People are actually starting to look at IPv6 security. The recent OpenBSD issues highlighted the problem. OpenBSD, FreeBSD and MidnightBSD should all be patched for this issue. OpenBSD chose to turn it off completely for now. There is some talk about adding support to PF for blocking specific traffic. FreeBSD and MidnightBSD both used a patch that adds a new sysctl to disable the feature by default, but still allow it. As I recall, the reason its in the spec to begin with is for research purposes. I don't follow DragonFly or NetBSD enough to know if they've patched yet.
1. put cd in drive. 2. cancel or allow 3. Click next 4. click next 5. cancel or allow 6. next 7. finish.
This assumes its not an upgrade of the nvidia driver which is
1. download 2. run executable 3. cancel or allow 4. next 5. uninstall 6. cancel or allow 7. reboot 8. (app runs) Next 9. (windows detects hardware, tries to install old driver) cancel 10. cancel or allow 11. next 12. installing.... cancel or allow 13. done. reboot. 14. Fix the display resolution... well you get the idea.
Now lets compare to MidnightBSD 1. cd/usr/mports/x11/nvidia-driver/ 2. sudo make install
Almost every web design book I've read suggests that Sans Serif "fonts" are easier to read on screen whereas Serif "fonts" are better for print media.
I think Sans Serif, particularly Verdana is easier to read in some cases as long as the text is large enough. I often try to make print stylesheets use serif fonts. I guess you could print the sites and read them that way.
Perhaps Serif fonts will become more useful on screens with newer displays. I find they don't bother me as much on my laptop (LCD) vs my desktop. Older LCD displays tend to look too washed out regardless of the typeface.
It seems like a generational thing. I'd be curious what services get the most sign-ups.
I just tried my ICQ account and it seems to work. Its a 6 digit and I almost never use it. Once or twice a year I might get on to talk to my old boss or people I worked with 7 years ago. I guess that means the delete operation was not for rarely used accounts. I wonder if there is another pattern like international users or something.
I gave up on ICQ after the windows client got so bloated. When I use it now, its an ancient mac client.
What about disclosure before Microsoft releases a patch. That occasionally happens and then we have to wait for patch tuesday to get the fix. Their current system causes systems to be vulnerable longer for no good reason. Microsoft shifted the analysis of patches from the sys admin to their hands. They don't even give you details about exploits in their security advisories anymore. Its just a vague "there is a vulnerability in product x" kind of thing. I have to search their kb or technet to find out what is wrong with their product. Its a hassle.
The other problem with patch tuesday is that for your thinking to work every vendor has to release patches on the same day. If IT only does patches once a month, then vulnerabilities in Firefox, Office, and any other business app might go unpatched for a long time. Companies are not out of the catch 22.
Consider that someone has to be interested in your idea to contribute.
I work on three open source projects and am the founder of two of them. All three projects suffer from limited number of committers. In fact, I am the only committer for Just Journal. Granted, the code sucks balls and I didn't expect to open source it when I started. Don't assume that people will use your code or contribute back. If you get lucky, you might have the next big thing.
Even when you actually have other developers, sometimes people think you are too small to matter. MidnightBSD, for instance, has 5 active developers and a few people working on translations and things. For an operating system project, that is quite small. DragonFly started with around 8 developers early on as far as I know. However, most people think I'm the only developer since I commit the most. Perceptions are the big problem.
The idea that you need to release first is correct. Many people email me with comments like "I'll join the project after you release a version" and "I don't want to try this until you get a few releases out". Well I could do a release right now that sucks. Sadly, that would work with some people.
You may also find that the demands of users are unbelievable. The requirements for the first release have changed several times. Intially, it was to be a non gui release with just some basic changes to get familar with the release process and to offer a stable starting point. I decided waiting a few years to do a 1.0 release like DragonFly isn't the best idea for our situation. Now people expect a full working desktop environment for a 0.1 release. It amazes me.
I suppose the reaction you will get will vary greatly on the type of software you are developing and the license that you choose. GPL fans are supportive of GPL'd code IF it runs on Linux. If you GPL something for another system, its often problematic. If you even try to port software to another OS, you often get comments about it not being linux or how you should give up or the classic "BSD is dying". Now if its a killer application or product that is missing, you might get lucky. Imagine a world without Firefox or Pidgin.
