You got your up and down inverted... but that's not why I posted. The reason that consumer ISPs offer asymmetrical bandwidth is because you can't think in terms of down == up == total bandwidth. The reality is that down + up == total bandwidth. So your 6.8M total bandwidth could be divided as 3.4 down and 3.4 up -or- 6 down and.8 up. Since the vast majority of users use more downstream bandwidth than upstream bandwidth, that's how consumer ISPs divvy up the pie to give the maximum overall speed. Personally, I think 5M up is just about right for almost any non-server use in early 2008. The piddly 1M up that's offered by most non-FIOS ISPs is really lamentable in today's internet of uploading pictures and especially videos.
What??? Did Microsoft sign an OEM agreement with radio makers while I wasn't paying attention??? YOU BASTARDS!!!
Joking aside, this is why I got satellite radio. I don't mind paying $15/month to NOT be bombarded with commercials. Now, if XM would stop playing the same 50 songs (don't think we didn't notice), and replace those annoying DJ interruptions telling me about how I can find out about traffic in San Antonio by tuning to channel 290 with a friggen randomizer, that would be cool.
Even thought there's NO way anybody from XM or Sirius is reading this, I'll drop a little rant that might get googled by someone with a say someday: How about letting subscribers program a channel or ten? Think submitting iTunes playlist "set" and people can go online to rate play lists for air play. Those with the highest rating get played in the next block. You can limit the catalog to fit the channel.
You're pointing out the minor shortcomings while ignoring that the browser, mail, calendar, music, video, and screen blow every other *PHONE* as it exists today clear out of the water. I have yet to see one come close to the iPhone on those features. Could the iPhone be better? Fully Understood Common Knowledge yeah... no argument there. Is the iPhone the best phone available on the market currently... arguably yes. Your points about the GPS / 3G / jack are good. The other two are laughable. I'd add where's the (non 3rd party) support for tethering, video camera, and the SDK?
It's called expose, you have to hit a button to get to it, but I have the side button on my mouse mapped to it. One click, and I see all open windows on one screen. I hated the Windows task bar (been a loooooooong time since I've used it though) because it would crowd up to the point of uselessness (labels would become...) because I tend to run a lot of concurrent windows. The Mac approach is vastly superior.
Jobs that blocked that feature for AAC to MP3 conversion on DRM free tracks
What in the hell are you talking about? I can convert iTunes DRM free M4A files to MP3 inside iTunes by right-click -> Convert Selection to MP3, no problem whatsoever. Of course, it may not work on Windows, I don't have to test that handy, but there sure isn't any limitation like you mention on OS X. Are you talking about stripping DRM within iTunes to convert to MP3? If so, even though I hate DRM schemes, that's the way DRM is supposed to work!
They can sue anyone along the food chain, from dev to seller to end user. They just chose the seller because that's where the most bang for the buck is.
Since you're indexing non-text data, you'll need a search engine that has plenty of document filters. We use Oracle Text to do something similar to this, but it's not for the faint of heart. The nice thing about Oracle Text is it includes filters for pretty much any document you'd want to index (PDF, Word, Excel, etc). Of course, Oracle Text query syntax needs an awful lot of lipstick to be made to look like Google query syntax. WMMV.
Btw... Mac OS and Mac Intel are both OS X so your Vista market share calculation is wrong, but those numbers will change seeing as almost 1 in 5 of laptops currently being sold is a Mac.
Well... MS office isn't exactly EOLed, it's a crap rosetta app that's incredibly painful to use, but it's still around until it gets replaced by the hopefully less crap Office 2007(8 now?) due in Jan. iWork 08 is so much better it's not even funny. However, because some wannabes still insist and embedding macros in their spreadsheets, MSO2K4 for Mac is a painful necessity. On that note, the Aqua OpenOffice port is starting to solidify nicely.
$5K, really? So you have a dual 3.0G Quad-core Xeon with 4G of RAM, a 750G 7200 RPM SATA drive, and an NVIDIA 7300GT vid card? Call me suspicious, but I'm guessing you have nowhere near that kind of horsepower. *Good* Macs aren't cheap, you can pick up a Mini that you'll hate for $600, but for $2200 you get a dual 2.0G Dual-core Xeon Mac Pro that's probably got better performance than the HP/Dell you're using not to mention that it's quieter by a factor of 10. Still not cheap, but you get one hell of a nice computer that you can sell for 70 cents on the dollar on eBay when you decide to upgrade.
I think he meant that living in social groups leads to morality, not that living in social groups is inevitable or that evolution predicts morality. I don't know if "morality" is the right terminology, but there certainly is truth to the fact that living in social groups does imply an expected behavior. IANAS (I am not a sociologist) but if I wanted to be extra friggen pedantic I'd phrase it as: codes of conduct are what define social groups.
