You're not interested in making your coworkers' lives easier. You would rather dick them around. 'I'm getting a lot of spam from AOL.' Okay, we'll block all of AOL. 'But I have a student who signs on using AOL.' Okay, well, we'll unblock EVERYTHING for you, so you don't get your spam blocked at all. That'll teach you to complain about anything ever again.
Funny, the way I look at the job of an IT person, it is to enable the people who do the actual work at my place of employment to do their jobs more easily (or, in some cases, at all). Not to make them keep their heads down and then call in their friends over the weekends to set up secondary email accounts, so they can actually get the email necessary for them to do their jobs. For example.
Sheesh.
-fred
Who is having an enormous amount of trouble making Exchange behave itself, and who wishes he'd never heard the words 'Industry Standard', but who is still game. For a while, anyway.
The amount of spam email the company I do IT work for has gone up by a factor of more than ten in the month or so since two of the RTBH sites we used were DOSed to death. We're currently signing on with Postini, because it's gotten so bad that our CTO was getting upwards of 200 spam messages in the time between leaving work in the evening and coming in the next morning.
Me? I use a Mac, and mail.app filtering, so I didn't even *notice*. My spam went from 1-3 a day to 3-5 a day.
Postini is expensive, but a dedicated anti-spam service looks like it might be the only corporate-wide solution in days to come. Filters work fine until you get lots and lots of people using them. Once you hit a critical mass, the spammers will start taking them apart to see how they work and then designing spam to fly in under the radar.
I must admit I can't imagine who would possibly buy medicines from a spammer, though. I suppose someone must, but it sounds like about as good an idea as putting your hand in the garbage disposal, removing the switch plate from the wall, and inserting your tongue into the switch box.
I mean, this is PATHETIC. Try to keep up with me here.
I love the iPod. It's nice. But god, it's not the be-all and end-all. The article says 'if you're really concerned about battery life, then don't get the iPod.' IF this is the major factor for you, THEN this is a reason not to get the iPod! Get it?
I mean, it's like we've got this really nice four-door car, plenty of trunk space, really reliable, really pretty, good gas milage, good power, etc. And they wrote an article called 'Five reasons not to buy this vehicle'.
1) You need a car that gets 50 miles to the gallon 2) You haul furnature for a living 3) You need to drive through the outback 40 miles each way every day 4) You can't afford it 5) You were actually looking for a boat
Get OVER it, it's a perfectly valid article! There are people for whom that car ISN'T the best vehicle; there are people for whom the iPod isn't the best portable media device! And THEY SHOULDN'T BUY ONE. Maybe that's only 10% of customers, but believe it or not, THEY NEED REVIEWS TOO!
Goddamn. Makes me embarrassed to be an Apple enthusiast, with people around who can't understand stuff like this. I mean, MacUser ran an article 10 years or so ago called 'Top Ten Reasons Not To Buy A Mac'. You guys would have flayed and roasted them, instead of taking it as constructive criticism, and useful information.
> If you "hate" the GPL, then you're alot more of a zealot than most of the people posting in this thread.
No, I don't think so. Because I don't think people who use it are stupid or malicious by definition, nor do I think people who don't use my particular brand of software licensing are gullible sheep. I think that the GPL is a very bad idea, but I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that there are people who believe in it and who are honest and dedicated in their beliefs, and I don't believe that this makes them bad people.
I also think that communism isn't a terribly workable idea, but, unlike most people, I can see that there are idealists who think that it's a great idea, and that this belief doesn't automatically make them bad people. (In fact, I think the true believers tend to be better than average people. That's their problem... they think everyone is like them.)
> You're basically saying that anyone who isn't willing to compromise a principle for cash is an unthinking fanatic.
I think that a person who thinks that all software should be open source, and that by extension I shouldn't be allowed to decide whether to give you my source code when you want my software, is a zealot. That is my opinion.