Also don't make the mistake I did and be accepting of different licensing models. My project uses BSD, LGPL, GPL and several other pieces of code and everyone hates me. How dare I use GNUstep in my BSD project from people who use DesktopBSD (KDE isn't BSD guys). It is really interesting to interact with different projects though. There are projects that I didn't think much of until I submitted patches. For instance, I had a great experience with the Perl project. They are very nice developers. The GNUstep people have been very helpful too. So also consider who you might alienate. FreeBSD fans want me to die for forking.
Sun probably should setup a program for that. You could install FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD on the system if its an UltraSparc IIi. You can also install Linux. For older systems with 32bit cpus, you can install NetBSD 1.x and it runs very well. I did this with a Sun SparcStation IPC. You can even boot these machines from floppy if they do not have a cdrom drive.
I realize some people like Solaris or bought Sun hardware to learn it. You might be able to find old versions on ebay. I happen to have a Solaris 7 CD as sun used to sell them for development for $75. It included x86 and sparc versions.
Solaris 10 runs fine on an Ultra 10 3D Creator presuming there is enough disk space. I put in a standard 80GB ATA disk and had Solaris on it in about 2 hours. Granted, FreeBSD and MidnightBSD were faster on the machine.
I suppose sun has still done better than Apple or Microsoft. Mac OS X is not completely free for old hardware. Windows certainly is not. You can't buy copies of Windows 98 anymore.
And apparently I might have to do that. Currently, when I buy a DVD at the local best buy or any other store the people are too lazy to deactivate the anti-theft device. That means the alarm always goes off making me look like a thief, wasting my time as they search my bag and so on. Now instead of just being annoying, I'll get home and my DVD won't play! Then I have to go to the store and bitch them out costing more money in gas. Are they trying to get me to download the shit?
I'm really sick of this shit. I buy movies that I like. I buy games. I even buy music. Why do I have to suffer?
I also have to wonder why they did this with an old technology. Supposedly we need to adopt the new blueray or hd-dvd formats. Why not focus on making the players for the new formats cheaper instead of "innovating" for old formats?
... or users on a business grade package to host websites. I pay comcast $160 for the ability to host websites on my home connection. i think businesses could use the extra upstream and I certainly could. My wife has to upload installers and demos at work. (She is a programmer/consultant) I upload MidnightBSD ISOs which are certainly not pirated. I don't use any p2p protocol a home because I don't have the speed for it and hosting. I would love to offer MBSD downloads with bittorrent though.
Someone might see a "box" but that doesn't mean a Wii. Here in Ann Arbor, MI I see Wii boxes at various stores but if you ask they are all empty! In order to get a Wii, you must come in on magic shipment day which the employees will not tell you. You must be there promptly to get the 10 or less Wii systems they get in. They will try to bundle them with crap.
Now the only people I've heard of getting a Wii had to go into Walmart. The nearest one I know of is in a bad neighborhood and I probably wouldn't make it to my car with it. Target isn't even trying to stock them anymore around here. They have a sign up that they won't be getting any Wiis.
I'm sure there are markets that have Wiis, but many of us have struck out since last year. I know I could order a $600 bundle online but I can't afford that all in one shot. I'm a college student!
Yes, and if you are on the mailing lists you'll know that people are having trouble administering it. There are lots of posts asking how to tweak it. There are magic memory tuning measures to make it stable. Its by no means automatic. There are obvious upsides as well. Its currently not capable as a root partition but they are working on that.
It requires a lot of RAM although it does in solaris too.
I don't think ZFS fits into the Linux way. I would guess someone will write a copy cat file system for linux soon under GPL2. I was rather shocked FreeBSD imported it into their tree due to licensing. Sun's license isn't terrible, but after the stink about GPL code in the tree it seems odd.
Simple, most surveys are done by people who want to make money on open source. Research and education aren't big $$$ markets. People there know how to download free distros.
Linux has the best chance in the business sector. I'm hoping to make MidnightBSD useful to home users and academic enivronments. Of course, its easy for me to think about computer labs and universities since I'm still a student and administer a computer lab. A high up at novell probably thinks about business. I'm not a big ubuntu fan, but their perspective is a bit unique in the linux community these days.
