We had one person get infected with the I Love You virus before we were aware of it and notified people not to open blah blah blah. It took a sysadmin 10 minutes to disinfect the affected computer.
Sysadmin salary/120,000 minutes worked per year*10 minutes= $4.16
That's our total loss. If you decide to count the amount of time spent learning about viruses, that means you count the amount of time we spend with Bugtraq every morning, which we would do anyway, so that's a wash.
I think the place where M$ is getting ready to get blindsided by Mac OSX is in the server market. Having done some performance tests myself, a G4-500 with 1.5GB of RAM coupled with the built-in gigabit ethernet is the equal of any enterprise server, *nix, M$ or otherwise that I've ever worked with. There are Solaris machines that cost $25000 that don't perform as well as a $5000 mac as a web or document server -- the fact that OSX has support for SMB, among other things, might set the wheels in motion that Cupurtino has something other than desktop machines in mind for the current generation of macs. Think about it: sendmail, SSH, apache, FTP are all installed by default under OSX. This is no surprise for Linux folks, but show me another commercial operating system that can deliver that for under $150? SCO? HPUX? Solaris? Don't even start with M$ stuff, you'd wind up paying $150 worth of licensing fees just to look at the list of software you'd have to buy.
Yes, the Imperial March is stolen from Holst; The Klingon theme is taken almost entirely from various works by Prokofiev. But neither John Williams or Alexander Courage is guilty of anything that hasn't been done by almost every successful composer, ever. In music, they call it "influence." In writing, it's plagarism, and in movies it's "stealing." But really, look carefully. Indiana Jones, the Star Wars movies, etc. are all cliche after cliche, but they are well executed cliches. That, I think is the difference between those movies and D it was not well executed.
I wonder if anyone has considered the autobiographical (for Lucas) aspect of these movies:
Rick McCallum's plot summary: We meet Anakin Skywalker when he's a young boy [filmmaker] and we watch him become a Jedi- knight [rich filmmaker],then a Jedi-master [very rich filmmaker]. Then in the background of the Clone-Wars,[terrible 70's and 80's sci-fi movies] he becomes a great hero, and on that moment pride, ego and selfishness take over and he chooses to go to the Dark Side. And rest of the movie [his life] is really about the consequences of what happens when you don't take responsibilities of your own actions, and when you think you're better than anybody else.
you might find an old version of Macromedia's Director, like version 5 when you still had to program all of the lingo by hand. It produces great visual results, is able to handle complex programming problems, and is still easy to learn. A lot of the commands are intuitive, and if they get stuck, there are syntax checkers, etc. built into the program.
Because of the visual nature of the application, there is a lot of visual feedback and some immediate gratification. Try programming a "choose your own adventure" type sequence with variable endings depending on the choices you have made earlier in the story. Teaches global variables, for/next, etc, and at the end they have something that they can play with.
I disagree with your assessment that PPC architecture is slow under linux. Granted, I have only been using Yellow Dog, so I can't speak to 2000. I use the following machines: Dual processor P3-600(Red Hat), G-4 450(mac OS), G-4 400(mac OS), and a 233 iMac(Yellow Dog Linux). None of them dual boot. The best performer for real world tasks is the iMac. It boots faster, it loads applications faster, and it compiles a kernel faster then the P3. Granted, the kernel is more complex for the Dual-P3, but not a lot more. The P3 blows it out of the water on a lot of tasks, and is tremendously more versatile, but for practical issues like surfing the web, and day to day use, the iMac is great. It started as an experiment, and I just kept working with it. The iMac is also running with 96MB of RAM as opposed to 512MB in the P3. What it really comes down to though, is that they are both fast. Really fast compared to anything running Windows or Mac OS. I'm anxious to install YDL on the G-4 and see what happens. But the ca. $1000 I paid for the iMac is making me reconsider the $7000 I paid for the dual P-3. I never thought I'd consider apple hardware a bargain...
I produce professional quality industrial and broadcast video on the following: Mac G-4 450, 10GB HD for software (master), 27GB Ultra ATA (slave) just for video, 256MB RAM, Miro DC-30 pro, Premiere 5.1 (comes bundled with the miro card). We get about the same quality from this setup as we do in offline AVID, but the total cost of this setup was about $3500. If you are interested in going the Wintel route, Matrox has a ca. $1200 video card that is comparable to AVID for real-time effects rendering.
Our setup requires a bit of render-then-output tweaking to get Beta-SP quality video out, but the cost to results are better than any other combination that I've found. If you need more drive space, you can always plug into the FW/1392 ports. In my experience, this setup (on Mac) is much more stable than the same software on Wintel -- been doing this sort of thing about 6 years.
