Purchasing shouldn't just be based on the initial cost of the software. If Massachusetts purchases proprietary software for some function, then later disagrees with the vendor on the direction the software is going, they're screwed.
With open source software, presumably Massachusetts has the source, and can pay some OTHER vendor to continue to support/extend the software.
I think that's an important aspect of Open Software for government.
Re:tell apple you're not satisfied with patch time
on
Mac OS X 10.2.8 Available
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think a week is reasonable if they used the time to do lots of testing. I hate patches that don't work correctly. Ref: what everybody seems to complain about Microsoft patches... they're afraid of them making things worse and breaking stuff.
A reasonable amount of QA testing goes a long way towards good reliability in my book.
I did exactly this procedure for my son's TiBook. I printed the (very good) directions in the Apple Knowledge Base article, purchased a Torx screwdriver, and then within 10 minutes had the Airport card installed.
The hardest part was finding the correct Torx screwdriver.
I also have a Beige 266Mhz desktop. It will run OS X just fine. I have 192MB of memory, two monitors, and I added a cheapo $50 combo USB/Firewire card. It all works fine under 10.1 and 10.2. I'm assuming that I'll upgrade to 10.3 when it is available.
I use the machine mostly for Photoshop. I can run Photoshop on ~35MB photos, print to my Epson 2000P via the USB card, talk to my camera (D1X) via the Firewire, play iTunes, surf with Safari, all at the same time, and the speed is fine. Really not noticably slower than OS 9, except there would have been no way I could have done all that simultaneously with OS 9.
Don't listen to all the people who are saying you have to put huge amounts of RAM on the system, or overclock the CPU. The machine is a fine computer as it is. Kudos to Apple for such good support for an older machine. One of the reasons I think so highly of that company.
I used to associate home schooling with far right Christians. I think the turning point for me was listening to an edition of "The Connection" on NPR that discussed home schooling. I was especially impressed by some of the kids who are home schooled who called in. They conducted their side of the conversation with an intelligence and maturity that belied their age. They gave many good reasons for home schooling being an advantage over public schools. I won't list them here, because that will turn this quick post into a long one.
As for Apple's educational problems being caused by Apple... I doubt it. I think it's more a reflection of the computer environment where 95% of the users just assume that everyone wants to use Microsoft... and the IT professionals try to coax, bully, and engineer the remaining 5% into being absorbed into the Microsoft environment.
All I can say for my own computing preferences: thank god for Apple and Linux...
I don't understand your comment about Classic. I run several older applications including Photoshop and the driver for my Epson photographic printer, and it is fast and I can't remember it ever crashing.
Classic is not an emulator, it is simply running OS 9 inside a Unix process (i.e. it will run computational jobs at 100% speed). There must be some overhead talking to the network and the filesystem, but reading/writing 30Mb photoshop files... I just don't see it.
Is it really that problematic for you? (I run it on both an 800Mhz TiBook, and also on a 266Mhz G3). What programs were you trying to run under Classic?
"Surely we should be teaching children to learn how to learn". Thinking we need to teach them how to use a computer, or a particular program, is foolish. If kids need help learning how to use a computer, why are the kids the computer experts in so many households?
I'd rather see schools try to keep computers OUT of the classroom, stop trying to get kids to memorize facts, and work on skills they really need, like critical thinking, how to find information and know whether it is reliable and... I dunno... how to talk to each other in a way that promotes understanding?
I've long since given up on the public school system. The percentage of idiots who seem bent on turning kids into another generation of idiots seems to be very high. Many of them are well meaning idiots, but still... (ok, many of the people are intelligent, but seem to be stuck in a system that forces them into acting the part of an idiot).
The one thing I've noticed kids getting lots of experience using computers in the classroom? Multi-tasking... as in... they seem to be very good at chatting and surfing at the same time they are supposed to be "learning". Either the teachers are clueless, or they welcome having a large percentage of their class doing other stuff besides classwork. Perhaps it decreases the number of kids they actually have to work with?
I must admit that I am becoming more and more a true believer in home schooling. I only wish I had done that when my kids were in public school...