I guess the finishing move for me with Linux was when I saw the CEO of Redhat interviewed on a financial show on PBS. He was asked if linux was ready for the prime time and he pointed out that he had Windows in his office. When the CEO of redhat can't even used openoffice and run his own operating system, its rather sad.
Sometimes you don't have a choice but to run crap. Either you get stuck on a product before you know its crap and its difficult to migrate or your boss mandates that you install crap.
Besides, if Zend added the code to begin with how does one seperate what is going to go away from what is useful? Are they supposed to read minds? Seems very much like random windows apis that disappear or change.
$150? School text books are similar to college text books. I've had to spend over $150 on a single class before in college. Unless prices are fixed for publishers, I don't see this happening. I remember getting fined in high school for book damage from previous students. We had to spend the first day writing down "marks" in the books and I missed a few pages. What would be nice is if on demand publishing became cost effective. As I recall, often only half the book was used in high school or at least a few chapters were skipped by the teacher. It might be beneficial to schools to offer dynamic versions of books that they could order which fit the needs and could also be printed fresh each year as you suggest.
This also leads to a few advantages like current text books. In high school, I had a french book printed in 1978 which is before I was born! It had water damage and was difficult to follow. The slang words weren't even close to current. History classes were often bad as well. I remember my text book talking about exciting "new" events in 1984 when it was 1992. That's not helpful either. Providing new books each year or on demand style books solves the outdated problem.
I used to work at an ISP. One school bought refurbished Macs and gave them to students for home use. These were desktop systems so they didn't need to worry about breaking. They also got a discount on internet access and students were provided desktops to use at school. This could solve some of the breaking problem. Plus the students were issued the computers as long as they were at the district. The school could buy a $300 dell or something and let the students use it at home for 6 years. (well ok maybe a brand that will last longer...) I'm not sold on the idea that computers automatically make students smarter. I would have played with them and not payed attention to homework at that age.
Its nice to find someone else who sees inconsistency problems with PHP. For those of you PHP users who don't see it, if I have to change code to make things work with PHP then a new release is not compatible with an old release. There are also some oddities in the API. PHP often gets a free pass because its open source and one of the earlier ASP like alternatives.
I think the month of bugs helps consumers in the long term, but its certainly a bitch for the vendor to get flooded with tons of holes at once. If someone did that with one of my projects, it was be a nightmare right now. At least with apple and PHP (Zend) they have full time paid developers. PHP also has free developers obviously.
My laptop crashes if I don't reboot it daily. There is a difference. Its entirely related to low disk space. I have never lost a mp3, aac, or video file on my iBook. In fact, I've never lost anything on any Mac I've personally owned. I have had to format Windows installs, lost NTFS volumes in XP a few times and other issues. I don't trust windows for critical data storage. Also, with vista I have less experience recovering data and less tools available this early in the game. I would trust a BSD with the files, but I don't have a spare machine for dedicated use and I can't play DRM'd files in BSD.
I'll give you that part of it is psychological. Back in the windows 9x days, I had to reinstall quite a few times due to windows bugs or viruses. With linux, I remember losing my ext2 file system do to a power outage on my first Redhat 5 box. (NOT EL) I now associate both operating systems with data loss. Obviously both have matured over the years.
Also, your comment makes little sense. You claim FUD, but you also forget that Vista is a fairly new operating system. Many things are still not known about long term reliability and performance. Mac OS 10.4 has been out for awhile now.
Finally, I do MidnightBSD development on my PC. What if I do a chance and it wipes out my partition table or does some unexpected strange access to my windows drive?
My OPINION of my situation does not mean that I'm bashing Microsoft. There are a lot of factors.
I know where its going. I have 35GB of iTunes content. I don't trust Vista enough to store it there. I used to solve this with a file server, but that turned into a webserver for midnightbsd. I rely on the iBook for iTunes, school work, e-mail and java programming.
Its 52 screws. It took me nearly 5 hours to upgrade my drive. You must take the entire computer apart to get to the hard drive. I was not impressed by the process. If the hard drive dies, I'll probably just buy a new computer rather than go through that again. I'm not as comfortable working on laptops, but I've swapped drives on many Dell laptops which only take a few minutes at most. I'm not counting OS installation in that time.
