Sure, ducks won't get into the tupperware, and especially not an ammo box..
But a raccoon can get into just about anything that's not padlocked shut. And even *that* won't stop a bear.
Then, of course, the duck comes along, eats, and chokes to death on, the balloons that the raccoon or bear left on the ground after realising there was nothing edible (or WAS there???) in the cache.
The contractual clauses you're talking about, the ones that run along the lines of:
"ALL IP you generate, even that which you come up with at home or in the shower, walking to/from work, etc., belong to the company."
Those are illegal in California; and they're unenforcable, no matter if you signed them into a contract. Once you walk out that office door, your time and ideas are your own. Sell that code independently, release it under the GPL, do whatever. If you do it on your own time, your employer has NO right to it whatsoever, no matter WHAT you signed.
AOL seems to be trying to apply the more authoritarian standards of the east coast, to people residing in the more employee-friendly California. It just doesn't wash.
> They would have to have a contract with Justin that says > all thoughts are AOL's regardless of whether he does > them for work or not.
If the Nullsoft guys are still working out of San Francisco, as the article suggests, he's 100% in the clear. Such clauses are illegal in California, wether you sign them into your contract or not. Go ahead and sign a contract giving your employer the rights to ideas you come up with in your free time. Clauses like that are generally thrown in with the legalese to try to make you THINK they have a right to your free time. Nevertheless, said clause is illegal and unenforceable.
Obviously, I don't know what was going on behind the scenes. But in my own experience, Apple's focus is on CUSTOMER satisfaction, even at the expense of a sale of their own.
Back when "Master of Orion III" had JUST been released for the Macintosh, I was REALLY desperate to get it. After being disappointed in CompUSA for not having it in stock, I resorted to calling ahead before trekking to other stores. My first call was to The Apple Store in Emeryville. They were more concerned that I, the customer, would be satisfied than they were on getting that sale. Though they didn't have it in stock, they actually referred me to three other stores that carry Macintosh software; one of which was the ComputerWare in Berkeley.
Unfortunately, none of them had MOO3 in stock yet either. A week later, I found myself in Emeryville for other reasons, and decided to stop in at the Apple Store to see if it was in yet. They didn't have it, but the store manager actually CALLED those same resellers (including again, Berkeley's ComputerWare) for me, while I was in The Apple Store, trying to get me what I wanted, EVEN IF IT WOULD COST THEM A SALE!!!
Shades of "Miriacle on 34th Street"; and certianly NOT the actions of a company that's hostile to its 3rd party resellers. More like one that places the satisfaction of the CUSTOMER at the highest priority. And that's but one more reason *I* will be staying with Apple.
Plus, as another poster noted, ComputerWare was NEVER very competitive in the first place. Basiclly, they were where you would go as a last resort if you couldn't find something locally, and you didn't want to wait for mail-order. Sure, they were exclusively Macintosh; so their staff was more clued in; but that was only ever relevant to the non-tech-savvy anyway. They also carried random Apple trinkets like T-shirts, pens, stickers, and the like. If you wanted crap like that, ComputerWare was the first place to go.
But if you wanted hardware or software? No way. ComputerWare, so far as I could ever tell, sold EVERYTHING at the full MSRP. Except for the Macs themselves, most of the hardware they sold could be had at Frys or even CompUSA at 1/3-2/3 the price. And they sold three and even FIVE YEAR OLD games at full MSRP price from when they first came out. This, when the same games could be had in the bargain bin elsewhere in town for $15; or you could wait for MacWorld to roll into the Moscone Center and get them for $5. (Hell, even The Apple Store marks down the low-end games!!!)
Like I said, I don't know what happened behind the scenes. But from where I sit, The Apple Store was pretty supportive of ComputerWare, even at the possibility of their own expense. And ComputerWare was never, IMO, the perferred store to shop in the first place. My bet is that they only lasted as long as they did because of some of the more zealous Mac users who perferred to shop at a Mac-only store, even if it cost them more money than schlepping down to Frys or CompUSA.
It's been my experience that these sort of companies are EXACTLY the sort of places that DO place policy over productivity. The first job out of college, that I mentioned, was with Lockheed Martin. You don't GET much larger or more impersonal than that. And, with rare exceptions, they do NOT value individual engieers as contributors. Everyone there is just another source of man-hours. And you DO follow policy; because everything IS documentated and you ARE easily replaced.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. In fact, that's the main reason I left, in favor of a small (tiny even) company where I felt my efforts WOULD make a difference. But that's the way it is. (Though, the way the economy turned out, I would've been better off had I stayed at the big, evil, impersonal defence contractor. But hindsight is 20/20.)
Besides, data storage like I described shouldn't just be done because it's "the policy". It should be done that way, or similarly, because it makes SENCE. Loseing data like my ex-colleague did is just stupid, reckless, and flat out unnecessary.
I've HAVE been on both sides of the IT desk. And even when, as an engineer, I was annoyed by certian policies, I DID understand that, in most cases, they were there for GOOD reasons.
EVERYONE, IT and engineer alike, should understand that RAID and regular offsite backups are your friends!
