Someone mentioned windows media player for the mac. Another useful program is VLC (Video lan client?) It can play avi's with mp3 audio (quicktime can't). Then download the 3ivx or divx for mac os x download and you can watch divx movies on the mac too. It can also play some wmv files that Windows Media player for the mac can't play. The biggest difference is that it doesn't have all the drm stuff so certain things won't work. (both vlc and windows media mac edition)
Virtual PC does not work for video streaming either.. too slow. And yahoo's site wont' let you use a mac at all for multimedia. Not enough drm and marketshare for their taste.
I understand your situation. I've got a ibook g4 and a wintel desktop. (linux, freebsd and solaris on it too) There are a few things you can't do on the mac like play half life.
Good point. Here's a summary of JBoss. Its a J2EE application server. Translation: it runs server side java code for websites and web services (servlets, jsp, jsf, enterprise java beans, more buzzwords) Its kind of like ASP.NET's runtime equivalent in java. Sun, Oracle, HP and several other companies make competing products. PHP folk make recognize it as a bloated service thats used to run code you can just write in PHP as a script. (i don't like php, but its a fair assessment for smaller projects) JBoss is included in Mac OS X and Mac OS X server (10.4).
A little more information: JBoss is a greedy project which used to charge people for the documentation! Yes, it was free and open source to download jboss but the documention was $$$. Most people don't even know what J2EE is and can get away with running Apache Tomcat, Resin, or Jetty. In fact, JBoss uses apache tomcat.
I'm only 26, but generally agree with the traditional Republican ideas. One might label me as a moderate conservative. I'll keep voting for democrats until the republicans wake up.
I have a first gen ipod mini and a first gen ibook g4. Both work great. Its not always a problem to buy the first generation of a product. In some product lines, ever product is a first generation with apple.
I realize that not all apple products work properly. What I don't understand is why this is any different than HP, Sony, Dell or any other vendor? Everybody has a crap product once in a while if not all the time (Microsoft). Apple is a company and they make money. I'm sure this will spawn yet another class action lawsuit against apple. No one sues dell when they release another shitty insperon do they? Why not?
IT work is tedious, but that doesn't mean that anyone can do it. Here is an example. My wife works at the computer lab at my university as a grad assistant. She works with three other GAs who happen to be indian. Two are linux sys admins and two are windows sys admins. One of the windows sys admins decided to upgrade the linux file server (8 drive raid array + 2 drive software raid 1 for os). He put a Intel xeon processor and intel chipset based motherboard in to replace an amd athlon 2500+ cheap-o. In less than 2 days, data corruption caused the OS drives to be unbootable.
He didn't get that its stupid to change from amd to intel without rebuilding the kernel and more importantly not trying to use software raid on a different controller in linux. Oddly enough he said it would be stupid to do that to windows.
What you forget with your IT work should be indian cheap argument is that real IT people must keep up on things. They must be able to solve problems and understand newer operating environments or even older ones like linux and windows. They must realize there are preferences and users might NOT RUN DEFAULTS.
In case anyone is wondering, my wife is a Linux sys admin. She hates windows.:) .
Look at the apple store. They've got some refurbs left of the larger black and white models last i checked.
I'm disappointed they discontinued the mini as i like the external hard drive functionality. Sure the nano can act as flash memory, but i'm still not sold on its reliability. I've seen too many bad usb memory sticks in the computer labs at my university.
OH come on.. just burn them to an audio or mp3 cd. iTunes lets you do that and you can play them anywhere. Just because you were too stupid to change the format isn't apple's fault. I've never tried it but you might even be able to use itunes under wine or vmware. This is such lame fud. Its no different if you buy a windows media based solution's songs. Hell i think apple is better because you can burn unlimited cd copies of your songs.
Yes, an example would be the Rolling Stones. I think its obvious from their history in court. All they care about is money and not the fans. I think i'll go listen to bitter sweet symphony.
Yes, but if there is a flaw in the rendering engine you have to recompile firefox and thunderbird anyway. I actually prefer the user interface with firefox and that is the primary reason I use it. I use firefox in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. I use thunderbird in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. The only platform that firefox and thunderbird suck on is Mac OS X. I think the code is less mature and often crashes on my ibook.
As a netscape user for most of my time on the internet, I was very sad when I learned the netscape suite was dying, but then I tried firefox and realized why it was great. I miss having my email client open all the time, but its nice to have the extra memory free. There's no point to leaving it open when i don't see the notifications anymore when new mail arrives.