Don't assume that. I turn my on and off once a day. Actually, I have to at least reboot it since OS X crashes after about a day's use. Before you start, its mostly due to the fact I only have 1GB of disk space left and OS X eats through swap. I've already replaced the HDD with a 60GB model and i'm not about to go through the 52 screws to do it again.
When I was in high school (10+ years ago), I had to agree to computer use rules. If I broke those rules, I could no longer use any computer in the school. If you accessed adult content, you could be suspended or expelled. But, only a few computers were on the Internet back then.
I think randomly kicking kids out for curiosity is plain stupid. On the other hand, if the students are out of control with the systems the school district might have to resort to extreme measures. I'm current taking college courses and have noticed the younger students feel they can do whatever they want and some even have mommy come up and bitch when they fail a course. I can only imagine what high school students are like right now.
I think the real solution is to just give kids a computer they can screw around with at home. If they are hacker types, let them install linux or BSD. Obviously internet access should still be limited or monitored.
Its strange though as I talk to younger people online while gaming. Some of them can play online games at lunch in Europe. Things are very different here.
1. If they asked for a phone number from a customer, 2 or more people could live at the same household and use the same number. 2. They may want all the numbers in the same area code together. If you were distributing a call list for sales people to call, you might want to break it up by region. 3. Just because something is unique does not mean you don't want them ordered.
Yeah, and as far as concurrency goes its a terrible choice. When I first started learning ASP years ago, I started with Access databases. My website could not handle over 5 concurrent users without giving errors. I think at that time there was a hard limit of 5 concurrent users. This thing was read only most of the time. The database only changed a few times a week.
Now if access couldn't handle a Jewel fan site how on earth could it handle an entire state's voting data? Switching to SQL Server and later migrating to MySQL was a godsend. Prior to SQL Express, there was MSDE as well. They had other options at the time. As much as they probably charged, couldn't have purchased and setup SQL Server or gone with an OSS database?
Either the developers were idiots or management made a terrible mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
People are actually starting to look at IPv6 security. The recent OpenBSD issues highlighted the problem. OpenBSD, FreeBSD and MidnightBSD should all be patched for this issue. OpenBSD chose to turn it off completely for now. There is some talk about adding support to PF for blocking specific traffic. FreeBSD and MidnightBSD both used a patch that adds a new sysctl to disable the feature by default, but still allow it. As I recall, the reason its in the spec to begin with is for research purposes. I don't follow DragonFly or NetBSD enough to know if they've patched yet.
Yes.
/usr/mports/x11/nvidia-driver/
1. put cd in drive.
2. cancel or allow
3. Click next
4. click next
5. cancel or allow
6. next
7. finish.
This assumes its not an upgrade of the nvidia driver which is
1. download
2. run executable
3. cancel or allow
4. next
5. uninstall
6. cancel or allow
7. reboot
8. (app runs) Next
9. (windows detects hardware, tries to install old driver) cancel
10. cancel or allow
11. next
12. installing.... cancel or allow
13. done. reboot.
14. Fix the display resolution... well you get the idea.
Now lets compare to MidnightBSD
1. cd
2. sudo make install
Yeah, windows is so easy.
Almost every web design book I've read suggests that Sans Serif "fonts" are easier to read on screen whereas Serif "fonts" are better for print media.
I think Sans Serif, particularly Verdana is easier to read in some cases as long as the text is large enough. I often try to make print stylesheets use serif fonts. I guess you could print the sites and read them that way.
Perhaps Serif fonts will become more useful on screens with newer displays. I find they don't bother me as much on my laptop (LCD) vs my desktop. Older LCD displays tend to look too washed out regardless of the typeface.
It seems like a generational thing. I'd be curious what services get the most sign-ups.
I just tried my ICQ account and it seems to work. Its a 6 digit and I almost never use it. Once or twice a year I might get on to talk to my old boss or people I worked with 7 years ago. I guess that means the delete operation was not for rarely used accounts. I wonder if there is another pattern like international users or something.
I gave up on ICQ after the windows client got so bloated. When I use it now, its an ancient mac client.
What about disclosure before Microsoft releases a patch. That occasionally happens and then we have to wait for patch tuesday to get the fix. Their current system causes systems to be vulnerable longer for no good reason. Microsoft shifted the analysis of patches from the sys admin to their hands. They don't even give you details about exploits in their security advisories anymore. Its just a vague "there is a vulnerability in product x" kind of thing. I have to search their kb or technet to find out what is wrong with their product. Its a hassle.