Someone who won't buy my software because it's not open source is not necessarily a zealot. As long as they don't tell me that closed source is morally wrong, it's fine with me. Just as I choose not to contribute to GPL software: I don't like it at all, but I don't think it's morally wrong. I just think it's a bad idea.
> Just as a headsup, you DO know that you still retain copyright on code you might submit to a GPLed project, > and are capable of re-licensing it independently if you want?
Of course, although in practice this is nearly impossible, and was designed from the beginning to be that way. If you have a single line of code in a source file, you have to be hunted down and independently asked to license your software. With dozens or hundreds of people adding to the more popular projects, that's clearly impossible. Even on a small project, try figuring out what to do when a minor contributor is dead.
> Then either you don't write open-source software or you're foolish to let other people profit off your efforts > without getting anything back either to yourself or the open-source community as a whole.
Or perhaps I have a different view of the situation. You think that anyone who doesn't use the GPL is foolish. I think that anyone who does use the GPL is... someone who uses the GPL. I don't like the GPL, I don't use the GPL, but I don't think people who use it are stupid. That's the mark of a fanatic.
I clean up the trails in one of my local parks, too. I pick up trash, I move branches out of the way, and so forth. I spend a few hours two or three times a month on it. The park charges for admission, and there are a bunch of tour groups and such that go through those paths. I don't charge them admission. I don't even require that anyone who uses the paths I clean up go and clean up some other paths. I just do it because I like walking along clean paths.
The software I write, I'd've written anyway. If someone wants to use it for something else, that's fine with me. I might be a little bit sour if someone took one of my projects, added nothing at all to it, and managed to make a bundle off of it... but not too sour. There are plenty of people out there contributing free software.
Clearly both of these things make me foolish in your eyes. All I can say is, I'm glad I don't have your eyes.
Funny, I thought BSD's popularity was skyrocketing.
After all, all those MacOS X boxes... 3% market share... millions of people... plus, since Macs from back in 1998 can run the latest version of MacOS X (I'm typing on one now), and lots of people do that, probably significantly more than 3% of the installed base.
BSD sure isn't in any danger from where I'm standing, although who'd'a thunk that Apple would be its saviour?
> Congratulations: you've just described the LGPL (pretty much). It's up to the author to decide that license to use. If > the author intended what you descibe, then s/he would have used the LGPL or equivalent license.
But, of course, it isn't that simple. There are lots and lots of people out there using the GPL because it was what was handy, because they don't understand it, because they don't really care about it, or, in two cases that I've actually seen, because they found some 'Hello World' sort of program that was GPLed and used the eight-line program with all the relevant #includes as the basis for their app, and didn't care about what the license was.
> All that aside, at least I couldn't care less about GPL acceptance: don't accept it, don't use my code.
So you wouldn't be amenable to licensing your source code under different terms if someone approached you and offered you a licensing fee?
That is, in my opinion, where a rational belief in free software fades into zealotry. Not wanting other people to take advantage of your code without crediting or paying you for it? Fine. Not wanting anyone to (in effect) hire you to code for their proprietary software, because all proprietary software is evil? Fanaticism.)
BTW, I hate the GPL, myself. But I certainly have no problem with the people who use it. I just don't, and won't. And I will never contribute to a piece of software that is covered by it, though, due to necessities of life, I am often forced to use some.
> This is wrong! If they distribute the binary to me, I can ask for the source code, as stated by the GPL, if they are > linking the GPL to their code, that is.
You can ask. But you haven't a legal leg to stand on, as you are not an aggrieved party.
Here's what happened: they released a product under a commercial license of their own devising. The product contains some GPL-protected/infected (depending on who you ask) source in it. However, they didn't release their source under the GPL.
Now, what exactly are they doing wrong? They are violating the implicit (shrink-wrap) license in the code they're using, in that they have released their source without the GPL even though they're using GPL source. That is to say, they have gone against the license agreement of the code. The aggrieved party is the person (or persons) who licensed that code to them.