Wow... that was incredibly distasteful, nothing like jokes about lesbians, tornado victims, and pedophilia to get me laughing out loud. The type of people who find that moronic pap funny are the same that don't see the irony of this bit.
My current MBP has a 17" screen at 1920x1200, compare that with the top of the line ThinkPad with a 15.4" screen at 1600×1024. If you're using a TP, you're not on the right equipment for "serious" graphical work.
It is really easy to forget some obscure setting, because of all those damn tabs.
I don't know about obscurity, but there is something good about being able to check-in config changes into version control. I think tab based configuration of anything on a server is just asking for trouble. I'll take plain text (ok XML) over some binary cruft socked away in a registry or a plist any day. I wish MS would accept that the registry was a bad idea and move back to a text config model, even a half-baked-but-better-than regedt one like the old.INI scheme. Cue the single vs multibyte vs hex vs management comments...
This is one of the most insightful posts I have seen on Slashdot. This is the stuff they DON'T teach you in university but they should. Moving into upper management isn't about WHAT you know, it's about WHO you know. You can call it bullshitting, ass kissing, whatever... but the perception people have of you determines where your glass ceiling lies. Yes, keep your skills up to date, but also keep your address book up to date and send a keepalive on your entire social network every quarter. Crap... now I can't use my mod points here.
VMWare Fusion... download it... it's really good on OS X. I have 3 Linux images I regularly use with almost no perceptible performance hit. It has a really slick full screen mode. Also, there's nothing stopping you from imaging your machine with Linux and installing OS X in a VMWare VM, it's a bit flaky on the redraws, but you'll have access to iTunes since you DO have a valid OS X license after all. The downside to that is you won't have access to firmware updates from Stevie.
I'm probably in the minority here but I use OS X because it has a BSD Unix base, not because it's cool. If your moral choices preclude you from using it, that's fine too. However, I think you're overlooking the fact that Windows still holds the lions share of the workstation install base, any competition in that ecosystem weakens the "we only write for MS because it's the broadest market" argument. Once code is written to be portable, barriers to diversity in that ecosystem weaken. Also, I certainly don't want to be an Apple apologist, but Apple uses mainly open standards, as in MP4/H264, MP3, and MP4 Audio (AAC). They're hardly ideal, but they're magnitudes more "open" than MS when it comes to standards. Keep in mind that I say this as a Linux / DB admin by trade and used a Linux workstation for almost 6 years before giving OS X a shot. Really I view OS X as a drop-in replacement for KDE since under the hood there's not much difference from my old Linux workstation other than the GUI.
I've got $20 that says you don't even have an iPhone. Anyways, the hacking part is kind of fun, even though all the heavy lifting has been done by others. I don't call connect the tether and run iActivate and iPhoneInterface real "hacking".
My MBP with 4GB of RAM, 2.4G Core 2 Duo, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM begs to differ with you on your "no good for 3D gaming" blanket statement. However, there will ALWAYS be a niche for desktops, the difference is that mobile computers will *probably* become the norm if current trends continue. As an example, there's still a niche for high end mainframe systems, even though those have been considered dead for over a decade now. Personally, I think the market will stabilize somewhere around 75% mobile and 25% desktop. Of course, this completely excludes servers from the equation, this is pure end user.
I wouldn't call the position "meaningless", the "world's wealthiest man" is a moniker that brought free publicity to Microsoft. I for one would be happy to never hear that moniker attached to anything related to Microsoft again. Also, Microsoft no longer gets free promotion by having their CTO/CEO/whatever on the cover page of Forbes anymore. So for Bill, nothing changes, for his company, I would argue that this does matter to a very small extent.
this app being a generic attack vector for anyone willing to abuse your computer.
Yeah but even then, that's when the beauty of Linux kicks in. If someone discovers, for example, a buffer overflow in the app, they're still facing an unknown kernel version, distro filesystem, and GCC version on top of Linux's user privileges. It's much harder to create an exploit that could be used to take over your account, let alone take control of the system. There's really no wide reaching baseline from which to build an attack on Linux, unlike Windows which has one distro, one compiler. The best they could do on a broad reaching basis is crash the application consistently or maybe corrupt the binary to delete files from your home directory if you install the application locally.