The other problem with patch tuesday is that for your thinking to work every vendor has to release patches on the same day. If IT only does patches once a month, then vulnerabilities in Firefox, Office, and any other business app might go unpatched for a long time. Companies are not out of the catch 22.
Consider that someone has to be interested in your idea to contribute.
I work on three open source projects and am the founder of two of them. All three projects suffer from limited number of committers. In fact, I am the only committer for Just Journal. Granted, the code sucks balls and I didn't expect to open source it when I started. Don't assume that people will use your code or contribute back. If you get lucky, you might have the next big thing.
Even when you actually have other developers, sometimes people think you are too small to matter. MidnightBSD, for instance, has 5 active developers and a few people working on translations and things. For an operating system project, that is quite small. DragonFly started with around 8 developers early on as far as I know. However, most people think I'm the only developer since I commit the most. Perceptions are the big problem.
The idea that you need to release first is correct. Many people email me with comments like "I'll join the project after you release a version" and "I don't want to try this until you get a few releases out". Well I could do a release right now that sucks. Sadly, that would work with some people.
You may also find that the demands of users are unbelievable. The requirements for the first release have changed several times. Intially, it was to be a non gui release with just some basic changes to get familar with the release process and to offer a stable starting point. I decided waiting a few years to do a 1.0 release like DragonFly isn't the best idea for our situation. Now people expect a full working desktop environment for a 0.1 release. It amazes me.
I suppose the reaction you will get will vary greatly on the type of software you are developing and the license that you choose. GPL fans are supportive of GPL'd code IF it runs on Linux. If you GPL something for another system, its often problematic. If you even try to port software to another OS, you often get comments about it not being linux or how you should give up or the classic "BSD is dying". Now if its a killer application or product that is missing, you might get lucky. Imagine a world without Firefox or Pidgin.
Also don't make the mistake I did and be accepting of different licensing models. My project uses BSD, LGPL, GPL and several other pieces of code and everyone hates me. How dare I use GNUstep in my BSD project from people who use DesktopBSD (KDE isn't BSD guys). It is really interesting to interact with different projects though. There are projects that I didn't think much of until I submitted patches. For instance, I had a great experience with the Perl project. They are very nice developers. The GNUstep people have been very helpful too. So also consider who you might alienate. FreeBSD fans want me to die for forking.
Sun probably should setup a program for that. You could install FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD on the system if its an UltraSparc IIi. You can also install Linux. For older systems with 32bit cpus, you can install NetBSD 1.x and it runs very well. I did this with a Sun SparcStation IPC. You can even boot these machines from floppy if they do not have a cdrom drive.
I realize some people like Solaris or bought Sun hardware to learn it. You might be able to find old versions on ebay. I happen to have a Solaris 7 CD as sun used to sell them for development for $75. It included x86 and sparc versions.
Solaris 10 runs fine on an Ultra 10 3D Creator presuming there is enough disk space. I put in a standard 80GB ATA disk and had Solaris on it in about 2 hours. Granted, FreeBSD and MidnightBSD were faster on the machine.
I suppose sun has still done better than Apple or Microsoft. Mac OS X is not completely free for old hardware. Windows certainly is not. You can't buy copies of Windows 98 anymore.
Solaris is open source and free. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/
Also consider that some of the better solaris features have been added to FreeBSD recently. dtrace and zfs are available for FreeBSD 7 current.
And apparently I might have to do that. Currently, when I buy a DVD at the local best buy or any other store the people are too lazy to deactivate the anti-theft device. That means the alarm always goes off making me look like a thief, wasting my time as they search my bag and so on. Now instead of just being annoying, I'll get home and my DVD won't play! Then I have to go to the store and bitch them out costing more money in gas. Are they trying to get me to download the shit?
I'm really sick of this shit. I buy movies that I like. I buy games. I even buy music. Why do I have to suffer?
I also have to wonder why they did this with an old technology. Supposedly we need to adopt the new blueray or hd-dvd formats. Why not focus on making the players for the new formats cheaper instead of "innovating" for old formats?