As far as you are concerned, you have a product which is licensed with their software license, which doesn't require them to release any code. The fact that this software includes an illegally-stolen set of code gives you no sort of rights at all, until and unless the company is sued and required to make their software GPLed. The person who is being offended against, according to the law, is not the person buying the software, it is the person whose code has been stolen. Thus, no one else has 'standing' in the courts to sue over this, which, really, is the only 'power' that is useful in this case.
No, I am not a lawyer, I've just read up on copyright law.
For long distance it worked fairly well, until recently. (Deregulation is slowly consolidating power in the hands of the 'local' phone companies again.)
For actual dial tone service, though, it worked incredibly poorly, unless you consider waiting 20 years for cell phone service to become cheap enough to be a good alternative is 'working great'. And we're back down to what, three baby bells? Four? And there's talk of another merger. But even if they didn't merge, the fact remains that they have been price gouging and will continue to, and since each one takes up a different market segment, you're still at the mercy of a monopoly in your area.
So split up Microsoft... the OS division will be a monopoly, the apps division will be a monopoly, and the MSN division will quietly disappear. The OS division doesn't need the apps division to maintain their monopoly, especially since they've 'proven' that IE is part of the OS (and IE was going to be part of the OS division in the tentative company split plans.) The apps division doesn't need the OS division to maintain their monopoly, they just need their current app market share and very carefully crafted file incompatibilities that make it impossible for people to switch to new software.
Splitting companies up can be a useful tactic, in some cases, but splitting MS wouldn't help anyone, in the same way that splitting AT&T up into the baby bells didn't endanger their profits or force them to be in any way competitive. It just took away one (admittedly lucritive) part of their business, and left them more determined than ever to gouge the consumer as much as they could.
Ah yes, RTF. The format that MS created, and then extended every time they felt like it needed something, without telling anyone.
You can save an Excel document in RTF, but you can't open it in any other program in the world. And try opening one of today's Word files in an RTF interpreter made two years ago. Lousy, non-formatted, and occasionally crash-inducing.
First: that was an insightfull, well-thought-out response to my article, so don't take this the wrong way.
But when I read it I had to laugh. Why? You made a big assumption about which side of the fence I'm on. I'm not a programmer, or a QA guy, or a technical writer, although I have worked as such in the past.
I am an IT guy. More than that, I am the only IT guy at a company of 30 people. Five Linux users, two Mac users, and the rest Windows of various stripe and performance. We are a web software development company, and so I have to keep company services running, test servers running, demo servers (including one huge 50,000 user public demo service) running, development tools and source control systems working, and end users supported. And we won't even talk about IP telephony.
I work 50-60 hour weeks, plus commute, on median. One notable week a month or two ago, I worked 40 hours between 5 PM Friday and 5 AM Monday, after a 50-hour M-F and before another 50-hour M-F. (Trying to set up a pre-production Oracle product for a demo. I, in cooperation with two support people from Oracle, failed.)
But when someone comes to me and says that they need a tool to do their job effectively, I sit down and listen to them. If they can make any kind of a decent case, and a bit of exploration on my part doesn't turn up any obvious problems, then I will go to bat for them, sans veiled warnings and without the hope that my higher-ups will save me from some work. Because I'm focused on making the employees here as effective as they can be.
Now, maybe it's harder in a larger company. I don't know. It wasn't bad at Apple while I was there, but I hear it was awful in the late 1990s... people who couldn't get MEMORY, for God's sake.
It's interesting the assumptions we make. You assume that because I am unimpressed with the current state of IT in this country, I can't be an IT guy. I submit that if there's anyone who is qualified to be unimpressed, it's someone who has worked as a programmer, a QA engineer, a tech writer, and a salesman... and who is now an IT guy.
You said: > I expect all the applications to be consistent in their appearance and function when I use a computer.