No you don't have to poke around... not if you have competent admins, and a good, consistent, data storage policy.
Everywhere I've ever worked in the tech industry (except the startup that was too new to HAVE a policy... but they adopted something similar) has had a policy, for both the windows and Linux/Unix networks, that *ALL* files go on the FILE SERVER, where everything is RAID'ed and periodicly backed up. The local hard drive was to be considered, at best, temporary storage and could be re-imaged at any time.
This has the added advantage of enableing companies to buy the most dirt-cheap dell POS's... those Optiplex boxes with the 6GB hard drives. 6GB is more than enough for an NT installation, AND a Linux installation, either as a dual-boot. or a VMware guest. EVERYTHING else, was to be on the file servers.
At my first job out of college, an engineer was even fired because of this. In violation of the policy (Which he had to read and sign before ever logging on in the first place.) he was keeping most of his work on his desktop machine. One of those windows viruses (melissia, IIRC) got loose in our network. So we all got to sit around doing nothing for a day. That night, the IT guys got to pull a LOT of overtime, while they re-imaged the department's workstations. Next morning, guess where said engineer's last six weeks worth of work was? HINT: the answer is NOT: "On the file server, where it would have been safely backed up every 24 hours.". It only took about another 24 hours for him to become an ex-engineer.
The rest of us were not symphathetic at all.... WE had to redo his work, on top of our own assignments. Even then, he made us miss our deadline by a week.
> that frickin' metallic theme that Apple puts on everything
> now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed
> metal looks good on hardware, not on software.
Brushed metal is indeed annoying. Fortunately, it's simplicity itself to be rid of. Wether an application used Aqua or brushed metal widgets is defined by a single variable in an xml file inside the application bundle. Change that variable, restart the application, and the accursed brushed metal is gone!
There are free programs that'll demetallify all your apps in one step; or do so on an app by app basis, and keep track of the altered ones in a central location.
If you're some kind of freak, you can even ADD the brushed metal skin to applications that didn't use it in the first place!
Don't those DMCA threaten & harass letters almost always include a statement along the lines of: "I hereby swear, under penalty of PERJURY, than I am the copyright holder or the legal representative therof."???
Said statement was obviously NOT true in this case, and I don't think those letters include a disclamier like: "unless I get CAUGHT lieing, and apologize afterward".
So do those "swear under penalty of perjury" clauses have any real legal validity? If so, isn't it appropiate for some RIAA/Metallica drones to be shareing bunkspace with Charlie Manson in the very near future? After all, when a regular citizen does it, perjury is a pretty BIG deal. Why should the RIAA/Metallica enjoy any immunity?
Or are those lines not, in any way, legally binding? If that's the case, why include them at all?
And that was half the beauty of the things itself. Not only were computers of that day simple enough to be easily documented. They actually CAME with that documentation! When you bought an Apple ][, you got EVERYTHING. Just the floppy drive came with a pair of manuals that was about an inch and a half thick between the two. In those manuals was everything you needed to know to: write programs that read/wrote data to conventional files, write directly to specific sectors if you were inclined, how the thing interfaced with the Apple ][, even how to diagnose, repair, and damn near REBUILD THE DRIVE, if it were to break.
My dad still has the documentation for our first Apple ][. Said documentation is just as, if not more, extensive as that I described for the floppy drive. Most notably, it includes commented assembley code for the boot ROMS; HAND-signed by the Woz himself!!!
Have you noticed the state of documentation for a pc now, in the gates era? If you're LUCKY, a peripherial might include a single sheet that amounts to: "insert tab A into slot B, run driver on floppy, reboot, prey". And forget about having enough information to repair anything or develop for it. (Not without forking over LOADS of cash to be an "authorized service tech" or an "authorized developer". And just where the HELL is my autographed-by-bill-gates copy of the code for the BIOS of my windows box, eh?
cya, john
Re:Dragged kicking and screaming...
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 2
> matches up artists
That's not the problem. I'd love to support the ARTISTS. I go see my favorite DJs and bands perform all the time. If they are, themselves, selling merchandise, I'll not uncommonly buy something... from the ARTIST.
> with labels
Therein lises the problem. The RIAA/Metallica had repeatedly and unerringly demonsteated that they do NOT, in a million years, deserve my money. I have no desire EVER to support them, their minions, or their supplicants. Any scheme (including Apple's music store) which delivers so much as a PENNY to the likes of hillary rosen or lars ulrich is, so far as I'm concerned, wholely unacceptable.
> IBM may have been willing to enter Steve Jobs' reality > distortion field this time, and have been misleading us > all this time - but personally I find that unlikely
I've a couple of uncles who recently retired from IBM. And today's IBM isn't the "Big Blue" of the '80s. Things have changed.
For starters, the engineers, at least, don't wear suits anymore!
But that's not the important bit. The important bit is that ever since bill gates fucked them over, back in the early '90s, in the OS/2 incident, IBM has had an institutional hatred of microsoft the likes of which mere mortals can barely comprehend. They're nowhere near as rabidly vocal about it as the likes of Ellison, McNealy, or a big segment of the Linux community, of course. But, then, IBM has always been rathar understated. They don't bluster. But they *DO* remember!