Funny, I've never worked at a company that bothers to upgrade computer systems. They might add a specialized PCI card, or add a disk, or add memory, but I've never seen them upgrade a processor. If an employee needs a faster machine, they buy him/her one, and give his/her old one to someone else.
You are right that no computer is idiot proof, but in my experience, Mac (especially OS-X) is less likely to get clobbered that Wintel machines.
I was constantly amazed at a previous job at how much maintenance was required by IT to keep their Wintel machines running. Shocked, really.
BTW, a top of the line Mac will run you $3,000, but as you say, the average office worker doesn't need that. Figure on about $1,500 for a very nice machine with AppleCare included.
So? Buy a 3 button mouse. OS-X supports it, along with the scroll wheel, just fine. Some third party apps (Adobe Acrobat) don't support the scroll wheel, but everything that I can think of supports the 3 button mouse...
Actually, I run OS-X on a 266Mhz beige G3 and it's just fine. Only has 192 megs of memory, but I use it for Photoshop color correction (it has 2 high quality CRTs on it) as well as a print server for a Epson 2000P. It's plenty fast running Photoshop (not as fast as my TiBook laptop, but still fine). Also is a fine machine for surfing in conjunction with Safari. I can be printing in Photoshop, running iTunes, and printing to the printer, all simultaneously. I think that's pretty darn impressive considering the age of the machine!
I think this has always been one of Apple's strengths: the machines are usable for a long time. We also have 2 90Mhz 7200s that my sons still use. I only wish OS-X supported the 601 processor - I'd upgrade them too. As it is, they only run OS 9, and they are pretty slow, but usable.
There is something weird going on then... I run 3 different OS-X computers - one old Beige G3 desktop, plus 2 TiBook laptops. All three are totally solid. No crashes, no network problems... really really trouble free.
TiBooks are typically up for 3-6 months at a time (just put 'em to sleep when not using them). The G3 is a shared machine that also acts as a server, so we tend to shut it down when it's not being used (to save power) but it's had times it's been up for months at a time.
OS-X is really really solid, so if you're seeing problems like you describe... ask someone to give you a hand correcting them! It's not normal behavior...
Actually, I gotta agree with the previous poster. In lots of companies, the IT department dictates policy because that is a way to gain power and control, build an empire, and try to make themselves indispensible. They say they have a mandate from management to make the IT system work, but then they go around acting like a bunch of Nazis. They often seem a lot more concerned for their own empire than for making sure the employees are productive.
I'm sure there are lots of enlightened places, and it sounds like yours probably is one, but the last place I was at was a nightmare. I'll give you an example: you could not connect ANYTHING to the network that IT didn't bless (I mean, not even a Laser Printer). We wanted a file server in my group. It didn't need to be fast. I recommended a Snap server because we had used one at a previous job. For $4,000 we could get like? 100GB of space. The IT department wanted us to spend $40,000 for a Network Appliance with maybe 18GB?. Cool box, but we didn't need that level of server, and really wanted to save the company $36,000. The IT department claimed we couldn't plug it into the net until they "certified it" which would take six months. My boss asked them how they would "certify it". Answer: They'd plug it into the corportate net for 6 months and play with it! LOL.
I finally got so pissed off at their inability to keep my Windoze NT system running that I brought in a Mac running OS-X. They silently blocked my MAC address in all their switches/routers to prevent me from connecting to the net - and didn't even send an email / leave me a voice mail. I wasted a half day figuring out what they did because they were trying to be sneaky bastards instead of being in the business they should have been - keeping developers like myself productive.
Sorry your feelings are hurt by people like the previous poster and myself, but it sux to be told the jackboots are for our own protection. A much better environment, one which corporations will eventually move to I hope, is one where people are allowed to pick the hardware and software tools that make them most productive, do 95% of their own support, and only need help from IT when network & extra-ordinary issues rear their ugly head.
People who can't imagine a computer system that doesn't need constant babying from "IT professionals" just aren't seeing what the future needs to be. The old "Imagine if cars were like computers" thread is right on the money.
I went through this in 1982 switching from VMS (non-case-sensitive) to Unix (case sensitive). At first I thought it was strange, but then I grew to like it. I think it's just what you are used to, so yeah, there is gonna be some knashing of teeth while Mac people get used to it. Once they're used to it... I doubt it will be a big deal.