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You got your up and down inverted ... but that's not why I posted. The reason that consumer ISPs offer asymmetrical bandwidth is because you can't think in terms of down == up == total bandwidth. The reality is that down + up == total bandwidth. So your 6.8M total bandwidth could be divided as 3.4 down and 3.4 up -or- 6 down and .8 up. Since the vast majority of users use more downstream bandwidth than upstream bandwidth, that's how consumer ISPs divvy up the pie to give the maximum overall speed. Personally, I think 5M up is just about right for almost any non-server use in early 2008. The piddly 1M up that's offered by most non-FIOS ISPs is really lamentable in today's internet of uploading pictures and especially videos.
What??? Did Microsoft sign an OEM agreement with radio makers while I wasn't paying attention??? YOU BASTARDS!!!
Joking aside, this is why I got satellite radio. I don't mind paying $15/month to NOT be bombarded with commercials. Now, if XM would stop playing the same 50 songs (don't think we didn't notice), and replace those annoying DJ interruptions telling me about how I can find out about traffic in San Antonio by tuning to channel 290 with a friggen randomizer, that would be cool.
Even thought there's NO way anybody from XM or Sirius is reading this, I'll drop a little rant that might get googled by someone with a say someday: How about letting subscribers program a channel or ten? Think submitting iTunes playlist "set" and people can go online to rate play lists for air play. Those with the highest rating get played in the next block. You can limit the catalog to fit the channel.
You're pointing out the minor shortcomings while ignoring that the browser, mail, calendar, music, video, and screen blow every other *PHONE* as it exists today clear out of the water. I have yet to see one come close to the iPhone on those features. Could the iPhone be better? Fully Understood Common Knowledge yeah ... no argument there. Is the iPhone the best phone available on the market currently ... arguably yes. Your points about the GPS / 3G / jack are good. The other two are laughable. I'd add where's the (non 3rd party) support for tethering, video camera, and the SDK?
It's called expose, you have to hit a button to get to it, but I have the side button on my mouse mapped to it. One click, and I see all open windows on one screen. I hated the Windows task bar (been a loooooooong time since I've used it though) because it would crowd up to the point of uselessness (labels would become ...) because I tend to run a lot of concurrent windows. The Mac approach is vastly superior.
Jobs that blocked that feature for AAC to MP3 conversion on DRM free tracks
What in the hell are you talking about? I can convert iTunes DRM free M4A files to MP3 inside iTunes by right-click -> Convert Selection to MP3, no problem whatsoever. Of course, it may not work on Windows, I don't have to test that handy, but there sure isn't any limitation like you mention on OS X. Are you talking about stripping DRM within iTunes to convert to MP3? If so, even though I hate DRM schemes, that's the way DRM is supposed to work!
They can sue anyone along the food chain, from dev to seller to end user. They just chose the seller because that's where the most bang for the buck is.
Since you're indexing non-text data, you'll need a search engine that has plenty of document filters. We use Oracle Text to do something similar to this, but it's not for the faint of heart. The nice thing about Oracle Text is it includes filters for pretty much any document you'd want to index (PDF, Word, Excel, etc). Of course, Oracle Text query syntax needs an awful lot of lipstick to be made to look like Google query syntax. WMMV.
The number of macbooks that are NOT running OS X is not going to be statistically significant.
Fine, but the number of MacBooks running VMWare / Parallels with Linux / Windows is NOT statistically insignificant.
Btw ... Mac OS and Mac Intel are both OS X so your Vista market share calculation is wrong, but those numbers will change seeing as almost 1 in 5 of laptops currently being sold is a Mac.
Well ... MS office isn't exactly EOLed, it's a crap rosetta app that's incredibly painful to use, but it's still around until it gets replaced by the hopefully less crap Office 2007(8 now?) due in Jan. iWork 08 is so much better it's not even funny. However, because some wannabes still insist and embedding macros in their spreadsheets, MSO2K4 for Mac is a painful necessity. On that note, the Aqua OpenOffice port is starting to solidify nicely.
$5K, really? So you have a dual 3.0G Quad-core Xeon with 4G of RAM, a 750G 7200 RPM SATA drive, and an NVIDIA 7300GT vid card? Call me suspicious, but I'm guessing you have nowhere near that kind of horsepower. *Good* Macs aren't cheap, you can pick up a Mini that you'll hate for $600, but for $2200 you get a dual 2.0G Dual-core Xeon Mac Pro that's probably got better performance than the HP/Dell you're using not to mention that it's quieter by a factor of 10. Still not cheap, but you get one hell of a nice computer that you can sell for 70 cents on the dollar on eBay when you decide to upgrade.
I think he meant that living in social groups leads to morality, not that living in social groups is inevitable or that evolution predicts morality. I don't know if "morality" is the right terminology, but there certainly is truth to the fact that living in social groups does imply an expected behavior. IANAS (I am not a sociologist) but if I wanted to be extra friggen pedantic I'd phrase it as: codes of conduct are what define social groups.