Catch an IBM'er and have a frank discussion sometime. And you'll find that the prevailing attitude towards microsoft there is: "One day, maybe not soon, but one day... we WILL bend gates and his minions over a barrel and assrape them HARD. And as they say: 'Revenge is a dish best served cold'".
It wouldn't be suprising at all if the RDF had nothing to do do with it; and IBM sped up production, and got prototypes to Apple early, JUST to spite gates.
mpeg 4 is an open standard. I'd be genuinely suprised there wasn't something in beta on sourceforge ALREADY to add ACC support to Linux players. Knowing the Linux development community, I say give it a week, two at most, and the answer will be yes.
> Does it seamlessly integrate into my Sun Workstation?
Nope. If you have a Sun Workstation at home, then you're most likely NOT in Apple's target market. And Apple's hardly alone in not supporting every OS under the sun (no pun intended). Basiclly Netscape/Mozilla, RealPlayer, and gnu are the main ones who go for that strategy. Most everybody else supports only the "big two" or even only windows.
> Can I burn the audio to CD?
Yep. You have to change your playlist around after the 10th CD burn. But you can change it back later.
Oh gee... horror of horrors, Bill Clinton got a blowjob. That makes him evil incarnate. No force more evil in the WORLD than a man who got a blowjob. That's SO much worse than starting a couple of wars of aggression, imprisoning people without trial or access to lawyers, throwing away our obligations under half a dozen treaties, wipeing your ass with the Bill of Rights, UN Charter, and Geneva Conventions, and destroying the economy! None of THAT is in any way wrong, because Clinton got a BLOWJOB!
Oh, and Al Gore did not claim to invent the internet. You who say otherwise are just dittoheads taking a poorly-worded statement out of context. So FOAD.
Back when AOL used to come on floppies, I used to collect them, reformat the suckers, and use them just like any other floppy (mostly as boot disks with various TSR and high memory configs for loading games... fscking windows pc). Not as good as clensing with fire. But it did let me purify the tools of evil and use them for good.
"Read my lips: no new taxes!" and "I am not a crook."
Both of which make MUCH funnier sound bytes in everything from Hot Shots to Futurama...
(Let's face it... for all his faults, Nixon's head makes a much better comeback, when he is fitted to a robot body and wins the 3000 presidential election, than Reagan ever could have.)
> To the knee-jerk dumbasses: He's a Republican, not a > 'crat.
Yeah, but how sad is it that you guys have to go all the way back to Roosevelt in order to find an example of a decent human being amid your ranks?
The GOP may have BEEN the "party of Lincoln", and of Teddy Roosevelt as well. But that was over a century ago. In RECENT history, you are the party of the likes of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, David Duke, Jerry Fallwell, the Bushes, Ashcroft, Cheney, Kenneth Lay, Orrin Hatch, and the rest of their accomplices.
Compared to the offences of ANY of the above, getting a blowjob in the office is praticaly worthy of sainthood.
It's been years and years since I read it, so I'm a bit fuzzy...
But I don't remember the protagonist killing himself. I thought he got to have a long heart to heart with the big world leader guy (Mustopha Mond, right?); where it was explained to him just WHY no one gets to read Shakespere anymore, and the like. Eventually, he comes to agree that he is a threat to society, and accepts banishment to the Falklands, where he can be intellectual in peace, without disturbing the unwashed, who are happy with their soma. Not exactly "happily ever after", but not all "death and destruction" either.
Or am I contaminated by having seen one of the movies? (Though I don't remember, for the life of me, actually having seen one.)
I've never tried it that way (On OS X, such things are common, even expected, on other Unixes.) myself, but given that symbolic links on OS X work the same way as symlinks on any other Unix I've seen, it should be doable much the same way as I described before.
Instead of moving your whole/Users folder to the new location, move everything that's *IN* your/Users folder (taking care to include the hidden files, and making SURE to use ditto, for this one, instead of mv or cp; you want to keep those resource forks!) to the new partition (which should STILL appear as a subdirectory under/Volumes).
For a sanity check, compare the contents of/Users and/Volumes/Users (probably better for sanity's sake that the partition is maned Users). If they're identical, you can:
rm -rf/Users and ln -s/Volumes/Users/Users
Again, I would log in as root, without the GUI running to do this.
Like I said, I've never done it that way. I've always made mu/Users a folder on the new drive instead of the whole thing. But the way Unix works (Everything's a file, most importantly under/Volumes, in this case.) and the way symbolic links work, I can't, for the life of me, think of any reason why this wouldn't work just as well as what I originally described.
Me being a cautious sort, I'd backup my data and do a little testing before I committed myself tho. (Hell, for your own piece of mind, I'd recommend backing up and experimenting before following my FIRST idea, even though I CAN vouch for that one.) 'Don't even have to back up off your hard disk, even. Just move your important data somewhere outside your home directory, move you/Users stuff and do the symlink, and if everything's kosher, move your data to its new home.