On the other hand, the WORST thing is mixing case-insensitive and case-sensitive on the same machine. THAT is confusing as hell, and the confusion never goes away. I think you just have to bite the bullet and choose one way or the other. Trying to have both, though, sux big time.
I think a lot of what you say is on target. However, I think you overstate the overhead required to run a GUI. On my TiBook running OS-X (not Server) I don't see the GUI using more than a couple percent of the cpu. Only when I'm mousing around, 0% the rest of the time. The commands you run using a command line interface are going to take a *lot* more than that, so I doubt the GUI overhead is significant.
I work at a company that produces (Linux based) IP switches. I'm always amazed that the industry likes the command line interfaces that are common. I personally would prefer a *well designed* GUI for configuring systems, but that doesn't seem to be what the industry wants. (or maybe it's just that people gave up after seeing a few thrown-together GUIs that missed the mark by a thousand miles?).
The best thing, of course, is a really good GUI, that always allows you to drop into a command line for something the GUI didn't anticipate.
BTW, I've been a Unix kernel programmer for 20 years, and I love Linux and I love OS-X. I do wish there was the equivalent of Aqua/Quartz for Linux. I've always thought that X11 only had one good idea: "Graphics should work across the network". I've never been impressed with the rest of the X11 man-machine interface. IMO X11 is one of the reasons GUIs haven't caught on with Unix servers. OS-X raises the bar in that respect, I think. I applaud Apple for trying to make OS-X Server easier to use with a (hopefully well thought out) GUI.
Unfair comparison. In your example, the gun is doing exactly what it was designed to do: shoot. The Microsoft product isn't performing as the users have reason to expect it to. And it's because of shoddy workmanship on the part of Microsoft.
A better gun example would have be the M16 during Vietnam when it was malfunctioning all over the place. And yes, it was the fault of Colt and the Army for insufficient testing of the product. People died.
In either case, shoddy design & manufacture should be penalized.
Someone else mentioned QNX. There's a performance hit to running drivers in a protected context, but it does not make the OS unusable. QNX is a really fine system, and I wish Linux had gone the drivers-in-usermode route - I'll take stability over speed anytime, thanks.
Nope. We generally operate between 100 ft to 3,000 ft. From my work on avionics in the past, the limitation on hard drives to 10,000 ft isn't an 'air bearing' it's that as you have less atmosphere, the heads of the drive fly lower and lower. Above 10,000 ft there is a good chance of a head crash...
I fly aerial photographers. Most of them are still shooting film. We spend more time on site while they fumble to change film, than we actually do taking pictures. It's especially bad when the doors are off and the cockpit is being buffeted by wind. In my mind, digital, with a storage module big enough to hold the entire shoot, is the way to go. I had one guy with a Canon digital, using a 1 GB drive. He had to reload during the middle of the shoot. Simultaneously, Logan tower is hinting that we better finish up soon i.e. we had about 1 more minute before we got kicked out of the airspace. Bigger drive would have been much better in this case.
I'm also a semi-pro with a Nikon D1X. I currently have the 1Gb IBM Microdrive. Shooting raw NEF pictures (which is all I ever shoot) I get about 130 pictures on a drive. I hate opening the camera up in the field, so bigger is defintely better. Using jpeg that same drive holds 400 pictures, but I NEVER use jpeg. When you're printing large, you can definitely see the artifacts.
BTW, the battery use in a pro camera like the D1X is very good. Since you can shoot lots of pictures without using the battery draining LCD, you can literally shoot all day on a single battery. I usually carry 1 spare. So, "film" not battery is defintely the limitation in this case.
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With open source software, presumably Massachusetts has the source, and can pay some OTHER vendor to continue to support/extend the software.
I think that's an important aspect of Open Software for government.
A reasonable amount of QA testing goes a long way towards good reliability in my book.
The hardest part was finding the correct Torx screwdriver.
I think you are exaggerating the difficulty...
I use the machine mostly for Photoshop. I can run Photoshop on ~35MB photos, print to my Epson 2000P via the USB card, talk to my camera (D1X) via the Firewire, play iTunes, surf with Safari, all at the same time, and the speed is fine. Really not noticably slower than OS 9, except there would have been no way I could have done all that simultaneously with OS 9.