You are a bit incorrect with the Active X comment. IE is not a browser exactly, its an Active X container that loads other controls (like MSHTML or Acrobat reader) that can also be active x containers... another words IE is active x. They can't fix it because its how IE works. That is the design flaw.
I was under the impression that sun was dropping the linux version of JDS. Version 2.0 was linux and 3.0 was based on solaris 10. (release 2 = version 2)
i wanted to buy a license but found that it was now solaris awhile back. You can download solaris 10 for free including the JDS for ia32. it doesn't have good support for my video card and no support for audio (radeon aiw 9600 xt and sb audigy)
That depends on your perspective if we get shafted. Look at an ibook g4 and compare the specs to a dell, sony, or toshiba laptop on price/specs. The ibook is a better deal especially the acedemic price of 950 dollars for a radeon video card, wireless, bluetooth, 512mb ram and a 40gb hdd along with a combo drive.
Powermacs are costly but if you compare them to a dell precision they are not too much more. Now i'll agree that apple monitors are a screw in price. I don't buy those:)
Example: My wife bought a dual 867mhz powermac g4 with 256mb ram, 60 gb hdd about 2 years ago.. maybe 3. It was 1700 dollars not including a monitor. It included a 32mb nvidia geforce 4mx and combo drive.
I bought a dell precision 650 refurbished last year for 1300 dollars with 1gb ecc ram, 2 x 2.0ghz intel xeon processors, ati firegl 64mb dell oem video card. My included a cd burner and 80gb hdd.
My system is faster than hers at integer operations but throw something like world of warcraft at it and hers is faster. I should mention though that we both upgraded video cards and she now has 1.25gb ram. (radeon 9800 128mb agp 4x vs my 9600 aiw xt 128mb agp 8x)
Its a draw when i run windows, and i blow her out when i boot FreeBSD5 or Redhat EL 3.
It won't necessarily cost more. Think of it this way, they can pull an apple. Apple does not release security patches for all versions of OSX now do they? Its very selective for older versions (10.2 and lower) I can still get itunes for 10.2, but not many security patches. Its an issue at work because most of our macs run 10.2 and i can't get management to buy 10.4. Worse yet, we had to replace some machines so i have 2 on 10.3 and 5 on 10.4. I can't even use a standard image because of it.
Back to my point, Microsoft can simply say we won't security patch Windows vista 2006 because we have Vista 2007 and Vista 2008 out... Corporate customers will have to pay for security just like they would with apple. And when questioned about it, Microsoft can point at apple and say they do it!
I would like to see two versions of windows: server and desktop. Make the install cd configure the version for what you need. If you run a webserver, it will setup similar to web edition now, etc. You can later add features as needed. Likewise, the desktop edition could have an option during the install for home, deluxe multimedia and corporate installs. It would then have common components that those types of users need. Of course you can select them all. This will never happen because Microsoft can make you rebuy windows if you need an extra feature down the road at a high price.
As for the this approach backfiring, i don't think that is true. I work at a university in an IS department and my boss waits for n versions of a product before he upgrades. For example, he made us use office 2000 until 2 months ago. The IT department got a site license or we would have waited another version before upgrading. He didn't research the new features or decide if we needed the software, just counted the versions. Its stupid, but I doubt he's not the only person who does that. There's not much different between 2000 and 2003 office editions as far as our needs, but i certainly like the security patches. Worms + IE + active x controls = trouble. He rejected my suggestion to use OpenOffice or even buy star office.
I've looked at the servers, and they are interesting but certainly not complete.
1. As another pointed out no hard drive. 2. No operating system 3. optical drive and decent warrenty are addons.
I priced a server out and figure it would be about 1500 dollars once a decent hard drive, warrenty and optical drive are selected. I'm assuming that I don't buy a 150 dollar sun hard drive and instead go to newegg. I also assumed that I upgraded the ram.
The servers look better than dell's lower lines and i'm very interested, but its not an 800 dollar server by any means.
Its odd that sun made the amd64 line both their lowend and midrange products. The v100 has been 1000 dollars for quite some time with a 550mhz sparc and a hard drive with solaris and sun one webserver on it. I'm even more confused which processor architecture they are going to use in 3 years. It seems to go from sparc to amd64 and back to sparc. Glad apple said "we're switching" flat out.
Finally, I'd like to explain the optical drive statement above. 1u servers are also purchased by small businesses and individuals for colocation purposes. Many of us don't have netboot/tftp handy to install operating systems and would need to either buy a dvd drive with the system, hope a sun can boot off an external, pop the drive in another computer for installation, or try to open the case and temporarily hook up a cdrom. Its a hassle. Its good in larger environments not to pay extra from the dvd drive as it would not be needed.