You must be a terribly, terribly disappointed person, if you're truly a Windows user. It was only two years ago that it was observed that in three different programs in the Windows Office suite, selecting a chunk of text and then hitting the backspace button DID THREE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
So... is there some hypocracy there? I'm not sure I'd call it hypocracy, I think I'd call it *revenge*. Apple is tired of having their HIG ignored by masses of companies. They're trying to show Windows users what Mac programs are like, and at the same time poke a little fun. You can call it hypocracy. But if that's hypocracy, then the death penalty is too: we don't want people killing other people, so we kill them.
I suppose it's possible that there is someone off in some corner of the company that gets treated like crap, but I never met him when I was there.
I did meet plenty of the QuickTime boys and girls, and despite the fact that they all have both Macs and Windows machines on their desks, and every line of code that they write has to be cross-platform (with the exception of the lowest of the low level stuff, and the QTML interface layer), they were treated pretty well.
I have seen several machines with minimal amounts of memory that poeple here have upgraded to XP or Win2k. I'm not sure what you do to make them run faster than Win95, but I have the suspicion it involves halluninogenic drugs, because it's sure not the case on the machines I've been using.
It's not such a big deal, window-wise, on the Mac. I'm running this on a 400 mHz G4 with about a zillion windows open, and 256 megs of RAM, and minimizing windows doesn't speed it up much, because all the compositiing is being done on the video card... all the window contents are already there.
> Also, why doesn't Apple expose Quicktime and iTunes to the COM or managed model?
Because this would be an enormous amount of work, given how it is implemented, and there is a perfectly great way of writing plugins for QuickTime and iTunes already? (I.e. QTML (QuickTime MetaLayer) programming?)
It has parts of the OS optimized for 64-bit calculations. (And 128-bit calculations, with Altivec).
So the reason you're saying that the OS isn't 64-bit is because some of it has 32 bit code in it? Well, then, Apple doesn't have a PowerPC OS yet, because some of Classic still runs 680x0 code.
Give up. It may or may not be the first, but it sure as heck is a 64-bit machine.
> When enough human doves cluster, they become the power greater than the world's greatest superpower: Peace.
Apparently not. Since there were a zillion of us out there, and the US still blew the fuck out of IRAQ with what turns out to have been no actual justification at all.
I mean, optimism, yes, but don't make statements like this unless they have something other than sheerest optimism untempered by reality to back them up.
Oddly enough, there are dozens of countries which treat their people worse than IRAQ did. And, in fact, the average person in IRAQ is and will (the US government admits) worse off now than they were under Sadaam.
I'm all for just wars, if you can find me one. But one where the US government lied to its populace about the justifications for the war, rushed into it without any international support, and alienated basically every other country on earth except for Britan (the citizens of which are now lynching their leadership because of it) isn't it.
Oddly enough, I was okay on the war in Afghanistan, because, well, the leadership there were pretty much a bunch of bastards who tried to kill lots of us. Of course, we destroyed the country, then promised to help rebuild it, and then completely failed to even BEGIN to keep our word, so people are starving to death daily there and other countries are cleaning up after our mess.
But being the world's only superpower is evidently all about being able to kill lots of people, destory their homes, ruin their livelihood, distrupt their way of life, and then not feel sorry for them, because they were dumb enough not to be born Americans.
...that VPC (and SoftWindows before it) ran just fine on earlier PPC processors that didn't have the little-endian mode. It did help, but it's hardly a deal-breaker.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, it'd make a great BOFH response.
You're not interested in making your coworkers' lives easier. You would rather dick them around. 'I'm getting a lot of spam from AOL.' Okay, we'll block all of AOL. 'But I have a student who signs on using AOL.' Okay, well, we'll unblock EVERYTHING for you, so you don't get your spam blocked at all. That'll teach you to complain about anything ever again.