... or users on a business grade package to host websites. I pay comcast $160 for the ability to host websites on my home connection. i think businesses could use the extra upstream and I certainly could. My wife has to upload installers and demos at work. (She is a programmer/consultant) I upload MidnightBSD ISOs which are certainly not pirated. I don't use any p2p protocol a home because I don't have the speed for it and hosting. I would love to offer MBSD downloads with bittorrent though.
Gmail: Everyone can send you email.
Hotmail: Legit mail is blocked before you can get it.
There's spam filtering and then there's ridiculous blocking of email.
Someone might see a "box" but that doesn't mean a Wii. Here in Ann Arbor, MI I see Wii boxes at various stores but if you ask they are all empty! In order to get a Wii, you must come in on magic shipment day which the employees will not tell you. You must be there promptly to get the 10 or less Wii systems they get in. They will try to bundle them with crap.
Now the only people I've heard of getting a Wii had to go into Walmart. The nearest one I know of is in a bad neighborhood and I probably wouldn't make it to my car with it. Target isn't even trying to stock them anymore around here. They have a sign up that they won't be getting any Wiis.
I'm sure there are markets that have Wiis, but many of us have struck out since last year. I know I could order a $600 bundle online but I can't afford that all in one shot. I'm a college student!
Yes, and if you are on the mailing lists you'll know that people are having trouble administering it. There are lots of posts asking how to tweak it. There are magic memory tuning measures to make it stable. Its by no means automatic. There are obvious upsides as well. Its currently not capable as a root partition but they are working on that.
It requires a lot of RAM although it does in solaris too.
I don't think ZFS fits into the Linux way. I would guess someone will write a copy cat file system for linux soon under GPL2. I was rather shocked FreeBSD imported it into their tree due to licensing. Sun's license isn't terrible, but after the stink about GPL code in the tree it seems odd.
Simple, most surveys are done by people who want to make money on open source. Research and education aren't big $$$ markets. People there know how to download free distros.
Linux has the best chance in the business sector. I'm hoping to make MidnightBSD useful to home users and academic enivronments. Of course, its easy for me to think about computer labs and universities since I'm still a student and administer a computer lab. A high up at novell probably thinks about business. I'm not a big ubuntu fan, but their perspective is a bit unique in the linux community these days.
I guess the finishing move for me with Linux was when I saw the CEO of Redhat interviewed on a financial show on PBS. He was asked if linux was ready for the prime time and he pointed out that he had Windows in his office. When the CEO of redhat can't even used openoffice and run his own operating system, its rather sad.
Sometimes you don't have a choice but to run crap. Either you get stuck on a product before you know its crap and its difficult to migrate or your boss mandates that you install crap.
Besides, if Zend added the code to begin with how does one seperate what is going to go away from what is useful? Are they supposed to read minds? Seems very much like random windows apis that disappear or change.
$150? School text books are similar to college text books. I've had to spend over $150 on a single class before in college. Unless prices are fixed for publishers, I don't see this happening. I remember getting fined in high school for book damage from previous students. We had to spend the first day writing down "marks" in the books and I missed a few pages. What would be nice is if on demand publishing became cost effective. As I recall, often only half the book was used in high school or at least a few chapters were skipped by the teacher. It might be beneficial to schools to offer dynamic versions of books that they could order which fit the needs and could also be printed fresh each year as you suggest.
This also leads to a few advantages like current text books. In high school, I had a french book printed in 1978 which is before I was born! It had water damage and was difficult to follow. The slang words weren't even close to current. History classes were often bad as well. I remember my text book talking about exciting "new" events in 1984 when it was 1992. That's not helpful either. Providing new books each year or on demand style books solves the outdated problem.
I used to work at an ISP. One school bought refurbished Macs and gave them to students for home use. These were desktop systems so they didn't need to worry about breaking. They also got a discount on internet access and students were provided desktops to use at school. This could solve some of the breaking problem. Plus the students were issued the computers as long as they were at the district. The school could buy a $300 dell or something and let the students use it at home for 6 years. (well ok maybe a brand that will last longer...) I'm not sold on the idea that computers automatically make students smarter. I would have played with them and not payed attention to homework at that age.