For more indepth info (And, again, your own piece of mind. I am, after all, just some random poster on/.), read the man pages for ln and ditto, and get familiar with/Volumes and the way OS X sticks mounted drives/partitions into the directory.
> However, I hope that this means that we can easily > switch our home folder to a different partition or disk.
That's already easy... simplistic even. It's the first thing I did when I switched to OS X, actually. Two commands in the terminal, and you're all set:
mv/Users/Volumes/Whereever/Users
ln -s/Volumes/Whereever/Users/Users
I don't remember if you have to log out and back in for this to take. I did it as root from the console just to be sure. But in any event, you're all set. If you want to be extra careful, you could ditto the directories over and double check that they made it before rm'ing the originals and making the symlink, I suppose.
I have my own Macintosh set up with a 7200rpm 20GB hard drive for the OS, swap space, applications, and the like; plus a slower (cheaper) 5200rpm 100GB drive on which all my files, including home directories, live. Works quite nicely.
And it does have the advantage that, if I seriously fsck up the system (I haven't met an OS yet (well, except for OS/390... but I never really got to mess with it very much.) that I haven't hosed at SOME point), I can just blast that drive clean and start over without having to worry about recovering my files and data!
> you know there is a HUGE difference between the > equipment used in stateside research labs and what is > deployable in the field.
> even Unix is normally considered too newflangled and > unpredictable to run in "the field".
Point tak en, and correct. I guess I should clairfy that by "the field", I didn't mean combat. The project I worked on was development of automated test and diagnostic equipment that was mostly the business of the REMFs. Our stuff didn't go into combat. If the fancy toy that DOES go into combat breaks; you bring it back behind the lines, plug it into our stuff, and out comes a report of what's wrong, and how to fix it (Plus, the report's kept in the database, so there's a record of what breaks, and what parts will be used, to send back to logistics.). The whole thing was five racks of equipment, all of which was controlled by an HP 747i running HP-UX 10.20. That control computer was my baby (for the duration of my involvement with that project anyway).
> you know there is a HUGE difference between the > equipment used in stateside research labs and what is > deployable in the field.
> even Unix is normally considered too newflangled and > unpredictable to run in "the field".
Point taken, and correct. I guess I should clairfy that by "the field", I didn't mean combat. The project I worked on was development of automated test and diagnostic equipment that was mostly the business of the REMFs. Our stuff didn't go into combat. If the fancy toy that DOES go into combat breaks; you bring it back behind the lines, plug it into our stuff, and out comes a report of what's wrong, and how to fix it (Plus, the report's kept in the database, so there's a record of what breaks, and what parts will be used, to send back to logistics.). The whole thing was five racks of equipment, all of which was controlled by an HP 747i running HP-UX 10.20. That control computer was my baby (for the duration of my involvement with that project anyway).
Which does not mean at all that the picture the parent linked to was not of a windows desktop with Exceed serving as the link to the real computer elsewhere.
I dunno about VxWorks, but both Solaris and Lynx are quite capable of running X11 servers. And the whole POINT of X11 is that you can run the application on one box, whilst displaying the GUI on, and controlling it from, a second one. And the whole point of Exceed is that that second box can be a windows machine.
I'm not certian that's what's going on in this case, of course. But the picture, and my own experience with government contractors, suggests that it's likely. And nothing in the link you provided eliminates the possibility.
My guess is that it's an X11 Unix application being displayed on a windows box running Exceed to make it into a virtual X terminal.
(Yes Virginia, the dumb terminal is alive and well.)
Said configuration is so common it's almost obscene. My first Job out of college was at one of Lockheed Martin's many branches. All of the REAL work was done on various flavours of Unix (AIX, HP-UX and some other IBM OS in our case, and some projects in the facility were expreimenting with Linux and BSD as alternatives (Main problem being, VA and the like don't exactly build their boxen to MILSPEC, HP and IBM were happy to do so.) Obviously, we needed a Unix environment to program computers that would be rinning Unix in the field. Makes sence, right?
Problem being, as they said on Star Trek: "The buerocratic mentality is the only constant in the universe". And LMCO has a BIG one. Some big muckety-muck, a CIO, an IT director, or somesuch, had chosen Dell as the desktop vendor for our facility, gotten several score truckloads of the things at bulk rate, built an NT-centric IT staff and 'standard desktop configuration', and said "Thou shalt use windows on thy desktop!". No matter that windows is completely useless to engineers. He's got his Dell/windows empire, and he's going to lord over it. So what we had to do, is run Exceed on the things to open virtual X windows onto the real computers, on which our actual work was done. This was supposedly a pretty common situation at the rest of LMCO as well.
In the course of doing latter jobs, and interviewing for others, I've discovered that this is stupidly common within other government contractors as well, and not uncommon outside. So I've little doubt that it's pretty common in the actual military as well.
I can't even BEGIN to imagine just HOW many windows PCs are out there, complete with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. etc. etc., all those licenses doing nothing but burning money; when the only purpose they wind up serving is as a glorified dumb terminal.
(PS. Oh yeah... it's not too hard to change the graphic on the start menu button, startup screen, or most other places, so that's no indication that it's not windows.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, ducks won't get into the tupperware, and especially not an ammo box..