Funny, the way I look at the job of an IT person, it is to enable the people who do the actual work at my place of employment to do their jobs more easily (or, in some cases, at all). Not to make them keep their heads down and then call in their friends over the weekends to set up secondary email accounts, so they can actually get the email necessary for them to do their jobs. For example.
Sheesh.
-fred
Who is having an enormous amount of trouble making Exchange behave itself, and who wishes he'd never heard the words 'Industry Standard', but who is still game. For a while, anyway.
The amount of spam email the company I do IT work for has gone up by a factor of more than ten in the month or so since two of the RTBH sites we used were DOSed to death. We're currently signing on with Postini, because it's gotten so bad that our CTO was getting upwards of 200 spam messages in the time between leaving work in the evening and coming in the next morning.
Me? I use a Mac, and mail.app filtering, so I didn't even *notice*. My spam went from 1-3 a day to 3-5 a day.
Postini is expensive, but a dedicated anti-spam service looks like it might be the only corporate-wide solution in days to come. Filters work fine until you get lots and lots of people using them. Once you hit a critical mass, the spammers will start taking them apart to see how they work and then designing spam to fly in under the radar.
I must admit I can't imagine who would possibly buy medicines from a spammer, though. I suppose someone must, but it sounds like about as good an idea as putting your hand in the garbage disposal, removing the switch plate from the wall, and inserting your tongue into the switch box.
-fred
I mean, this is PATHETIC. Try to keep up with me here.
I love the iPod. It's nice. But god, it's not the be-all and end-all. The article says 'if you're really concerned about battery life, then don't get the iPod.' IF this is the major factor for you, THEN this is a reason not to get the iPod! Get it?
I mean, it's like we've got this really nice four-door car, plenty of trunk space, really reliable, really pretty, good gas milage, good power, etc. And they wrote an article called 'Five reasons not to buy this vehicle'.
1) You need a car that gets 50 miles to the gallon
2) You haul furnature for a living
3) You need to drive through the outback 40 miles each way every day
4) You can't afford it
5) You were actually looking for a boat
Get OVER it, it's a perfectly valid article! There are people for whom that car ISN'T the best vehicle; there are people for whom the iPod isn't the best portable media device! And THEY SHOULDN'T BUY ONE. Maybe that's only 10% of customers, but believe it or not, THEY NEED REVIEWS TOO!
Goddamn. Makes me embarrassed to be an Apple enthusiast, with people around who can't understand stuff like this. I mean, MacUser ran an article 10 years or so ago called 'Top Ten Reasons Not To Buy A Mac'. You guys would have flayed and roasted them, instead of taking it as constructive criticism, and useful information.
Sad.
-fred
> If you "hate" the GPL, then you're alot more of a zealot than most of the people posting in this thread.
No, I don't think so. Because I don't think people who use it are stupid or malicious by definition, nor do I think people who don't use my particular brand of software licensing are gullible sheep. I think that the GPL is a very bad idea, but I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that there are people who believe in it and who are honest and dedicated in their beliefs, and I don't believe that this makes them bad people.
I also think that communism isn't a terribly workable idea, but, unlike most people, I can see that there are idealists who think that it's a great idea, and that this belief doesn't automatically make them bad people. (In fact, I think the true believers tend to be better than average people. That's their problem... they think everyone is like them.)
> You're basically saying that anyone who isn't willing to compromise a principle for cash is an unthinking fanatic.
I think that a person who thinks that all software should be open source, and that by extension I shouldn't be allowed to decide whether to give you my source code when you want my software, is a zealot. That is my opinion.
Someone who won't buy my software because it's not open source is not necessarily a zealot. As long as they don't tell me that closed source is morally wrong, it's fine with me. Just as I choose not to contribute to GPL software: I don't like it at all, but I don't think it's morally wrong. I just think it's a bad idea.
> Just as a headsup, you DO know that you still retain copyright on code you might submit to a GPLed project,
> and are capable of re-licensing it independently if you want?