In general, I agree with everything you said. However, I do feel that optimization of code is ignored to often. Its silly to optimize a program that prints invoices or displays the weather in india. Picking good searching and sorting routines for the problem is not a waste of time though. When a problem is O(n), shaving one loop iteration is not a big deal. I think the problem is that large projects bring this thinking into them. Look at Windows or Gnome. A little optimization would save a lot of people a lot of money on hardware.
The bottom line is that efficiency can also impact purchasing decisions. If you could buy a program that completed the job 10% quicker, would you do it? A business person would always answer yes given the cost of the program is less than the cost to work 10% longer. The time to program a better solution might be cheaper than buying $1000 dollar computers instead of $300 dollar computers for a large organization for example.
The dark side of my personality looks at the use of bit fields for preference storage and wonders why we use 4 byte integers to store 1 boolean value.
No see they didn't take most of the applicants.. you would not have done any work. The rejection was even delayed by 9 hours!
Visual Basic.NET might have worked if they had mono in there but of course mono barely supports VB. Novell doesn't get that many people know VB.
My project idea was for the FreeBSD project. My wife was also rejected with her ideas for the KDE Kate text editor.
What i'd like to know is how many people actually got paid. The projects got money up front but the individuals had to code all summer and if they completed their projects in a satisfactory member to the parent group THEN they got money.
This is very interesting. The article points out that small businesses and individuals get cracked more than big organizations. It also points out that more people use Windows and Linux than Mac OS X and BSD. I wonder if the numbers take that into account. Are the Linux statistics balanced with the windows counts, etc?
I think there might be two problems with the information assuming the numbers are normalized on installs vs succesful compromises. First, Mac OS X is the most widely sold UNIX like OS in the world. Its hard to believe that OS X and BSD counted together is more than Linux. Most other surveys put them at about the same percentage. If you look at servers then linux would blow out OS X and probably BSD. Desktops i think linux would do better than BSDs aside from OS X. Second, it would be nice to see data on how well trained the sys admins were on the systems. Many people don't know linux well enough to properly secure it. An OSX destkop ships in a safer default than most linux distros. In fact, if you look at the bloated distros they ship with several programs that do the same thing. (KDE and Gnome along with software) 4 browsers, 3 email clients, probably 20 text editors, etc. OS X server and Linux are both a pain in the ass for different reasons. I think they give a false sense of security because of the user interface. (graphical and not distros like gentoo or debian that don't include x11 by default) Windows has the same problem. If you meet a windows admin who's never touched the registry then you know they are an idiot. Likewise, if someone hasn't touch a config file in/etc or used a terminal on OS X server or linux they are an idiot. BSD people have no choice:)
Obscurity only goes so far. I'd also like to know what caused the linux distros to get attacked. Was it a kernel flaw, service issue, common open source software? For example, many operating systems come with a webserver now (apache or iis). Is there a pattern on services?
I write this on a redhat EL 3.0 workstation install. I've noticed that i get about the same number of security updates in a month for my windows box and this redhat machine. Today i had to install 5 patches to redhat. (last patched a week ago) and i patched windows a few days ago and had 3. My ibook g4 laptop with tiger on it has had about 7 security patches in the last month and countless new versions of software like quicktime, itunes, etc. I've always wondered if apple hides security updates in new versions of software and doesn't tell anyone. My point is that all my operating systems seem to require the same amount of security patching in desktop scenarios. My FreeBSD file server and webservers tend to need 1-2 patches a month as part of the userland and then new versions of software add up for say 20-25 portupgrades a month. And that does not include apache, mysql or php which i manually compile and install.
Numbers without more background are not that helpful.
You are right of course. Most malware is written for specific gui toolkits, operating systems or even more specifically in scripting languages though. Mac OS X can not run VBScript and does not contain windows scripting host. It does not have Outlook Express or the Wintel active x container from hell called IE. If old school viruses make a comeback we are all in trouble.
I think the only thing that has saved the OS X platform from serious malware so far is the fact that anyone with enough knowledge to write a unix/mac virus would not want to do it. Think about it, anyone who knows unix, linux or its derivatives typically does not want to hurt the system. There have been relatively few Linux viruses even though it runs on intel chips. Now there are a lot more people who hate Apple than say Sun, bsds or linux. The monopoly argument applies to Macs just as it does to Windows. Of course one could say this about the GNU since many consider the GPL to be a virus. It depends on your view. Mac users love the lock in because the hardware and software actually work together. I love my Mac and my sparc because they work more reliably than my pc. The vendor lock-in helped in this case. Yet windows does not work because there is so many possible hardware combinations in PCs. Linux works because the community supports a subset of hardware that is much smaller than Microsoft supports.
