I know a lot of people who switched from Windows to Linux in the last year or so, dozens in fact. But Mac? Nah.
Funny you'd say that. I know a lot of people who were running Linux and switched to Mac. Most of these people had switched from Windows to Linux, or were running both on various machines, but switched to Mac because they didn't have to fiddle with sound system incompatibilities, mod dependencies for this or that hardware device, problems with apm not working with certain drivers, etc. etc.. I know that's why I switched to Mac. I was sick of closing my Inspiron 4000 to put it to sleep, then waking it back up to find that I had to reboot in order to get sound to work. I was sick of hot-plugging a pcmcia card and having my eth#'s shift. I wanted something that was *nix that worked without me having to fix it. Sure, tinkering is cool, but not when you want to get work done. Mac OS is reliable, and I have yet to meet anybody who has used it that will refute that.
As for the price difference, the laptops are very competitively priced FOR THE QUALITY OF WHAT YOU GET. Sure, there is no cheap piece-of-crap-but-it-works Apple laptop equivalent to the Office Depot Compaq special you read about in slickdeals, but we're talking internal slot-loading dvd/cdrw or dvd burners in a 12" laptop. Find me a reasonably priced Dell or Sony with those specs. And there's no comment on the Mac mini, its price competition is obvious enough.
All that said, it's all about OS X for me. I think OS X is the best desktop OS ever. I'm on my first Mac (an original 12" powerbook), I've had it for over two years, reloaded it once, and this is by far the most reliable and most consistent operating environment I've ever used.
Even if some packages were missed the first time around and left the same as the old ones, then damn... they could have been caught up three times over already (assuming yearly releases over the last 3 years)
I think that defeats the idea of a stable release. The test versions of Debian are released weekly, and from my experience they work perfectly fine. In fact, a few weeks ago I even had a problem installing Debian on a Dell SC420 because the installer didn't have support for SATA, but the following week's release put that support in. I think it's important to realize that the slow release cycle is just for a stable release, which is rock solid, and not for releases in general. Personally, I like the way they do it now.
I understand your point, but I don't think it applies. In my analogy it was never "my bottle", and that was rather the point. I didn't want a bottle, I wanted a drink. Likewise, businesses don't want a Slack cd, they want a working infrastructure, so it doesn't matter to them if the bottle is bottomless, or if your one cd can install 5000 workstations. One Windows cd can also be installed on 5000 workstations and people pay plenty for it.
The emptying of the bottle or the drink and the need to refill it could be considered "upkeep" or "maintenance" of it. Networks infrastructures and corporate websites don't maintain themselves. This is where the "action" and next the "skill" parts of the equation come in. You must actually take the action to make a product and upkeep it with security updates and implement interoperability with new technologies. You must have skill in doing it. If you have those things, and you are making a product that people will pay for then you have a market. If you have OSS you have tools available which won't cost you tons of money, giving you the ability to offer more competitive pricing to your customers as well as the possible peace of mind in knowing that the code is fairly secure, and if it is found to not be then you (or the community) will have it fixed shortly.
Again, it's more about taking action, providing solutions, not simply providing goods. You're being paid more for your services in providing the solution, your expertise in implementing it and your trustworthiness of providing something that is solid and secure.
Of course, there are plenty of open ends on this which go way beyond the course of this thread about making money using OSS. Giving back to the community in various ways would be the next step I'd take once we got the money making taken care of...
There are other businesses where some parts of the theory behind OSS make them money.
I pay plenty of bar tenders to make me "Open-source" drinks that I know damn well how to make on my own because I'm just no good at it or I don't want to take the time to go to the store or I'm too tired to make it etc. etc..
People pay for hamburgers at restaurants all the time, even though even little kids know what goes in them, because they don't want to go to the store and buy all the stuff and they don't have the tools to prepare it or the skill to do it well. They just want to eat. It's a matter of convenience and skill and action.