But a raccoon can get into just about anything that's not padlocked shut. And even *that* won't stop a bear.
Then, of course, the duck comes along, eats, and chokes to death on, the balloons that the raccoon or bear left on the ground after realising there was nothing edible (or WAS there???) in the cache.
cya,
john
The contractual clauses you're talking about, the ones that run along the lines of:
"ALL IP you generate, even that which you come up with at home or in the shower, walking to/from work, etc., belong to the company."
Those are illegal in California; and they're unenforcable, no matter if you signed them into a contract. Once you walk out that office door, your time and ideas are your own. Sell that code independently, release it under the GPL, do whatever. If you do it on your own time, your employer has NO right to it whatsoever, no matter WHAT you signed.
AOL seems to be trying to apply the more authoritarian standards of the east coast, to people residing in the more employee-friendly California. It just doesn't wash.
cya,
john
> They would have to have a contract with Justin that says
> all thoughts are AOL's regardless of whether he does
> them for work or not.
If the Nullsoft guys are still working out of San Francisco, as the article suggests, he's 100% in the clear. Such clauses are illegal in California, wether you sign them into your contract or not. Go ahead and sign a contract giving your employer the rights to ideas you come up with in your free time. Clauses like that are generally thrown in with the legalese to try to make you THINK they have a right to your free time. Nevertheless, said clause is illegal and unenforceable.
cya,
john
Back when "Master of Orion III" had JUST been released for the Macintosh, I was REALLY desperate to get it. After being disappointed in CompUSA for not having it in stock, I resorted to calling ahead before trekking to other stores. My first call was to The Apple Store in Emeryville. They were more concerned that I, the customer, would be satisfied than they were on getting that sale. Though they didn't have it in stock, they actually referred me to three other stores that carry Macintosh software; one of which was the ComputerWare in Berkeley.
Unfortunately, none of them had MOO3 in stock yet either. A week later, I found myself in Emeryville for other reasons, and decided to stop in at the Apple Store to see if it was in yet. They didn't have it, but the store manager actually CALLED those same resellers (including again, Berkeley's ComputerWare) for me, while I was in The Apple Store, trying to get me what I wanted, EVEN IF IT WOULD COST THEM A SALE!!!
Shades of "Miriacle on 34th Street"; and certianly NOT the actions of a company that's hostile to its 3rd party resellers. More like one that places the satisfaction of the CUSTOMER at the highest priority. And that's but one more reason *I* will be staying with Apple.
Plus, as another poster noted, ComputerWare was NEVER very competitive in the first place. Basiclly, they were where you would go as a last resort if you couldn't find something locally, and you didn't want to wait for mail-order. Sure, they were exclusively Macintosh; so their staff was more clued in; but that was only ever relevant to the non-tech-savvy anyway. They also carried random Apple trinkets like T-shirts, pens, stickers, and the like. If you wanted crap like that, ComputerWare was the first place to go.
But if you wanted hardware or software? No way. ComputerWare, so far as I could ever tell, sold EVERYTHING at the full MSRP. Except for the Macs themselves, most of the hardware they sold could be had at Frys or even CompUSA at 1/3-2/3 the price. And they sold three and even FIVE YEAR OLD games at full MSRP price from when they first came out. This, when the same games could be had in the bargain bin elsewhere in town for $15; or you could wait for MacWorld to roll into the Moscone Center and get them for $5. (Hell, even The Apple Store marks down the low-end games!!!)
Like I said, I don't know what happened behind the scenes. But from where I sit, The Apple Store was pretty supportive of ComputerWare, even at the possibility of their own expense. And ComputerWare was never, IMO, the perferred store to shop in the first place. My bet is that they only lasted as long as they did because of some of the more zealous Mac users who perferred to shop at a Mac-only store, even if it cost them more money than schlepping down to Frys or CompUSA.
cya,
john
> a large company with a monolithic IT department
It's been my experience that these sort of companies are EXACTLY the sort of places that DO place policy over productivity. The first job out of college, that I mentioned, was with Lockheed Martin. You don't GET much larger or more impersonal than that. And, with rare exceptions, they do NOT value individual engieers as contributors. Everyone there is just another source of man-hours. And you DO follow policy; because everything IS documentated and you ARE easily replaced.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. In fact, that's the main reason I left, in favor of a small (tiny even) company where I felt my efforts WOULD make a difference. But that's the way it is. (Though, the way the economy turned out, I would've been better off had I stayed at the big, evil, impersonal defence contractor. But hindsight is 20/20.)
Besides, data storage like I described shouldn't just be done because it's "the policy". It should be done that way, or similarly, because it makes SENCE. Loseing data like my ex-colleague did is just stupid, reckless, and flat out unnecessary.
I've HAVE been on both sides of the IT desk. And even when, as an engineer, I was annoyed by certian policies, I DID understand that, in most cases, they were there for GOOD reasons.
EVERYONE, IT and engineer alike, should understand that RAID and regular offsite backups are your friends!
cya,
john
No you don't have to poke around... not if you have competent admins, and a good, consistent, data storage policy.