Yeah and most lamers buy dell, hp/compaq or gateway/emachine. Many of these machines do not have an AGP or PCI express slot. I've actually used this to convert people to macs. Even an ibook has a radeon 9200. I think the new mac minis ship with 9550's...
Intel's graphic chipsets hurt the pc business. I think all computers should be able to play games. Gaming pcs are a ripoff and companies that make games don't go for the lowest (intel) common denominator. Dumb people pay for "pentium" but they get a computer that can't even run WoW without skipping and lack of textures. I know someone in my et clan that can't play because their brand new emachine can't get 15fps in Enemy territory which is a quake 3 engine game!
Remember, Microsoft must throw in tons of eye candy to compete with Apple. Its what Microsoft perceives apple has. Its not the usability of the Mac, just the eye candy. Windows 95 surpassed Mac OS 6/7 in appearance and Microsoft had a huge ride from that for over 5 years.
Do you work for a retailer or just a computer shop? Real computer shops sometimes throw in motherboards that don't suck for expansion. Go into best buy or circuity city and ask them what computers have AGP or PCI Express expansion. Most sales people will look at you and go "huh"? So step 1 is to train lamers to ask and step 2 is to find salespeople with a clue.
Well the kernel's are different as someone else pointed out, but there is a powerpc port of FreeBSD in the works. That means you can dual boot your Mac with FreeBSD and OS X. It would be easier than switching to Sun since you don't have to buy new hardware.
I should point out that the PowerPC port is not tier 1 yet so its not perfect. I know there have been a few problems with X11 and keyboards on laptops that use ADB protocol are broken (all ibooks for example) I think some powerbook models use USB so you might be ok there.
There is a freebsd-ppc mailing list. If you look at the archives you can learn more about it. They just released an iso of 6.0 beta 3 or 4 for it.:)
I was taught in a recent CS course that g++ can not make certain assumptions about variables and their use. Since C++ allows inheritance, and many other object oriented properties, and becuase of the common implementations, there are cases where optimizations like placing function inline to code can not be used. It causes code compiled with a C++ compiler to run slower. I wrote a quick and dirty C program and compiled it using gcc and g++. Not only does the g++ compiler add extra cruft to the binary, but the program executed much slower. It makes perfect sense to me why this is since C++ is almost a superset of C. I also tested an opengl game that I had modified heavily from an open source asteroids game. Compiling in g++ made the game considerably slower, almost unplayable in fact. Its possible that using more "native" c++ code would improve performance (cout vs printf, etc).
This is just one example, and I'm not qualified to make an educated argument either way. I can only go on the little i understand from the gcc documentation and professors at my university.
I guess C++ seems much newer to me than C simply because I was actually alive when C++ was brought into the world and UNIX was released a decade before I was born.:)
I don't judge a language by its age. I think many would agree that C is a better language than say visual basic. Both have their place and for largely different things.
You are probably right that C can obscure intentions at times because its so simple. It doesn't know about any complex data structure. I always think about implementations building up from lower levels even though its certainly possible for a compiler to make judgements at higher levels. I wouldn't call C almost assembly though. I've done sparc assembly and I'll take C any day of the week.
I used system programming as an example since I find it interesting. My experience is very disconnected as I've done some bsd and linux cli apps, written services, toyed with visual basic and professionaly worked on web applications.
Like many computer geeks, I taught myself most of what I know and have quite a few missing pieces. Thats why I'm in college now.:)
What modern languages can you do system programming in? Seriously, what can we use? Most modern languages are running on virtual machines (java, visual basic.net, c#, even php is going that way).
C is a very simple language. It certainly doesn't fit into modern hardware design perfect with sizing of data types, etc. but i don't see why its the language that is the problem. Any language can be implemented poorly.
If you want to argue that optimization is difficult for a compiler using C I might go along with that to an extent. Read about g++ and all the optimizations they can't use for C++ a NEWER language and see why new isn't always better.
I've also noticed that engineers tend to like adding layers to designs to improve them. Perhaps adding another intermediate layer to compiler designs before we write assemly could improve the output for the architecture?
I'm not an expert on hardware or compiler design so maybe i'm talking nonsense. Ignore my comments if thats the case.