You just have to choose the right market. When a bar tender is behind the bar she doesn't pay another bar tender to make her a drink that they both know how to make, but after her shift is over and she's dead tired, relaxing on the other side of the bar she will. Likewise, you probably won't be able to sell your OSS products to people who make their own OSS products. You sell them to people who need solutions to problems that you can provide using tried and true OSS code. To sound really cliche, if you're selling OSS stuff you're a "solutions provider" and your solution just happens to involve free software, but businesses will still pay you to solve their problems because you are doing work, your tools are just free.
What you said about NAT is a good point, and something I just discovered while playing with this. NAT inherently defends against this attack because NAT only changes the destination address in the packet and not the source. This change breaks the premise of the attack.
The other interesting point you made was that some SOHO routers are vulnerable. Assuming that the attack will be launched remotely, and assuming that most people left their SOHO router at default, there will be no open ports on the router itself, so despite being vulnerable to the attack the conditions don't exist for the router to be a target.
Thanks for the BSD source code link, it compiled with no problems and what do you know, it actually does choke up an XP SP 2 box for 15-20 seconds. I was a little skeptical when I read this, but wow, it's true, and although it doesn't cause BSOD or reboot anymore it would be quite an irritant.
Brute force? Brute force of what? A system running no services shouldn't be vulnerable to any attack which involves initiating a connection, and without that there's nothing to brute force.
Is it just me or is every month "NO MPAA PURCHASE MONTH"? You gotta walk the walk, folks. The problem is that not all folks walk the walk, and that ruins the effect.
On the average OS X system it's one step easier than what you said, since OS X's root user is disabled by default and all system administration is done using sudo. If you learn an admin user-level users password that's it, and by default your user is admin. However, this is still more secure than windows where you don't need to type your password in to do admin-level things. For instance, you'd have to type the password to modify any system files, whereas in windows you wouldn't.
If you want to have a frank discussion with your employees, you have to be very very careful. Treat it as though it will become public and will be there forever.
You know, he pretty much says exactly that in his blog, and it's even quoted in the article...
Paul writes:
While this is intended as an internal blog, I recognize that it will become public-- welcome to the Internet! As a result, please recognize that I may be a bit limited in my comments and responses to protect Intel, and that we may exercise some editorial privilege on your comments for the same reason. I want to be clear on this up front. This is the price of entry to this blog.
It would seem to me that either that park is the *prime* place to commit a crime, or else the artists can make mad bank by suing the government for archiving hours and hours of footage of their sculpture via security cameras. In either case, graffiti is going to be a bitch when it's done because they either won't be able to find the people who did it since there are no cameras, or they won't have the money to have it removed since they had to give all their money to the artists over a court battle concerning the archived footage.
Ah, yes, I remember. That was the same Longhorn that was planned to have a Database Filesystem (WinFS), but it had to be removed in order to facillitate a 2006 release schedule of the OS, and a ~2008 release of the Filesystem. Meanwhile other people (Apple) have already got their implementation (Spotlight) running smoothly. I wonder if MS will ever realize that they can't do everything and do it well, especially when they go off and ignore standards, and definitely not in a timely manner. 2006... IE still won't be standards compliant though, and it will still be full of holes, and it will still only run in Windows.
Clearly digital is digital when you're looking at the data and hence the sound quality will be identical regardless of wether you use a different network link for delivery. I think the questionable aspect is the continuity of the delivery those 1's and 0's. Anybody who frequently uses wireless knows that there can be lag problems due to RF interference or heavy traffic on the wireless network segment. Dropped and late packets causing pauses for rebuffering aren't going to sound great with high fidelity speakers, especially when turned up loud.
Also, anybody who's used XP Zero config knows that it can be a fantastic source of frustration, and Windows would have to be the platform if iTunes is to be used on a PIII. XP Zero Config is easily enough bypassed if you dont' use XP or if you use the vendor-supplied management software, but I don't know for sure that those options would be any better.