Of course, although in practice this is nearly impossible, and was designed from the beginning to be that way. If you have a single line of code in a source file, you have to be hunted down and independently asked to license your software. With dozens or hundreds of people adding to the more popular projects, that's clearly impossible. Even on a small project, try figuring out what to do when a minor contributor is dead.
-fred
> Then either you don't write open-source software or you're foolish to let other people profit off your efforts
> without getting anything back either to yourself or the open-source community as a whole.
Or perhaps I have a different view of the situation. You think that anyone who doesn't use the GPL is foolish. I think that anyone who does use the GPL is... someone who uses the GPL. I don't like the GPL, I don't use the GPL, but I don't think people who use it are stupid. That's the mark of a fanatic.
I clean up the trails in one of my local parks, too. I pick up trash, I move branches out of the way, and so forth. I spend a few hours two or three times a month on it. The park charges for admission, and there are a bunch of tour groups and such that go through those paths. I don't charge them admission. I don't even require that anyone who uses the paths I clean up go and clean up some other paths. I just do it because I like walking along clean paths.
The software I write, I'd've written anyway. If someone wants to use it for something else, that's fine with me. I might be a little bit sour if someone took one of my projects, added nothing at all to it, and managed to make a bundle off of it... but not too sour. There are plenty of people out there contributing free software.
Clearly both of these things make me foolish in your eyes. All I can say is, I'm glad I don't have your eyes.
-fred
Funny, I thought BSD's popularity was skyrocketing.
After all, all those MacOS X boxes... 3% market share... millions of people... plus, since Macs from back in 1998 can run the latest version of MacOS X (I'm typing on one now), and lots of people do that, probably significantly more than 3% of the installed base.
BSD sure isn't in any danger from where I'm standing, although who'd'a thunk that Apple would be its saviour?
-fred
I think in this case he was talking about BSD.
Slashdot is very fond of declaring BSD dead.
-fred
> Congratulations: you've just described the LGPL (pretty much). It's up to the author to decide that license to use. If
> the author intended what you descibe, then s/he would have used the LGPL or equivalent license.
But, of course, it isn't that simple. There are lots and lots of people out there using the GPL because it was what was handy, because they don't understand it, because they don't really care about it, or, in two cases that I've actually seen, because they found some 'Hello World' sort of program that was GPLed and used the eight-line program with all the relevant #includes as the basis for their app, and didn't care about what the license was.
> All that aside, at least I couldn't care less about GPL acceptance: don't accept it, don't use my code.
So you wouldn't be amenable to licensing your source code under different terms if someone approached you and offered you a licensing fee?
That is, in my opinion, where a rational belief in free software fades into zealotry. Not wanting other people to take advantage of your code without crediting or paying you for it? Fine. Not wanting anyone to (in effect) hire you to code for their proprietary software, because all proprietary software is evil? Fanaticism.)
BTW, I hate the GPL, myself. But I certainly have no problem with the people who use it. I just don't, and won't. And I will never contribute to a piece of software that is covered by it, though, due to necessities of life, I am often forced to use some.
-fred
> This is wrong! If they distribute the binary to me, I can ask for the source code, as stated by the GPL, if they are
> linking the GPL to their code, that is.
You can ask. But you haven't a legal leg to stand on, as you are not an aggrieved party.
Here's what happened: they released a product under a commercial license of their own devising. The product contains some GPL-protected/infected (depending on who you ask) source in it. However, they didn't release their source under the GPL.
Now, what exactly are they doing wrong? They are violating the implicit (shrink-wrap) license in the code they're using, in that they have released their source without the GPL even though they're using GPL source. That is to say, they have gone against the license agreement of the code. The aggrieved party is the person (or persons) who licensed that code to them.