Don't listen to all the people who are saying you have to put huge amounts of RAM on the system, or overclock the CPU. The machine is a fine computer as it is. Kudos to Apple for such good support for an older machine. One of the reasons I think so highly of that company.
As for Apple's educational problems being caused by Apple... I doubt it. I think it's more a reflection of the computer environment where 95% of the users just assume that everyone wants to use Microsoft... and the IT professionals try to coax, bully, and engineer the remaining 5% into being absorbed into the Microsoft environment.
All I can say for my own computing preferences: thank god for Apple and Linux...
Is it really that problematic for you? (I run it on both an 800Mhz TiBook, and also on a 266Mhz G3). What programs were you trying to run under Classic?
I'd rather see schools try to keep computers OUT of the classroom, stop trying to get kids to memorize facts, and work on skills they really need, like critical thinking, how to find information and know whether it is reliable and... I dunno... how to talk to each other in a way that promotes understanding?
I've long since given up on the public school system. The percentage of idiots who seem bent on turning kids into another generation of idiots seems to be very high. Many of them are well meaning idiots, but still... (ok, many of the people are intelligent, but seem to be stuck in a system that forces them into acting the part of an idiot).
The one thing I've noticed kids getting lots of experience using computers in the classroom? Multi-tasking... as in... they seem to be very good at chatting and surfing at the same time they are supposed to be "learning". Either the teachers are clueless, or they welcome having a large percentage of their class doing other stuff besides classwork. Perhaps it decreases the number of kids they actually have to work with?
I must admit that I am becoming more and more a true believer in home schooling. I only wish I had done that when my kids were in public school...
You are right that no computer is idiot proof, but in my experience, Mac (especially OS-X) is less likely to get clobbered that Wintel machines.
I was constantly amazed at a previous job at how much maintenance was required by IT to keep their Wintel machines running. Shocked, really.
BTW, a top of the line Mac will run you $3,000, but as you say, the average office worker doesn't need that. Figure on about $1,500 for a very nice machine with AppleCare included.
So? Buy a 3 button mouse. OS-X supports it, along with the scroll wheel, just fine. Some third party apps (Adobe Acrobat) don't support the scroll wheel, but everything that I can think of supports the 3 button mouse...
I think this has always been one of Apple's strengths: the machines are usable for a long time. We also have 2 90Mhz 7200s that my sons still use. I only wish OS-X supported the 601 processor - I'd upgrade them too. As it is, they only run OS 9, and they are pretty slow, but usable.
OS-X is really really solid, so if you're seeing problems like you describe... ask someone to give you a hand correcting them! It's not normal behavior...
You have to reboot your computer ever week? That would seriously piss me off!!
I'm sure there are lots of enlightened places, and it sounds like yours probably is one, but the last place I was at was a nightmare. I'll give you an example: you could not connect ANYTHING to the network that IT didn't bless (I mean, not even a Laser Printer). We wanted a file server in my group. It didn't need to be fast. I recommended a Snap server because we had used one at a previous job. For $4,000 we could get like? 100GB of space. The IT department wanted us to spend $40,000 for a Network Appliance with maybe 18GB?. Cool box, but we didn't need that level of server, and really wanted to save the company $36,000. The IT department claimed we couldn't plug it into the net until they "certified it" which would take six months. My boss asked them how they would "certify it". Answer: They'd plug it into the corportate net for 6 months and play with it! LOL.
I finally got so pissed off at their inability to keep my Windoze NT system running that I brought in a Mac running OS-X. They silently blocked my MAC address in all their switches/routers to prevent me from connecting to the net - and didn't even send an email / leave me a voice mail. I wasted a half day figuring out what they did because they were trying to be sneaky bastards instead of being in the business they should have been - keeping developers like myself productive.
Sorry your feelings are hurt by people like the previous poster and myself, but it sux to be told the jackboots are for our own protection. A much better environment, one which corporations will eventually move to I hope, is one where people are allowed to pick the hardware and software tools that make them most productive, do 95% of their own support, and only need help from IT when network & extra-ordinary issues rear their ugly head.