I work in Web development, and have a Mac on my desktop. I also have an X-server, and run Linux/X-windows on top of my Mac OS all day, every day. When I'm writing code, or need to find something out about the network/internet, I switch to my Linux desktop. When I need to work in Photoshop, check my email, or just want to surf, I choose the Mac OS. Why? Well, aside from the issue of software availability (Photoshop, Flash Authorware, etc. for Linux) I find the Mac OS easier to use.
If I download a piece of software, or a plug-in, it just works. My business partner, who uses Linux exclusively, just spent 2 _days_ trying to get a 3DFX plugin for his MP3 player to work.
On the other hand, I often curse the fact that I don't have a ctrl+e "end of line" function in my Mac apps, and I can't configure them to be that way. I also hate the fact that I can't place my cursor anywhere I want it and start typing in Linux.
I like configurability, I like free, I hate wizards, and I hate being coddled. But I also hate having to screw around and waste hours of my time installing a toy. I also don't want to have to type a bunch of chown's and chmods just to move a bunch of porn from my hard drive to a Jaz. When I need to do powerful things, I use Linux. When my brain is tired, and I just want to get stuff done, I use Mac OS, and I live happily in both worlds.
The question I have is: why does everyone seem to think that OS's are mutually exclusive? Linux is sleek and powerful, Mac is fat and easy, I have needs for both, and I would hate to see either system compromised by trying to be more like the other. I'll be interested when OSX comes out to see if the power of the CLI can be incorporated into the Mac OS without making it unplesant for all parties involved.
Seems like there was an Apple machine -- 20th anniversary Macintosh? -- that they tried this with. Integrated flat screen, built in CD-ROM, huge price tag, no upgrades wireless keyboard. Perhaps the Macs were a big hit in Japan, too. Ah, well, at least it opens up the possibility of having a snazzy Linux box without having to install LinuxPPC on an iMac. This at least gives me a glimmer of hope that computer manufacturers (other than Apple and a few other assorted whackos) are begining to consider industrial design as well as functionality in their desktop machines. Now if they can just put functionality _and_ design together...
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We had one person get infected with the I Love You virus before we were aware of it and notified people not to open blah blah blah. It took a sysadmin 10 minutes to disinfect the affected computer.
Sysadmin salary/120,000 minutes worked per year*10 minutes= $4.16
That's our total loss. If you decide to count the amount of time spent learning about viruses, that means you count the amount of time we spend with Bugtraq every morning, which we would do anyway, so that's a wash.
Yeah, $4.16. That's about right.
I think the place where M$ is getting ready to get blindsided by Mac OSX is in the server market. Having done some performance tests myself, a G4-500 with 1.5GB of RAM coupled with the built-in gigabit ethernet is the equal of any enterprise server, *nix, M$ or otherwise that I've ever worked with. There are Solaris machines that cost $25000 that don't perform as well as a $5000 mac as a web or document server -- the fact that OSX has support for SMB, among other things, might set the wheels in motion that Cupurtino has something other than desktop machines in mind for the current generation of macs. Think about it: sendmail, SSH, apache, FTP are all installed by default under OSX. This is no surprise for Linux folks, but show me another commercial operating system that can deliver that for under $150? SCO? HPUX? Solaris? Don't even start with M$ stuff, you'd wind up paying $150 worth of licensing fees just to look at the list of software you'd have to buy.
Yes, the Imperial March is stolen from Holst; The Klingon theme is taken almost entirely from various works by Prokofiev. But neither John Williams or Alexander Courage is guilty of anything that hasn't been done by almost every successful composer, ever. In music, they call it "influence." In writing, it's plagarism, and in movies it's "stealing." But really, look carefully. Indiana Jones, the Star Wars movies, etc. are all cliche after cliche, but they are well executed cliches. That, I think is the difference between those movies and D it was not well executed.
I wonder if anyone has considered the autobiographical (for Lucas) aspect of these movies:
Rick McCallum's plot summary: We meet Anakin Skywalker when he's a young boy [filmmaker] and we watch him become a Jedi- knight [rich filmmaker],then a Jedi-master [very rich filmmaker]. Then in the background of the Clone-Wars,[terrible 70's and 80's sci-fi movies] he becomes a great hero, and on that moment pride, ego and selfishness take over and he chooses to go to the Dark Side. And rest of the movie [his life] is really about the consequences of what happens when you don't take responsibilities of your own actions, and when you think you're better than anybody else.
hmmmmm......
you might find an old version of Macromedia's Director, like version 5 when you still had to program all of the lingo by hand. It produces great visual results, is able to handle complex programming problems, and is still easy to learn. A lot of the commands are intuitive, and if they get stuck, there are syntax checkers, etc. built into the program.