Please explain "If only people would put some effort into modern languages and actually using them." What languages? What effort? How is this beneficial?
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Someone mentioned windows media player for the mac. Another useful program is VLC (Video lan client?) It can play avi's with mp3 audio (quicktime can't). Then download the 3ivx or divx for mac os x download and you can watch divx movies on the mac too. It can also play some wmv files that Windows Media player for the mac can't play. The biggest difference is that it doesn't have all the drm stuff so certain things won't work. (both vlc and windows media mac edition)
Virtual PC does not work for video streaming either.. too slow. And yahoo's site wont' let you use a mac at all for multimedia. Not enough drm and marketshare for their taste.
I understand your situation. I've got a ibook g4 and a wintel desktop. (linux, freebsd and solaris on it too) There are a few things you can't do on the mac like play half life.
Good point. Here's a summary of JBoss. Its a J2EE application server. Translation: it runs server side java code for websites and web services (servlets, jsp, jsf, enterprise java beans, more buzzwords) Its kind of like ASP.NET's runtime equivalent in java. Sun, Oracle, HP and several other companies make competing products. PHP folk make recognize it as a bloated service thats used to run code you can just write in PHP as a script. (i don't like php, but its a fair assessment for smaller projects) JBoss is included in Mac OS X and Mac OS X server (10.4).
A little more information:
JBoss is a greedy project which used to charge people for the documentation! Yes, it was free and open source to download jboss but the documention was $$$. Most people don't even know what J2EE is and can get away with running Apache Tomcat, Resin, or Jetty. In fact, JBoss uses apache tomcat.
I'm only 26, but generally agree with the traditional Republican ideas. One might label me as a moderate conservative. I'll keep voting for democrats until the republicans wake up.
I have a first gen ipod mini and a first gen ibook g4. Both work great. Its not always a problem to buy the first generation of a product. In some product lines, ever product is a first generation with apple.
I realize that not all apple products work properly. What I don't understand is why this is any different than HP, Sony, Dell or any other vendor? Everybody has a crap product once in a while if not all the time (Microsoft). Apple is a company and they make money. I'm sure this will spawn yet another class action lawsuit against apple. No one sues dell when they release another shitty insperon do they? Why not?
IT work is tedious, but that doesn't mean that anyone can do it. Here is an example. My wife works at the computer lab at my university as a grad assistant. She works with three other GAs who happen to be indian. Two are linux sys admins and two are windows sys admins. One of the windows sys admins decided to upgrade the linux file server (8 drive raid array + 2 drive software raid 1 for os). He put a Intel xeon processor and intel chipset based motherboard in to replace an amd athlon 2500+ cheap-o. In less than 2 days, data corruption caused the OS drives to be unbootable.
:) .
He didn't get that its stupid to change from amd to intel without rebuilding the kernel and more importantly not trying to use software raid on a different controller in linux. Oddly enough he said it would be stupid to do that to windows.
What you forget with your IT work should be indian cheap argument is that real IT people must keep up on things. They must be able to solve problems and understand newer operating environments or even older ones like linux and windows. They must realize there are preferences and users might NOT RUN DEFAULTS.
In case anyone is wondering, my wife is a Linux sys admin. She hates windows.
Actually the devices won't even show up anymore to windows... don't know if its static electricity or other environmental issues.
Look at the apple store. They've got some refurbs left of the larger black and white models last i checked.
I'm disappointed they discontinued the mini as i like the external hard drive functionality. Sure the nano can act as flash memory, but i'm still not sold on its reliability. I've seen too many bad usb memory sticks in the computer labs at my university.
OH come on.. just burn them to an audio or mp3 cd. iTunes lets you do that and you can play them anywhere. Just because you were too stupid to change the format isn't apple's fault. I've never tried it but you might even be able to use itunes under wine or vmware. This is such lame fud. Its no different if you buy a windows media based solution's songs. Hell i think apple is better because you can burn unlimited cd copies of your songs.
Yes, I think they annouced that it will be discontinued in the future though. Services for UNIX is a dead product.
:)
If NCSA Mosaic was ever open source, then Microsoft has shipped that as well. See the about box in IE.
Yes, an example would be the Rolling Stones. I think its obvious from their history in court. All they care about is money and not the fans. I think i'll go listen to bitter sweet symphony.
Yes, but if there is a flaw in the rendering engine you have to recompile firefox and thunderbird anyway. I actually prefer the user interface with firefox and that is the primary reason I use it. I use firefox in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. I use thunderbird in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. The only platform that firefox and thunderbird suck on is Mac OS X. I think the code is less mature and often crashes on my ibook.