Everywhere I've ever worked in the tech industry (except the startup that was too new to HAVE a policy... but they adopted something similar) has had a policy, for both the windows and Linux/Unix networks, that *ALL* files go on the FILE SERVER, where everything is RAID'ed and periodicly backed up. The local hard drive was to be considered, at best, temporary storage and could be re-imaged at any time.
This has the added advantage of enableing companies to buy the most dirt-cheap dell POS's... those Optiplex boxes with the 6GB hard drives. 6GB is more than enough for an NT installation, AND a Linux installation, either as a dual-boot. or a VMware guest. EVERYTHING else, was to be on the file servers.
At my first job out of college, an engineer was even fired because of this. In violation of the policy (Which he had to read and sign before ever logging on in the first place.) he was keeping most of his work on his desktop machine. One of those windows viruses (melissia, IIRC) got loose in our network. So we all got to sit around doing nothing for a day. That night, the IT guys got to pull a LOT of overtime, while they re-imaged the department's workstations. Next morning, guess where said engineer's last six weeks worth of work was? HINT: the answer is NOT: "On the file server, where it would have been safely backed up every 24 hours.". It only took about another 24 hours for him to become an ex-engineer.
The rest of us were not symphathetic at all.... WE had to redo his work, on top of our own assignments. Even then, he made us miss our deadline by a week.
cya,
john
> now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed
> metal looks good on hardware, not on software.
Brushed metal is indeed annoying. Fortunately, it's simplicity itself to be rid of. Wether an application used Aqua or brushed metal widgets is defined by a single variable in an xml file inside the application bundle. Change that variable, restart the application, and the accursed brushed metal is gone!
There are free programs that'll demetallify all your apps in one step; or do so on an app by app basis, and keep track of the altered ones in a central location.
If you're some kind of freak, you can even ADD the brushed metal skin to applications that didn't use it in the first place!
cya,
john
Don't those DMCA threaten & harass letters almost always include a statement along the lines of: "I hereby swear, under penalty of PERJURY, than I am the copyright holder or the legal representative therof."???
Said statement was obviously NOT true in this case, and I don't think those letters include a disclamier like: "unless I get CAUGHT lieing, and apologize afterward".
So do those "swear under penalty of perjury" clauses have any real legal validity? If so, isn't it appropiate for some RIAA/Metallica drones to be shareing bunkspace with Charlie Manson in the very near future? After all, when a regular citizen does it, perjury is a pretty BIG deal. Why should the RIAA/Metallica enjoy any immunity?
Or are those lines not, in any way, legally binding? If that's the case, why include them at all?
cya,
john
And that was half the beauty of the things itself. Not only were computers of that day simple enough to be easily documented. They actually CAME with that documentation! When you bought an Apple ][, you got EVERYTHING. Just the floppy drive came with a pair of manuals that was about an inch and a half thick between the two. In those manuals was everything you needed to know to: write programs that read/wrote data to conventional files, write directly to specific sectors if you were inclined, how the thing interfaced with the Apple ][, even how to diagnose, repair, and damn near REBUILD THE DRIVE, if it were to break.
My dad still has the documentation for our first Apple ][. Said documentation is just as, if not more, extensive as that I described for the floppy drive. Most notably, it includes commented assembley code for the boot ROMS; HAND-signed by the Woz himself!!!
Have you noticed the state of documentation for a pc now, in the gates era? If you're LUCKY, a peripherial might include a single sheet that amounts to: "insert tab A into slot B, run driver on floppy, reboot, prey". And forget about having enough information to repair anything or develop for it. (Not without forking over LOADS of cash to be an "authorized service tech" or an "authorized developer". And just where the HELL is my autographed-by-bill-gates copy of the code for the BIOS of my windows box, eh?
cya,
john
> matches up artists
That's not the problem. I'd love to support the ARTISTS. I go see my favorite DJs and bands perform all the time. If they are, themselves, selling merchandise, I'll not uncommonly buy something... from the ARTIST.
> with labels
Therein lises the problem. The RIAA/Metallica had repeatedly and unerringly demonsteated that they do NOT, in a million years, deserve my money. I have no desire EVER to support them, their minions, or their supplicants. Any scheme (including Apple's music store) which delivers so much as a PENNY to the likes of hillary rosen or lars ulrich is, so far as I'm concerned, wholely unacceptable.
cya,
john
> IBM may have been willing to enter Steve Jobs' reality
> distortion field this time, and have been misleading us
> all this time - but personally I find that unlikely
I've a couple of uncles who recently retired from IBM. And today's IBM isn't the "Big Blue" of the '80s. Things have changed.
For starters, the engineers, at least, don't wear suits anymore!
But that's not the important bit. The important bit is that ever since bill gates fucked them over, back in the early '90s, in the OS/2 incident, IBM has had an institutional hatred of microsoft the likes of which mere mortals can barely comprehend. They're nowhere near as rabidly vocal about it as the likes of Ellison, McNealy, or a big segment of the Linux community, of course. But, then, IBM has always been rathar understated. They don't bluster. But they *DO* remember!