People who can't imagine a computer system that doesn't need constant babying from "IT professionals" just aren't seeing what the future needs to be. The old "Imagine if cars were like computers" thread is right on the money.
I went through this in 1982 switching from VMS (non-case-sensitive) to Unix (case sensitive). At first I thought it was strange, but then I grew to like it. I think it's just what you are used to, so yeah, there is gonna be some knashing of teeth while Mac people get used to it. Once they're used to it... I doubt it will be a big deal. On the other hand, the WORST thing is mixing case-insensitive and case-sensitive on the same machine. THAT is confusing as hell, and the confusion never goes away. I think you just have to bite the bullet and choose one way or the other. Trying to have both, though, sux big time.
multi-boot? Why not mac-on-linux?
I think a lot of what you say is on target. However, I think you overstate the overhead required to run a GUI. On my TiBook running OS-X (not Server) I don't see the GUI using more than a couple percent of the cpu. Only when I'm mousing around, 0% the rest of the time. The commands you run using a command line interface are going to take a *lot* more than that, so I doubt the GUI overhead is significant. I work at a company that produces (Linux based) IP switches. I'm always amazed that the industry likes the command line interfaces that are common. I personally would prefer a *well designed* GUI for configuring systems, but that doesn't seem to be what the industry wants. (or maybe it's just that people gave up after seeing a few thrown-together GUIs that missed the mark by a thousand miles?). The best thing, of course, is a really good GUI, that always allows you to drop into a command line for something the GUI didn't anticipate. BTW, I've been a Unix kernel programmer for 20 years, and I love Linux and I love OS-X. I do wish there was the equivalent of Aqua/Quartz for Linux. I've always thought that X11 only had one good idea: "Graphics should work across the network". I've never been impressed with the rest of the X11 man-machine interface. IMO X11 is one of the reasons GUIs haven't caught on with Unix servers. OS-X raises the bar in that respect, I think. I applaud Apple for trying to make OS-X Server easier to use with a (hopefully well thought out) GUI.
ditto :-)
Unfair comparison. In your example, the gun is doing exactly what it was designed to do: shoot. The Microsoft product isn't performing as the users have reason to expect it to. And it's because of shoddy workmanship on the part of Microsoft. A better gun example would have be the M16 during Vietnam when it was malfunctioning all over the place. And yes, it was the fault of Colt and the Army for insufficient testing of the product. People died. In either case, shoddy design & manufacture should be penalized.
Someone else mentioned QNX. There's a performance hit to running drivers in a protected context, but it does not make the OS unusable. QNX is a really fine system, and I wish Linux had gone the drivers-in-usermode route - I'll take stability over speed anytime, thanks.
Nope. We generally operate between 100 ft to 3,000 ft. From my work on avionics in the past, the limitation on hard drives to 10,000 ft isn't an 'air bearing' it's that as you have less atmosphere, the heads of the drive fly lower and lower. Above 10,000 ft there is a good chance of a head crash...
I fly aerial photographers. Most of them are still shooting film. We spend more time on site while they fumble to change film, than we actually do taking pictures. It's especially bad when the doors are off and the cockpit is being buffeted by wind. In my mind, digital, with a storage module big enough to hold the entire shoot, is the way to go. I had one guy with a Canon digital, using a 1 GB drive. He had to reload during the middle of the shoot. Simultaneously, Logan tower is hinting that we better finish up soon i.e. we had about 1 more minute before we got kicked out of the airspace. Bigger drive would have been much better in this case.
I'm also a semi-pro with a Nikon D1X. I currently have the 1Gb IBM Microdrive. Shooting raw NEF pictures (which is all I ever shoot) I get about 130 pictures on a drive. I hate opening the camera up in the field, so bigger is defintely better. Using jpeg that same drive holds 400 pictures, but I NEVER use jpeg. When you're printing large, you can definitely see the artifacts.
BTW, the battery use in a pro camera like the D1X is very good. Since you can shoot lots of pictures without using the battery draining LCD, you can literally shoot all day on a single battery. I usually carry 1 spare. So, "film" not battery is defintely the limitation in this case.