I say that if you're building a house, definitely use a switched ethernet network. If you're buying a house, definitely consider any possible way to install ethernet. The worst-case solution would be wireless, and in that case you might consider ad-hoc for your audio units since it relieves strain on your access points.
In my parent post I meant to quote the next paragraph as well, so here's the whole quote:
As we now know [Recent Details] the PU is a 64bit "Power Architecture" processor. Power Architecture is a catch all term IBM have been using for a while to describe both PowerPC and POWER processors. Currently there's only 3 CPUs which fit this description: POWER5, POWER4 and the PowerPC 970 (aka G5) which itself is a derivation of the POWER4.
The IBM press release indicates the Cell processor is "Multi-thread, multi-core" but since the APUs are almost certainly not multi-threaded it looks like the PU may be based on a POWER5 core - the very same core I expect to turn up in Apple machines in the form of the G6 [G6] in the not too distant future, IBM have acknowledged such a chip is in development but as if to confuse us call it a "next generation 970".
As I posted I wonder if Apple might jump right over the G5 in notebooks to something based on the CELL cpu that IBM is developing.
I think you may be right, and you're not the only one to think that.
The Cell is part of the Power lineup from IBM, as is the G5, so technically the Cell and the G5 are in the same category, just different cores. The Power architecture is being touted as something that is scalable from Server hardware all the way down to Cell phones, so it really is just a matter of (hopefully not much) time until Apple releases a laptop based on G5 or the Cell.
As we now know [Recent Details] the PU is a 64bit "Power Architecture" processor. Power Architecture is a catch all term IBM have been using for a while to describe both PowerPC and POWER processors. Currently there's only 3 CPUs which fit this description: POWER5, POWER4 and the PowerPC 970 (aka G5) which itself is a derivation of the POWER4.
It would be sweet if they designed the G6 and did simultaneous releases of desktop and laptop, with the laptop CPU being just a scaled down version of the desktop version.
You must have some different version than what I have because I just sniffed packets throughout the whole process and nothing got sent out past my LAN the entire time. I did this on a clean system though, no mp3's or p2p apps, but it did find 3 system files for various OSes that I have loaded on here. Regardless, no information was sent out at all. Maybe that's some other application you have installed...
I saw that Register article about the G5 powerbook and thought "Wow! What if they are planning one??" I checked out Apple's page and the article was right, they fixed the "typo" and now it says G4... But what if there was actually a.gif file on their server that was keeping track of G5 hits...
That says that there IS a G5 powerbook hit-tracking file on the server!! G5 powerbooks are on the way!! Woohoo!!! After I regained consciousness and began to float back down from cloud 9 I thought "Wow! Apple is so awesome and so secret I bet they could even be working on a teleportation device and nobody would know!!"
That's ridiculous. Linux and FreeBSD are completely OSS, giving you the option to customize them all you like, rather than build a proprietary OS from the ground up just for your purpose. In a metaphor, you're essentially saying "No, I wouldn't have an important business housed in a building made of freely available materials that I can pick and choose as I please, made from tools that are commonly used to make a huge array of buildings for just about every purpose you can think of" with an implied "I'll design and forge my own tools, mill my own lumber and mine my own stones rather than buy them from any widely trusted supplier." It is the height of arrogance for anybody to theorize that they alone have what it takes to create a better OS, for any specific purpose however broad or narrow, than a team of hundreds of thousands of programmers who come from every country and culture around the globe.
As interesting as the phenomena of customers leeching power from the businesses they frequent is the self-imposed etiquette of many users.
I've read it about 5 times and it still doesn't make sense, except in some abstract interpretation where some of the words in the middle are overlapped.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple keeps a list of iSync's Supported Devices on their site.
http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.a sp?p=380915
Go on, mod me redundant.
...finds and cleans 5 different viruses which exploit vulnerabilities that were all patched in the latest point release of OS X 10.2 and 10.3.
