It's rather spotty anywhere outside of the New England. All the freight rail is owned and operated by private businesses. And, yes, we can argue about tax breaks and all the rest.
Social Security: Currently is broken, will require major changes sooner or later. I work as though it won't be there for me when I retire in 40 years.
And don't get me started on education. I remember looking at the school districts budget when I was in high school for a business class. IIRC, almost 60% had to be spent government (either state or federal) mandated programs with another 15% to cover fixed costs (building maintenance, etc.. The other 25% what was left to fund things like teachers, programs, books, etc.. I sound like an ass, but about 45% of the mandated programs went to support maybe 5% of the students with "special needs". Since I was in school, the definition of "Special needs" has expanded dramatically to include just about everyone it seems.
And that doesn't include wasteful items like buying the maintance people new pick-up trucks that get trashed before the end of the school year, or fire chiefs getting brand new huge 4x4 SUV's every year, and a million other wasteful items. Especially when the fire board is run by the wives and family of the fireboards. So if, the government actually spent money effeicently and effective, I'll won't bitch about taxes.
At least with private industry I have the option NOT TO use/buy the product/service they are selling.
Now I know things have changed and are better than they were six years ago. (Hell, even BSD automatically detects my wireless card settings these days.)
Can it be done with Linux? Yes. Easily, not in my experience.
Sorry, but anytime I get around to administrating Linux, I get quickly reminds me why I ditched it for BSD and Mac in the first place. (I mean no php5 build in repository for CentOS, because php5 is "Still in development", I mean really WTF!)
That being said, welcome to the club. I've been downloading and streaming movies and TV from via iTunes from my Powermac to the Mini hooked up to my LCD TV's DVI port for a couple years now. Coupled with a 360GB external FW HDD and it's a pretty effective DVR too.