As far as you are concerned, you have a product which is licensed with their software license, which doesn't require them to release any code. The fact that this software includes an illegally-stolen set of code gives you no sort of rights at all, until and unless the company is sued and required to make their software GPLed. The person who is being offended against, according to the law, is not the person buying the software, it is the person whose code has been stolen. Thus, no one else has 'standing' in the courts to sue over this, which, really, is the only 'power' that is useful in this case.
No, I am not a lawyer, I've just read up on copyright law.
-fred
For long distance it worked fairly well, until recently. (Deregulation is slowly consolidating power in the hands of the 'local' phone companies again.)
For actual dial tone service, though, it worked incredibly poorly, unless you consider waiting 20 years for cell phone service to become cheap enough to be a good alternative is 'working great'. And we're back down to what, three baby bells? Four? And there's talk of another merger. But even if they didn't merge, the fact remains that they have been price gouging and will continue to, and since each one takes up a different market segment, you're still at the mercy of a monopoly in your area.
So split up Microsoft... the OS division will be a monopoly, the apps division will be a monopoly, and the MSN division will quietly disappear. The OS division doesn't need the apps division to maintain their monopoly, especially since they've 'proven' that IE is part of the OS (and IE was going to be part of the OS division in the tentative company split plans.) The apps division doesn't need the OS division to maintain their monopoly, they just need their current app market share and very carefully crafted file incompatibilities that make it impossible for people to switch to new software.
Splitting companies up can be a useful tactic, in some cases, but splitting MS wouldn't help anyone, in the same way that splitting AT&T up into the baby bells didn't endanger their profits or force them to be in any way competitive. It just took away one (admittedly lucritive) part of their business, and left them more determined than ever to gouge the consumer as much as they could.
-fred
Interesting to note... ClarisWorks *did* have a Windows version. Even in this world.
-fred
Ah yes, RTF. The format that MS created, and then extended every time they felt like it needed something, without telling anyone.
You can save an Excel document in RTF, but you can't open it in any other program in the world. And try opening one of today's Word files in an RTF interpreter made two years ago. Lousy, non-formatted, and occasionally crash-inducing.
Yes, Microsoft created RTF... you can tell.
-fred
First: that was an insightfull, well-thought-out response to my article, so don't take this the wrong way.
But when I read it I had to laugh. Why? You made a big assumption about which side of the fence I'm on. I'm not a programmer, or a QA guy, or a technical writer, although I have worked as such in the past.
I am an IT guy. More than that, I am the only IT guy at a company of 30 people. Five Linux users, two Mac users, and the rest Windows of various stripe and performance. We are a web software development company, and so I have to keep company services running, test servers running, demo servers (including one huge 50,000 user public demo service) running, development tools and source control systems working, and end users supported. And we won't even talk about IP telephony.
I work 50-60 hour weeks, plus commute, on median. One notable week a month or two ago, I worked 40 hours between 5 PM Friday and 5 AM Monday, after a 50-hour M-F and before another 50-hour M-F. (Trying to set up a pre-production Oracle product for a demo. I, in cooperation with two support people from Oracle, failed.)
But when someone comes to me and says that they need a tool to do their job effectively, I sit down and listen to them. If they can make any kind of a decent case, and a bit of exploration on my part doesn't turn up any obvious problems, then I will go to bat for them, sans veiled warnings and without the hope that my higher-ups will save me from some work. Because I'm focused on making the employees here as effective as they can be.
Now, maybe it's harder in a larger company. I don't know. It wasn't bad at Apple while I was there, but I hear it was awful in the late 1990s... people who couldn't get MEMORY, for God's sake.
It's interesting the assumptions we make. You assume that because I am unimpressed with the current state of IT in this country, I can't be an IT guy. I submit that if there's anyone who is qualified to be unimpressed, it's someone who has worked as a programmer, a QA engineer, a tech writer, and a salesman... and who is now an IT guy.
Touche?
-fred
You said:
> I expect all the applications to be consistent in their appearance and function when I use a computer.