Catch an IBM'er and have a frank discussion sometime. And you'll find that the prevailing attitude towards microsoft there is: "One day, maybe not soon, but one day... we WILL bend gates and his minions over a barrel and assrape them HARD. And as they say: 'Revenge is a dish best served cold'".
It wouldn't be suprising at all if the RDF had nothing to do do with it; and IBM sped up production, and got prototypes to Apple early, JUST to spite gates.
cya,
john
> we don't have to go through checkpoints, don't get
> searched,
When was the last time you flew on an airplane, went inside a government office or courthouse building, or went out to a nightclub?
cya,
john
> the Linux based MP3 player in my car?
mpeg 4 is an open standard. I'd be genuinely suprised there wasn't something in beta on sourceforge ALREADY to add ACC support to Linux players. Knowing the Linux development community, I say give it a week, two at most, and the answer will be yes.
> Does it seamlessly integrate into my Sun Workstation?
Nope. If you have a Sun Workstation at home, then you're most likely NOT in Apple's target market. And Apple's hardly alone in not supporting every OS under the sun (no pun intended). Basiclly Netscape/Mozilla, RealPlayer, and gnu are the main ones who go for that strategy. Most everybody else supports only the "big two" or even only windows.
> Can I burn the audio to CD?
Yep. You have to change your playlist around after the 10th CD burn. But you can change it back later.
cya,
john
The thing is (theoreticly) unique to your NIC, after all.
cya,
john
Oh, and Al Gore did not claim to invent the internet. You who say otherwise are just dittoheads taking a poorly-worded statement out of context. So FOAD.
cya,
john
Hey! That's no fair!!!
Back when AOL used to come on floppies, I used to collect them, reformat the suckers, and use them just like any other floppy (mostly as boot disks with various TSR and high memory configs for loading games... fscking windows pc). Not as good as clensing with fire. But it did let me purify the tools of evil and use them for good.
cya,
john
> but you've got to admit, it sounds good :)
Yeah, but so do:
"Read my lips: no new taxes!"
and
"I am not a crook."
Both of which make MUCH funnier sound bytes in everything from Hot Shots to Futurama...
(Let's face it... for all his faults, Nixon's head makes a much better comeback, when he is fitted to a robot body and wins the 3000 presidential election, than Reagan ever could have.)
cya,
john
> To the knee-jerk dumbasses: He's a Republican, not a
> 'crat.
Yeah, but how sad is it that you guys have to go all the way back to Roosevelt in order to find an example of a decent human being amid your ranks?
The GOP may have BEEN the "party of Lincoln", and of Teddy Roosevelt as well. But that was over a century ago. In RECENT history, you are the party of the likes of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, David Duke, Jerry Fallwell, the Bushes, Ashcroft, Cheney, Kenneth Lay, Orrin Hatch, and the rest of their accomplices.
Compared to the offences of ANY of the above, getting a blowjob in the office is praticaly worthy of sainthood.
cya,
john
It's been years and years since I read it, so I'm a bit fuzzy...
But I don't remember the protagonist killing himself. I thought he got to have a long heart to heart with the big world leader guy (Mustopha Mond, right?); where it was explained to him just WHY no one gets to read Shakespere anymore, and the like. Eventually, he comes to agree that he is a threat to society, and accepts banishment to the Falklands, where he can be intellectual in peace, without disturbing the unwashed, who are happy with their soma. Not exactly "happily ever after", but not all "death and destruction" either.
Or am I contaminated by having seen one of the movies? (Though I don't remember, for the life of me, actually having seen one.)
cya,
john
I've never tried it that way (On OS X, such things are common, even expected, on other Unixes.) myself, but given that symbolic links on OS X work the same way as symlinks on any other Unix I've seen, it should be doable much the same way as I described before.
/Users folder to the new location, move everything that's *IN* your /Users folder (taking care to include the hidden files, and making SURE to use ditto, for this one, instead of mv or cp; you want to keep those resource forks!) to the new partition (which should STILL appear as a subdirectory under /Volumes).
/Users and /Volumes/Users (probably better for sanity's sake that the partition is maned Users). If they're identical, you can:
/Users /Volumes/Users /Users
/Users a folder on the new drive instead of the whole thing. But the way Unix works (Everything's a file, most importantly under /Volumes, in this case.) and the way symbolic links work, I can't, for the life of me, think of any reason why this wouldn't work just as well as what I originally described.
/Users stuff and do the symlink, and if everything's kosher, move your data to its new home.
/.), read the man pages for ln and ditto, and get familiar with /Volumes and the way OS X sticks mounted drives/partitions into the directory.
Instead of moving your whole
For a sanity check, compare the contents of
rm -rf
and
ln -s
Again, I would log in as root, without the GUI running to do this.
Like I said, I've never done it that way. I've always made mu
Me being a cautious sort, I'd backup my data and do a little testing before I committed myself tho. (Hell, for your own piece of mind, I'd recommend backing up and experimenting before following my FIRST idea, even though I CAN vouch for that one.) 'Don't even have to back up off your hard disk, even. Just move your important data somewhere outside your home directory, move you
For more indepth info (And, again, your own piece of mind. I am, after all, just some random poster on
cya,
john
> However, I hope that this means that we can easily
/Users /Volumes/Whereever/Users
/Volumes/Whereever/Users /Users
> switch our home folder to a different partition or disk.