As a netscape user for most of my time on the internet, I was very sad when I learned the netscape suite was dying, but then I tried firefox and realized why it was great. I miss having my email client open all the time, but its nice to have the extra memory free. There's no point to leaving it open when i don't see the notifications anymore when new mail arrives.
You are a bit incorrect with the Active X comment. IE is not a browser exactly, its an Active X container that loads other controls (like MSHTML or Acrobat reader) that can also be active x containers... another words IE is active x. They can't fix it because its how IE works. That is the design flaw.
I was under the impression that sun was dropping the linux version of JDS. Version 2.0 was linux and 3.0 was based on solaris 10. (release 2 = version 2)
i wanted to buy a license but found that it was now solaris awhile back. You can download solaris 10 for free including the JDS for ia32. it doesn't have good support for my video card and no support for audio (radeon aiw 9600 xt and sb audigy)
That depends on your perspective if we get shafted. Look at an ibook g4 and compare the specs to a dell, sony, or toshiba laptop on price/specs. The ibook is a better deal especially the acedemic price of 950 dollars for a radeon video card, wireless, bluetooth, 512mb ram and a 40gb hdd along with a combo drive.
:)
Powermacs are costly but if you compare them to a dell precision they are not too much more. Now i'll agree that apple monitors are a screw in price. I don't buy those
Example: My wife bought a dual 867mhz powermac g4 with 256mb ram, 60 gb hdd about 2 years ago.. maybe 3. It was 1700 dollars not including a monitor. It included a 32mb nvidia geforce 4mx and combo drive.
I bought a dell precision 650 refurbished last year for 1300 dollars with 1gb ecc ram, 2 x 2.0ghz intel xeon processors, ati firegl 64mb dell oem video card. My included a cd burner and 80gb hdd.
My system is faster than hers at integer operations but throw something like world of warcraft at it and hers is faster. I should mention though that we both upgraded video cards and she now has 1.25gb ram. (radeon 9800 128mb agp 4x vs my 9600 aiw xt 128mb agp 8x)
Its a draw when i run windows, and i blow her out when i boot FreeBSD5 or Redhat EL 3.
It won't necessarily cost more. Think of it this way, they can pull an apple. Apple does not release security patches for all versions of OSX now do they? Its very selective for older versions (10.2 and lower) I can still get itunes for 10.2, but not many security patches. Its an issue at work because most of our macs run 10.2 and i can't get management to buy 10.4. Worse yet, we had to replace some machines so i have 2 on 10.3 and 5 on 10.4. I can't even use a standard image because of it.
Back to my point, Microsoft can simply say we won't security patch Windows vista 2006 because we have Vista 2007 and Vista 2008 out... Corporate customers will have to pay for security just like they would with apple. And when questioned about it, Microsoft can point at apple and say they do it!
I would like to see two versions of windows: server and desktop. Make the install cd configure the version for what you need. If you run a webserver, it will setup similar to web edition now, etc. You can later add features as needed. Likewise, the desktop edition could have an option during the install for home, deluxe multimedia and corporate installs. It would then have common components that those types of users need. Of course you can select them all. This will never happen because Microsoft can make you rebuy windows if you need an extra feature down the road at a high price.
As for the this approach backfiring, i don't think that is true. I work at a university in an IS department and my boss waits for n versions of a product before he upgrades. For example, he made us use office 2000 until 2 months ago. The IT department got a site license or we would have waited another version before upgrading. He didn't research the new features or decide if we needed the software, just counted the versions. Its stupid, but I doubt he's not the only person who does that. There's not much different between 2000 and 2003 office editions as far as our needs, but i certainly like the security patches. Worms + IE + active x controls = trouble. He rejected my suggestion to use OpenOffice or even buy star office.
I've looked at the servers, and they are interesting but certainly not complete.
1. As another pointed out no hard drive.
2. No operating system
3. optical drive and decent warrenty are addons.
I priced a server out and figure it would be about 1500 dollars once a decent hard drive, warrenty and optical drive are selected. I'm assuming that I don't buy a 150 dollar sun hard drive and instead go to newegg. I also assumed that I upgraded the ram.
The servers look better than dell's lower lines and i'm very interested, but its not an 800 dollar server by any means.
Its odd that sun made the amd64 line both their lowend and midrange products. The v100 has been 1000 dollars for quite some time with a 550mhz sparc and a hard drive with solaris and sun one webserver on it. I'm even more confused which processor architecture they are going to use in 3 years. It seems to go from sparc to amd64 and back to sparc. Glad apple said "we're switching" flat out.