You must be a terribly, terribly disappointed person, if you're truly a Windows user. It was only two years ago that it was observed that in three different programs in the Windows Office suite, selecting a chunk of text and then hitting the backspace button DID THREE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
So... is there some hypocracy there? I'm not sure I'd call it hypocracy, I think I'd call it *revenge*. Apple is tired of having their HIG ignored by masses of companies. They're trying to show Windows users what Mac programs are like, and at the same time poke a little fun. You can call it hypocracy. But if that's hypocracy, then the death penalty is too: we don't want people killing other people, so we kill them.
-fred
I suppose it's possible that there is someone off in some corner of the company that gets treated like crap, but I never met him when I was there.
I did meet plenty of the QuickTime boys and girls, and despite the fact that they all have both Macs and Windows machines on their desks, and every line of code that they write has to be cross-platform (with the exception of the lowest of the low level stuff, and the QTML interface layer), they were treated pretty well.
-fred
Hence his statement that if you see .nib files, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is Cocoa.
Sheesh.
-fred
I have seen several machines with minimal amounts of memory that poeple here have upgraded to XP or Win2k. I'm not sure what you do to make them run faster than Win95, but I have the suspicion it involves halluninogenic drugs, because it's sure not the case on the machines I've been using.
-fred
It's not such a big deal, window-wise, on the Mac. I'm running this on a 400 mHz G4 with about a zillion windows open, and 256 megs of RAM, and minimizing windows doesn't speed it up much, because all the compositiing is being done on the video card... all the window contents are already there.
-fred
> Also, why doesn't Apple expose Quicktime and iTunes to the COM or managed model?
Because this would be an enormous amount of work, given how it is implemented, and there is a perfectly great way of writing plugins for QuickTime and iTunes already? (I.e. QTML (QuickTime MetaLayer) programming?)
-fred
But I have a better one:
Microsoft Works.
Easily my favorite. It's even ahead of Military Intelligence and Airline Food.
(Shamelessly stolen from some online comic strip or other.)
-fred
It uses 64 bit pointers.
It does 64 bit arithmetic.
It has parts of the OS optimized for 64-bit calculations. (And 128-bit calculations, with Altivec).
So the reason you're saying that the OS isn't 64-bit is because some of it has 32 bit code in it? Well, then, Apple doesn't have a PowerPC OS yet, because some of Classic still runs 680x0 code.
Give up. It may or may not be the first, but it sure as heck is a 64-bit machine.
-fred
...yet...
-fred
> When enough human doves cluster, they become the power greater than the world's greatest superpower: Peace.
Apparently not. Since there were a zillion of us out there, and the US still blew the fuck out of IRAQ with what turns out to have been no actual justification at all.
I mean, optimism, yes, but don't make statements like this unless they have something other than sheerest optimism untempered by reality to back them up.
-fred
Oddly enough, there are dozens of countries which treat their people worse than IRAQ did. And, in fact, the average person in IRAQ is and will (the US government admits) worse off now than they were under Sadaam.
I'm all for just wars, if you can find me one. But one where the US government lied to its populace about the justifications for the war, rushed into it without any international support, and alienated basically every other country on earth except for Britan (the citizens of which are now lynching their leadership because of it) isn't it.
Oddly enough, I was okay on the war in Afghanistan, because, well, the leadership there were pretty much a bunch of bastards who tried to kill lots of us. Of course, we destroyed the country, then promised to help rebuild it, and then completely failed to even BEGIN to keep our word, so people are starving to death daily there and other countries are cleaning up after our mess.
But being the world's only superpower is evidently all about being able to kill lots of people, destory their homes, ruin their livelihood, distrupt their way of life, and then not feel sorry for them, because they were dumb enough not to be born Americans.
God bless America.
-fred
...that VPC (and SoftWindows before it) ran just fine on earlier PPC processors that didn't have the little-endian mode. It did help, but it's hardly a deal-breaker.
-fred