Its nice to find someone else who sees inconsistency problems with PHP. For those of you PHP users who don't see it, if I have to change code to make things work with PHP then a new release is not compatible with an old release. There are also some oddities in the API. PHP often gets a free pass because its open source and one of the earlier ASP like alternatives.
I think the month of bugs helps consumers in the long term, but its certainly a bitch for the vendor to get flooded with tons of holes at once. If someone did that with one of my projects, it was be a nightmare right now. At least with apple and PHP (Zend) they have full time paid developers. PHP also has free developers obviously.
My laptop crashes if I don't reboot it daily. There is a difference. Its entirely related to low disk space. I have never lost a mp3, aac, or video file on my iBook. In fact, I've never lost anything on any Mac I've personally owned. I have had to format Windows installs, lost NTFS volumes in XP a few times and other issues. I don't trust windows for critical data storage. Also, with vista I have less experience recovering data and less tools available this early in the game. I would trust a BSD with the files, but I don't have a spare machine for dedicated use and I can't play DRM'd files in BSD.
I'll give you that part of it is psychological. Back in the windows 9x days, I had to reinstall quite a few times due to windows bugs or viruses. With linux, I remember losing my ext2 file system do to a power outage on my first Redhat 5 box. (NOT EL) I now associate both operating systems with data loss. Obviously both have matured over the years.
Also, your comment makes little sense. You claim FUD, but you also forget that Vista is a fairly new operating system. Many things are still not known about long term reliability and performance. Mac OS 10.4 has been out for awhile now.
Finally, I do MidnightBSD development on my PC. What if I do a chance and it wipes out my partition table or does some unexpected strange access to my windows drive?
My OPINION of my situation does not mean that I'm bashing Microsoft. There are a lot of factors.
Hey they can learn clustering so they can open up firefox.
I know where its going. I have 35GB of iTunes content. I don't trust Vista enough to store it there. I used to solve this with a file server, but that turned into a webserver for midnightbsd. I rely on the iBook for iTunes, school work, e-mail and java programming.
Thanks though.
Its 52 screws. It took me nearly 5 hours to upgrade my drive. You must take the entire computer apart to get to the hard drive. I was not impressed by the process. If the hard drive dies, I'll probably just buy a new computer rather than go through that again. I'm not as comfortable working on laptops, but I've swapped drives on many Dell laptops which only take a few minutes at most. I'm not counting OS installation in that time.
Don't assume that. I turn my on and off once a day. Actually, I have to at least reboot it since OS X crashes after about a day's use. Before you start, its mostly due to the fact I only have 1GB of disk space left and OS X eats through swap. I've already replaced the HDD with a 60GB model and i'm not about to go through the 52 screws to do it again.
When I was in high school (10+ years ago), I had to agree to computer use rules. If I broke those rules, I could no longer use any computer in the school. If you accessed adult content, you could be suspended or expelled. But, only a few computers were on the Internet back then.
I think randomly kicking kids out for curiosity is plain stupid. On the other hand, if the students are out of control with the systems the school district might have to resort to extreme measures. I'm current taking college courses and have noticed the younger students feel they can do whatever they want and some even have mommy come up and bitch when they fail a course. I can only imagine what high school students are like right now.
I think the real solution is to just give kids a computer they can screw around with at home. If they are hacker types, let them install linux or BSD. Obviously internet access should still be limited or monitored.
Its strange though as I talk to younger people online while gaming. Some of them can play online games at lunch in Europe. Things are very different here.
1. If they asked for a phone number from a customer, 2 or more people could live at the same household and use the same number.
2. They may want all the numbers in the same area code together. If you were distributing a call list for sales people to call, you might want to break it up by region.
3. Just because something is unique does not mean you don't want them ordered.
Yeah, and as far as concurrency goes its a terrible choice. When I first started learning ASP years ago, I started with Access databases. My website could not handle over 5 concurrent users without giving errors. I think at that time there was a hard limit of 5 concurrent users. This thing was read only most of the time. The database only changed a few times a week.
Now if access couldn't handle a Jewel fan site how on earth could it handle an entire state's voting data? Switching to SQL Server and later migrating to MySQL was a godsend. Prior to SQL Express, there was MSDE as well. They had other options at the time. As much as they probably charged, couldn't have purchased and setup SQL Server or gone with an OSS database?
Either the developers were idiots or management made a terrible mistake.