Finally, I'd like to explain the optical drive statement above. 1u servers are also purchased by small businesses and individuals for colocation purposes. Many of us don't have netboot/tftp handy to install operating systems and would need to either buy a dvd drive with the system, hope a sun can boot off an external, pop the drive in another computer for installation, or try to open the case and temporarily hook up a cdrom. Its a hassle. Its good in larger environments not to pay extra from the dvd drive as it would not be needed.
In general, I agree with everything you said. However, I do feel that optimization of code is ignored to often. Its silly to optimize a program that prints invoices or displays the weather in india. Picking good searching and sorting routines for the problem is not a waste of time though. When a problem is O(n), shaving one loop iteration is not a big deal. I think the problem is that large projects bring this thinking into them. Look at Windows or Gnome. A little optimization would save a lot of people a lot of money on hardware.
The bottom line is that efficiency can also impact purchasing decisions. If you could buy a program that completed the job 10% quicker, would you do it? A business person would always answer yes given the cost of the program is less than the cost to work 10% longer. The time to program a better solution might be cheaper than buying $1000 dollar computers instead of $300 dollar computers for a large organization for example.
The dark side of my personality looks at the use of bit fields for preference storage and wonders why we use 4 byte integers to store 1 boolean value.
No see they didn't take most of the applicants.. you would not have done any work. The rejection was even delayed by 9 hours!
.NET might have worked if they had mono in there but of course mono barely supports VB. Novell doesn't get that many people know VB.
Visual Basic
My project idea was for the FreeBSD project. My wife was also rejected with her ideas for the KDE Kate text editor.
What i'd like to know is how many people actually got paid. The projects got money up front but the individuals had to code all summer and if they completed their projects in a satisfactory member to the parent group THEN they got money.
This is very interesting. The article points out that small businesses and individuals get cracked more than big organizations. It also points out that more people use Windows and Linux than Mac OS X and BSD. I wonder if the numbers take that into account. Are the Linux statistics balanced with the windows counts, etc?
/etc or used a terminal on OS X server or linux they are an idiot. BSD people have no choice :)
I think there might be two problems with the information assuming the numbers are normalized on installs vs succesful compromises. First, Mac OS X is the most widely sold UNIX like OS in the world. Its hard to believe that OS X and BSD counted together is more than Linux. Most other surveys put them at about the same percentage. If you look at servers then linux would blow out OS X and probably BSD. Desktops i think linux would do better than BSDs aside from OS X. Second, it would be nice to see data on how well trained the sys admins were on the systems. Many people don't know linux well enough to properly secure it. An OSX destkop ships in a safer default than most linux distros. In fact, if you look at the bloated distros they ship with several programs that do the same thing. (KDE and Gnome along with software) 4 browsers, 3 email clients, probably 20 text editors, etc. OS X server and Linux are both a pain in the ass for different reasons. I think they give a false sense of security because of the user interface. (graphical and not distros like gentoo or debian that don't include x11 by default) Windows has the same problem. If you meet a windows admin who's never touched the registry then you know they are an idiot. Likewise, if someone hasn't touch a config file in
Obscurity only goes so far. I'd also like to know what caused the linux distros to get attacked. Was it a kernel flaw, service issue, common open source software? For example, many operating systems come with a webserver now (apache or iis). Is there a pattern on services?
I write this on a redhat EL 3.0 workstation install. I've noticed that i get about the same number of security updates in a month for my windows box and this redhat machine. Today i had to install 5 patches to redhat. (last patched a week ago) and i patched windows a few days ago and had 3. My ibook g4 laptop with tiger on it has had about 7 security patches in the last month and countless new versions of software like quicktime, itunes, etc. I've always wondered if apple hides security updates in new versions of software and doesn't tell anyone. My point is that all my operating systems seem to require the same amount of security patching in desktop scenarios. My FreeBSD file server and webservers tend to need 1-2 patches a month as part of the userland and then new versions of software add up for say 20-25 portupgrades a month. And that does not include apache, mysql or php which i manually compile and install.
Numbers without more background are not that helpful.
You are right of course. Most malware is written for specific gui toolkits, operating systems or even more specifically in scripting languages though. Mac OS X can not run VBScript and does not contain windows scripting host. It does not have Outlook Express or the Wintel active x container from hell called IE. If old school viruses make a comeback we are all in trouble.