Because of the visual nature of the application, there is a lot of visual feedback and some immediate gratification. Try programming a "choose your own adventure" type sequence with variable endings depending on the choices you have made earlier in the story. Teaches global variables, for/next, etc, and at the end they have something that they can play with.
I disagree with your assessment that PPC architecture is slow under linux. Granted, I have only been using Yellow Dog, so I can't speak to 2000. I use the following machines: Dual processor P3-600(Red Hat), G-4 450(mac OS), G-4 400(mac OS), and a 233 iMac(Yellow Dog Linux). None of them dual boot. The best performer for real world tasks is the iMac. It boots faster, it loads applications faster, and it compiles a kernel faster then the P3. Granted, the kernel is more complex for the Dual-P3, but not a lot more. The P3 blows it out of the water on a lot of tasks, and is tremendously more versatile, but for practical issues like surfing the web, and day to day use, the iMac is great. It started as an experiment, and I just kept working with it. The iMac is also running with 96MB of RAM as opposed to 512MB in the P3. What it really comes down to though, is that they are both fast. Really fast compared to anything running Windows or Mac OS. I'm anxious to install YDL on the G-4 and see what happens. But the ca. $1000 I paid for the iMac is making me reconsider the $7000 I paid for the dual P-3. I never thought I'd consider apple hardware a bargain...
I produce professional quality industrial and broadcast video on the following: Mac G-4 450, 10GB HD for software (master), 27GB Ultra ATA (slave) just for video, 256MB RAM, Miro DC-30 pro, Premiere 5.1 (comes bundled with the miro card). We get about the same quality from this setup as we do in offline AVID, but the total cost of this setup was about $3500. If you are interested in going the Wintel route, Matrox has a ca. $1200 video card that is comparable to AVID for real-time effects rendering.
Our setup requires a bit of render-then-output tweaking to get Beta-SP quality video out, but the cost to results are better than any other combination that I've found. If you need more drive space, you can always plug into the FW/1392 ports. In my experience, this setup (on Mac) is much more stable than the same software on Wintel -- been doing this sort of thing about 6 years.
ZI
I work in Web development, and have a Mac on my desktop. I also have an X-server, and run Linux/X-windows on top of my Mac OS all day, every day. When I'm writing code, or need to find something out about the network/internet, I switch to my Linux desktop. When I need to work in Photoshop, check my email, or just want to surf, I choose the Mac OS. Why? Well, aside from the issue of software availability (Photoshop, Flash Authorware, etc. for Linux) I find the Mac OS easier to use.
If I download a piece of software, or a plug-in, it just works. My business partner, who uses Linux exclusively, just spent 2 _days_ trying to get a 3DFX plugin for his MP3 player to work.
On the other hand, I often curse the fact that I don't have a ctrl+e "end of line" function in my Mac apps, and I can't configure them to be that way. I also hate the fact that I can't place my cursor anywhere I want it and start typing in Linux.
I like configurability, I like free, I hate wizards, and I hate being coddled. But I also hate having to screw around and waste hours of my time installing a toy. I also don't want to have to type a bunch of chown's and chmods just to move a bunch of porn from my hard drive to a Jaz. When I need to do powerful things, I use Linux. When my brain is tired, and I just want to get stuff done, I use Mac OS, and I live happily in both worlds.
The question I have is: why does everyone seem to think that OS's are mutually exclusive? Linux is sleek and powerful, Mac is fat and easy, I have needs for both, and I would hate to see either system compromised by trying to be more like the other. I'll be interested when OSX comes out to see if the power of the CLI can be incorporated into the Mac OS without making it unplesant for all parties involved.
-- ZI
Seems like there was an Apple machine -- 20th anniversary Macintosh? -- that they tried this with. Integrated flat screen, built in CD-ROM, huge price tag, no upgrades wireless keyboard. Perhaps the Macs were a big hit in Japan, too. Ah, well, at least it opens up the possibility of having a snazzy Linux box without having to install LinuxPPC on an iMac. This at least gives me a glimmer of hope that computer manufacturers (other than Apple and a few other assorted whackos) are begining to consider industrial design as well as functionality in their desktop machines. Now if they can just put functionality _and_ design together...