The biggest problem of all: while there are reasons to debate whether or not to take the train over the plane for a trip of about 250 miles or so, once the distance extends to about 400-450 miles, there's no effective alternative to air travel
I disagree. Paris -> Marseille is 480 miles (check on http://www.mappy.fr/). It is a 1h15 plane flight. The TGV trip time is 3 hours (check on http://www.sncf.com/). It is 3 h. Paris downtown to Marseille downtown. Without all the hassles of going to, through, and coming from the airports. From my point of view, at 480 miles the TGV still beats the plane.
One must also note, that the overall (door-to-door) speed advantage, these machines seem to have over airplanes at short and medium distances, is due to the much simpler security/registration procedures, the passengers have to go through to board them. It is not the technology, that requires us to come to the airport 2 hours prior to departure...
I disagree. It is the technology that requires more security for airplaines than for trains. A TGV is much more robust than a plane. Plant a bomb in a plane and the outcome is most probably a plane crash with maximal casualties. Plant a bomb in a TGV: this has been done twice (to my best knowledge). 2 persons killed the first time, 3 light injuries the second time.
This fact, in turn, generates a virtuous circle for the train: terrorists are not interested in planting bombs in the TGV because it is just not worth it. And that's why you'll always have significant security delays for planes, where I frequently rush to arrive at the station only minutes before the TGV departure.
It looks like in your mind every Mac OS X user is a power user (who reads/., for example).
In my mind, it could be possible that the majority of Mac OS X users are non-experts. When presented a dialog box saying that they should upgrade, they just click the "upgrade" button without even thinking that this could be risky. And remember: Software Update is configured by default to pop up automatically.
At least, this is what Apple is aiming at: isn't Mac OS X supposed to be the UNIX "for the rest of us" (ie, non-techie users) ? So Apple should really try hard to make sure that, when they pop up a window on every mac saying that we should upgrade, the risk factor is close to 0... In other words, Apple should make it so that you DON'T have to wait to see the guinea pigs before doing the upgrade.
At our school, we have developed an ad hoc solution with ASR (Apple Software Restore), it comes in 10.2 (client): try "man asr" on the command line.
ASR is damned fast ! We restore from scratch 2Gb system disks in 5 minutes. The image file is stored on a standard AppleShare server (100 Mbit/s switch). The speed is due to ASR ability to restore using block level disk access instead of file level, and from compressed images so less data has to travel on the network.
Each client has 2 partitions: one of them has a minimal system so we can boot on it when we want to restore the "main" partition. Everything is done automatically with ssh.
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I disagree. Paris -> Marseille is 480 miles (check on http://www.mappy.fr/). It is a 1h15 plane flight. The TGV trip time is 3 hours (check on http://www.sncf.com/). It is 3 h. Paris downtown to Marseille downtown. Without all the hassles of going to, through, and coming from the airports. From my point of view, at 480 miles the TGV still beats the plane.
I disagree. It is the technology that requires more security for airplaines than for trains. A TGV is much more robust than a plane. Plant a bomb in a plane and the outcome is most probably a plane crash with maximal casualties. Plant a bomb in a TGV: this has been done twice (to my best knowledge). 2 persons killed the first time, 3 light injuries the second time.
http://www.ina.fr/archivespourtous/index.php?vue=n otice&from=fulltext&num_notice=6&total_notices=16& mc=police%20scientifique
This fact, in turn, generates a virtuous circle for the train: terrorists are not interested in planting bombs in the TGV because it is just not worth it. And that's why you'll always have significant security delays for planes, where I frequently rush to arrive at the station only minutes before the TGV departure.
In my mind, it could be possible that the majority of Mac OS X users are non-experts. When presented a dialog box saying that they should upgrade, they just click the "upgrade" button without even thinking that this could be risky. And remember: Software Update is configured by default to pop up automatically.
At least, this is what Apple is aiming at: isn't Mac OS X supposed to be the UNIX "for the rest of us" (ie, non-techie users) ? So Apple should really try hard to make sure that, when they pop up a window on every mac saying that we should upgrade, the risk factor is close to 0... In other words, Apple should make it so that you DON'T have to wait to see the guinea pigs before doing the upgrade.
On a sorenson 3 encoded movie. Weird.
At our school, we have developed an ad hoc solution with ASR (Apple Software Restore), it comes in 10.2 (client): try "man asr" on the command line.
ASR is damned fast ! We restore from scratch 2Gb system disks in 5 minutes. The image file is stored on a standard AppleShare server (100 Mbit/s switch). The speed is due to ASR ability to restore using block level disk access instead of file level, and from compressed images so less data has to travel on the network.
Each client has 2 partitions: one of them has a minimal system so we can boot on it when we want to restore the "main" partition. Everything is done automatically with ssh.