As for the price difference, the laptops are very competitively priced FOR THE QUALITY OF WHAT YOU GET. Sure, there is no cheap piece-of-crap-but-it-works Apple laptop equivalent to the Office Depot Compaq special you read about in slickdeals, but we're talking internal slot-loading dvd/cdrw or dvd burners in a 12" laptop. Find me a reasonably priced Dell or Sony with those specs. And there's no comment on the Mac mini, its price competition is obvious enough.
All that said, it's all about OS X for me. I think OS X is the best desktop OS ever. I'm on my first Mac (an original 12" powerbook), I've had it for over two years, reloaded it once, and this is by far the most reliable and most consistent operating environment I've ever used.
Actually I think he was right. The line you're thinking of is from "Teh 0C"
I understand your point, but I don't think it applies. In my analogy it was never "my bottle", and that was rather the point. I didn't want a bottle, I wanted a drink. Likewise, businesses don't want a Slack cd, they want a working infrastructure, so it doesn't matter to them if the bottle is bottomless, or if your one cd can install 5000 workstations. One Windows cd can also be installed on 5000 workstations and people pay plenty for it. The emptying of the bottle or the drink and the need to refill it could be considered "upkeep" or "maintenance" of it. Networks infrastructures and corporate websites don't maintain themselves. This is where the "action" and next the "skill" parts of the equation come in. You must actually take the action to make a product and upkeep it with security updates and implement interoperability with new technologies. You must have skill in doing it. If you have those things, and you are making a product that people will pay for then you have a market. If you have OSS you have tools available which won't cost you tons of money, giving you the ability to offer more competitive pricing to your customers as well as the possible peace of mind in knowing that the code is fairly secure, and if it is found to not be then you (or the community) will have it fixed shortly. Again, it's more about taking action, providing solutions, not simply providing goods. You're being paid more for your services in providing the solution, your expertise in implementing it and your trustworthiness of providing something that is solid and secure. Of course, there are plenty of open ends on this which go way beyond the course of this thread about making money using OSS. Giving back to the community in various ways would be the next step I'd take once we got the money making taken care of...
There are other businesses where some parts of the theory behind OSS make them money.
I pay plenty of bar tenders to make me "Open-source" drinks that I know damn well how to make on my own because I'm just no good at it or I don't want to take the time to go to the store or I'm too tired to make it etc. etc..
People pay for hamburgers at restaurants all the time, even though even little kids know what goes in them, because they don't want to go to the store and buy all the stuff and they don't have the tools to prepare it or the skill to do it well. They just want to eat. It's a matter of convenience and skill and action.
You just have to choose the right market. When a bar tender is behind the bar she doesn't pay another bar tender to make her a drink that they both know how to make, but after her shift is over and she's dead tired, relaxing on the other side of the bar she will. Likewise, you probably won't be able to sell your OSS products to people who make their own OSS products. You sell them to people who need solutions to problems that you can provide using tried and true OSS code. To sound really cliche, if you're selling OSS stuff you're a "solutions provider" and your solution just happens to involve free software, but businesses will still pay you to solve their problems because you are doing work, your tools are just free.
What you said about NAT is a good point, and something I just discovered while playing with this. NAT inherently defends against this attack because NAT only changes the destination address in the packet and not the source. This change breaks the premise of the attack. The other interesting point you made was that some SOHO routers are vulnerable. Assuming that the attack will be launched remotely, and assuming that most people left their SOHO router at default, there will be no open ports on the router itself, so despite being vulnerable to the attack the conditions don't exist for the router to be a target.
Thanks for the BSD source code link, it compiled with no problems and what do you know, it actually does choke up an XP SP 2 box for 15-20 seconds. I was a little skeptical when I read this, but wow, it's true, and although it doesn't cause BSOD or reboot anymore it would be quite an irritant.
Brute force? Brute force of what? A system running no services shouldn't be vulnerable to any attack which involves initiating a connection, and without that there's nothing to brute force.