That's already easy... simplistic even. It's the first thing I did when I switched to OS X, actually. Two commands in the terminal, and you're all set:
mv
ln -s
I don't remember if you have to log out and back in for this to take. I did it as root from the console just to be sure. But in any event, you're all set. If you want to be extra careful, you could ditto the directories over and double check that they made it before rm'ing the originals and making the symlink, I suppose.
I have my own Macintosh set up with a 7200rpm 20GB hard drive for the OS, swap space, applications, and the like; plus a slower (cheaper) 5200rpm 100GB drive on which all my files, including home directories, live. Works quite nicely.
And it does have the advantage that, if I seriously fsck up the system (I haven't met an OS yet (well, except for OS/390... but I never really got to mess with it very much.) that I haven't hosed at SOME point), I can just blast that drive clean and start over without having to worry about recovering my files and data!
cya,
john
> you know there is a HUGE difference between the
> equipment used in stateside research labs and what is
> deployable in the field.
> even Unix is normally considered too newflangled and
> unpredictable to run in "the field".
Point tak en, and correct. I guess I should clairfy that by "the field", I didn't mean combat. The project I worked on was development of automated test and diagnostic equipment that was mostly the business of the REMFs. Our stuff didn't go into combat. If the fancy toy that DOES go into combat breaks; you bring it back behind the lines, plug it into our stuff, and out comes a report of what's wrong, and how to fix it (Plus, the report's kept in the database, so there's a record of what breaks, and what parts will be used, to send back to logistics.). The whole thing was five racks of equipment, all of which was controlled by an HP 747i running HP-UX 10.20. That control computer was my baby (for the duration of my involvement with that project anyway).
cya,
john
> you know there is a HUGE difference between the
> equipment used in stateside research labs and what is
> deployable in the field.
> even Unix is normally considered too newflangled and
> unpredictable to run in "the field".
Point taken, and correct. I guess I should clairfy that by "the field", I didn't mean combat. The project I worked on was development of automated test and diagnostic equipment that was mostly the business of the REMFs. Our stuff didn't go into combat. If the fancy toy that DOES go into combat breaks; you bring it back behind the lines, plug it into our stuff, and out comes a report of what's wrong, and how to fix it (Plus, the report's kept in the database, so there's a record of what breaks, and what parts will be used, to send back to logistics.). The whole thing was five racks of equipment, all of which was controlled by an HP 747i running HP-UX 10.20. That control computer was my baby (for the duration of my involvement with that project anyway).
cya,
john
Which does not mean at all that the picture the parent linked to was not of a windows desktop with Exceed serving as the link to the real computer elsewhere.
I dunno about VxWorks, but both Solaris and Lynx are quite capable of running X11 servers. And the whole POINT of X11 is that you can run the application on one box, whilst displaying the GUI on, and controlling it from, a second one. And the whole point of Exceed is that that second box can be a windows machine.
I'm not certian that's what's going on in this case, of course. But the picture, and my own experience with government contractors, suggests that it's likely. And nothing in the link you provided eliminates the possibility.
cya,
john
My guess is that it's an X11 Unix application being displayed on a windows box running Exceed to make it into a virtual X terminal.
(Yes Virginia, the dumb terminal is alive and well.)
Said configuration is so common it's almost obscene. My first Job out of college was at one of Lockheed Martin's many branches. All of the REAL work was done on various flavours of Unix (AIX, HP-UX and some other IBM OS in our case, and some projects in the facility were expreimenting with Linux and BSD as alternatives (Main problem being, VA and the like don't exactly build their boxen to MILSPEC, HP and IBM were happy to do so.) Obviously, we needed a Unix environment to program computers that would be rinning Unix in the field. Makes sence, right?
Problem being, as they said on Star Trek: "The buerocratic mentality is the only constant in the universe". And LMCO has a BIG one. Some big muckety-muck, a CIO, an IT director, or somesuch, had chosen Dell as the desktop vendor for our facility, gotten several score truckloads of the things at bulk rate, built an NT-centric IT staff and 'standard desktop configuration', and said "Thou shalt use windows on thy desktop!". No matter that windows is completely useless to engineers. He's got his Dell/windows empire, and he's going to lord over it. So what we had to do, is run Exceed on the things to open virtual X windows onto the real computers, on which our actual work was done. This was supposedly a pretty common situation at the rest of LMCO as well.
In the course of doing latter jobs, and interviewing for others, I've discovered that this is stupidly common within other government contractors as well, and not uncommon outside. So I've little doubt that it's pretty common in the actual military as well.
I can't even BEGIN to imagine just HOW many windows PCs are out there, complete with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. etc. etc., all those licenses doing nothing but burning money; when the only purpose they wind up serving is as a glorified dumb terminal.
(PS. Oh yeah... it's not too hard to change the graphic on the start menu button, startup screen, or most other places, so that's no indication that it's not windows.)
cya,
john