Wow ... that was incredibly distasteful, nothing like jokes about lesbians, tornado victims, and pedophilia to get me laughing out loud. The type of people who find that moronic pap funny are the same that don't see the irony of this bit.
My current MBP has a 17" screen at 1920x1200, compare that with the top of the line ThinkPad with a 15.4" screen at 1600×1024. If you're using a TP, you're not on the right equipment for "serious" graphical work.
As my old Sicilian grandfather used to say, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité!" At least that's what I think he used to say.
Are you sure your old Sicilian grandfather wasn't French?
It is really easy to forget some obscure setting, because of all those damn tabs.
.INI scheme. Cue the single vs multibyte vs hex vs management comments ...
I don't know about obscurity, but there is something good about being able to check-in config changes into version control. I think tab based configuration of anything on a server is just asking for trouble. I'll take plain text (ok XML) over some binary cruft socked away in a registry or a plist any day. I wish MS would accept that the registry was a bad idea and move back to a text config model, even a half-baked-but-better-than regedt one like the old
What a uninformed statement, your co-worker is an idiot.
This is one of the most insightful posts I have seen on Slashdot. This is the stuff they DON'T teach you in university but they should. Moving into upper management isn't about WHAT you know, it's about WHO you know. You can call it bullshitting, ass kissing, whatever ... but the perception people have of you determines where your glass ceiling lies. Yes, keep your skills up to date, but also keep your address book up to date and send a keepalive on your entire social network every quarter. Crap ... now I can't use my mod points here.
VMWare Fusion ... download it ... it's really good on OS X. I have 3 Linux images I regularly use with almost no perceptible performance hit. It has a really slick full screen mode. Also, there's nothing stopping you from imaging your machine with Linux and installing OS X in a VMWare VM, it's a bit flaky on the redraws, but you'll have access to iTunes since you DO have a valid OS X license after all. The downside to that is you won't have access to firmware updates from Stevie.
I'm probably in the minority here but I use OS X because it has a BSD Unix base, not because it's cool. If your moral choices preclude you from using it, that's fine too. However, I think you're overlooking the fact that Windows still holds the lions share of the workstation install base, any competition in that ecosystem weakens the "we only write for MS because it's the broadest market" argument. Once code is written to be portable, barriers to diversity in that ecosystem weaken. Also, I certainly don't want to be an Apple apologist, but Apple uses mainly open standards, as in MP4/H264, MP3, and MP4 Audio (AAC). They're hardly ideal, but they're magnitudes more "open" than MS when it comes to standards. Keep in mind that I say this as a Linux / DB admin by trade and used a Linux workstation for almost 6 years before giving OS X a shot. Really I view OS X as a drop-in replacement for KDE since under the hood there's not much difference from my old Linux workstation other than the GUI.
I've got $20 that says you don't even have an iPhone. Anyways, the hacking part is kind of fun, even though all the heavy lifting has been done by others. I don't call connect the tether and run iActivate and iPhoneInterface real "hacking".
My MBP with 4GB of RAM, 2.4G Core 2 Duo, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM begs to differ with you on your "no good for 3D gaming" blanket statement. However, there will ALWAYS be a niche for desktops, the difference is that mobile computers will *probably* become the norm if current trends continue. As an example, there's still a niche for high end mainframe systems, even though those have been considered dead for over a decade now. Personally, I think the market will stabilize somewhere around 75% mobile and 25% desktop. Of course, this completely excludes servers from the equation, this is pure end user.
Microsoft is not having trouble finding "employees", it's having trouble finding "employees at the wage they want to pay".
I wouldn't call the position "meaningless", the "world's wealthiest man" is a moniker that brought free publicity to Microsoft. I for one would be happy to never hear that moniker attached to anything related to Microsoft again. Also, Microsoft no longer gets free promotion by having their CTO/CEO/whatever on the cover page of Forbes anymore. So for Bill, nothing changes, for his company, I would argue that this does matter to a very small extent.
this app being a generic attack vector for anyone willing to abuse your computer.
Yeah but even then, that's when the beauty of Linux kicks in. If someone discovers, for example, a buffer overflow in the app, they're still facing an unknown kernel version, distro filesystem, and GCC version on top of Linux's user privileges. It's much harder to create an exploit that could be used to take over your account, let alone take control of the system. There's really no wide reaching baseline from which to build an attack on Linux, unlike Windows which has one distro, one compiler. The best they could do on a broad reaching basis is crash the application consistently or maybe corrupt the binary to delete files from your home directory if you install the application locally.