Is it just me or is every month "NO MPAA PURCHASE MONTH"? You gotta walk the walk, folks. The problem is that not all folks walk the walk, and that ruins the effect.
On the average OS X system it's one step easier than what you said, since OS X's root user is disabled by default and all system administration is done using sudo. If you learn an admin user-level users password that's it, and by default your user is admin. However, this is still more secure than windows where you don't need to type your password in to do admin-level things. For instance, you'd have to type the password to modify any system files, whereas in windows you wouldn't.
It would seem to me that either that park is the *prime* place to commit a crime, or else the artists can make mad bank by suing the government for archiving hours and hours of footage of their sculpture via security cameras. In either case, graffiti is going to be a bitch when it's done because they either won't be able to find the people who did it since there are no cameras, or they won't have the money to have it removed since they had to give all their money to the artists over a court battle concerning the archived footage.
Ah, yes, I remember. That was the same Longhorn that was planned to have a Database Filesystem (WinFS), but it had to be removed in order to facillitate a 2006 release schedule of the OS, and a ~2008 release of the Filesystem. Meanwhile other people (Apple) have already got their implementation (Spotlight) running smoothly. I wonder if MS will ever realize that they can't do everything and do it well, especially when they go off and ignore standards, and definitely not in a timely manner. 2006... IE still won't be standards compliant though, and it will still be full of holes, and it will still only run in Windows.
Clearly digital is digital when you're looking at the data and hence the sound quality will be identical regardless of wether you use a different network link for delivery. I think the questionable aspect is the continuity of the delivery those 1's and 0's. Anybody who frequently uses wireless knows that there can be lag problems due to RF interference or heavy traffic on the wireless network segment. Dropped and late packets causing pauses for rebuffering aren't going to sound great with high fidelity speakers, especially when turned up loud. Also, anybody who's used XP Zero config knows that it can be a fantastic source of frustration, and Windows would have to be the platform if iTunes is to be used on a PIII. XP Zero Config is easily enough bypassed if you dont' use XP or if you use the vendor-supplied management software, but I don't know for sure that those options would be any better. I say that if you're building a house, definitely use a switched ethernet network. If you're buying a house, definitely consider any possible way to install ethernet. The worst-case solution would be wireless, and in that case you might consider ad-hoc for your audio units since it relieves strain on your access points.
The Cell is part of the Power lineup from IBM, as is the G5, so technically the Cell and the G5 are in the same category, just different cores. The Power architecture is being touted as something that is scalable from Server hardware all the way down to Cell phones, so it really is just a matter of (hopefully not much) time until Apple releases a laptop based on G5 or the Cell. It would be sweet if they designed the G6 and did simultaneous releases of desktop and laptop, with the laptop CPU being just a scaled down version of the desktop version.
You must have some different version than what I have because I just sniffed packets throughout the whole process and nothing got sent out past my LAN the entire time. I did this on a clean system though, no mp3's or p2p apps, but it did find 3 system files for various OSes that I have loaded on here. Regardless, no information was sent out at all. Maybe that's some other application you have installed...
Drop us a torrent link when you're done and we'll all be set.
That's ridiculous. Linux and FreeBSD are completely OSS, giving you the option to customize them all you like, rather than build a proprietary OS from the ground up just for your purpose. In a metaphor, you're essentially saying "No, I wouldn't have an important business housed in a building made of freely available materials that I can pick and choose as I please, made from tools that are commonly used to make a huge array of buildings for just about every purpose you can think of" with an implied "I'll design and forge my own tools, mill my own lumber and mine my own stones rather than buy them from any widely trusted supplier." It is the height of arrogance for anybody to theorize that they alone have what it takes to create a better OS, for any specific purpose however broad or narrow, than a team of hundreds of thousands of programmers who come from every country and culture around the globe.
Wow, you're totally right. It makes sense now that you explained it, but it sure is hard to read. He must be a perl programmer.