I think the only thing that has saved the OS X platform from serious malware so far is the fact that anyone with enough knowledge to write a unix/mac virus would not want to do it. Think about it, anyone who knows unix, linux or its derivatives typically does not want to hurt the system. There have been relatively few Linux viruses even though it runs on intel chips. Now there are a lot more people who hate Apple than say Sun, bsds or linux. The monopoly argument applies to Macs just as it does to Windows. Of course one could say this about the GNU since many consider the GPL to be a virus. It depends on your view. Mac users love the lock in because the hardware and software actually work together. I love my Mac and my sparc because they work more reliably than my pc. The vendor lock-in helped in this case. Yet windows does not work because there is so many possible hardware combinations in PCs. Linux works because the community supports a subset of hardware that is much smaller than Microsoft supports.
Yeah and most lamers buy dell, hp/compaq or gateway/emachine. Many of these machines do not have an AGP or PCI express slot. I've actually used this to convert people to macs. Even an ibook has a radeon 9200. I think the new mac minis ship with 9550's...
Intel's graphic chipsets hurt the pc business. I think all computers should be able to play games. Gaming pcs are a ripoff and companies that make games don't go for the lowest (intel) common denominator. Dumb people pay for "pentium" but they get a computer that can't even run WoW without skipping and lack of textures. I know someone in my et clan that can't play because their brand new emachine can't get 15fps in Enemy territory which is a quake 3 engine game!
Remember, Microsoft must throw in tons of eye candy to compete with Apple. Its what Microsoft perceives apple has. Its not the usability of the Mac, just the eye candy. Windows 95 surpassed Mac OS 6/7 in appearance and Microsoft had a huge ride from that for over 5 years.
Do you work for a retailer or just a computer shop? Real computer shops sometimes throw in motherboards that don't suck for expansion. Go into best buy or circuity city and ask them what computers have AGP or PCI Express expansion. Most sales people will look at you and go "huh"? So step 1 is to train lamers to ask and step 2 is to find salespeople with a clue.
Well the kernel's are different as someone else pointed out, but there is a powerpc port of FreeBSD in the works. That means you can dual boot your Mac with FreeBSD and OS X. It would be easier than switching to Sun since you don't have to buy new hardware.
:)
I should point out that the PowerPC port is not tier 1 yet so its not perfect. I know there have been a few problems with X11 and keyboards on laptops that use ADB protocol are broken (all ibooks for example) I think some powerbook models use USB so you might be ok there.
There is a freebsd-ppc mailing list. If you look at the archives you can learn more about it. They just released an iso of 6.0 beta 3 or 4 for it.
I was taught in a recent CS course that g++ can not make certain assumptions about variables and their use. Since C++ allows inheritance, and many other object oriented properties, and becuase of the common implementations, there are cases where optimizations like placing function inline to code can not be used. It causes code compiled with a C++ compiler to run slower. I wrote a quick and dirty C program and compiled it using gcc and g++. Not only does the g++ compiler add extra cruft to the binary, but the program executed much slower. It makes perfect sense to me why this is since C++ is almost a superset of C. I also tested an opengl game that I had modified heavily from an open source asteroids game. Compiling in g++ made the game considerably slower, almost unplayable in fact. Its possible that using more "native" c++ code would improve performance (cout vs printf, etc).
:)
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This is just one example, and I'm not qualified to make an educated argument either way. I can only go on the little i understand from the gcc documentation and professors at my university.
I guess C++ seems much newer to me than C simply because I was actually alive when C++ was brought into the world and UNIX was released a decade before I was born.
I don't judge a language by its age. I think many would agree that C is a better language than say visual basic. Both have their place and for largely different things.
You are probably right that C can obscure intentions at times because its so simple. It doesn't know about any complex data structure. I always think about implementations building up from lower levels even though its certainly possible for a compiler to make judgements at higher levels. I wouldn't call C almost assembly though. I've done sparc assembly and I'll take C any day of the week.
I used system programming as an example since I find it interesting. My experience is very disconnected as I've done some bsd and linux cli apps, written services, toyed with visual basic and professionaly worked on web applications.
Like many computer geeks, I taught myself most of what I know and have quite a few missing pieces. Thats why I'm in college now.
What modern languages can you do system programming in? Seriously, what can we use? Most modern languages are running on virtual machines (java, visual basic.net, c#, even php is going that way).
C is a very simple language. It certainly doesn't fit into modern hardware design perfect with sizing of data types, etc. but i don't see why its the language that is the problem. Any language can be implemented poorly.
If you want to argue that optimization is difficult for a compiler using C I might go along with that to an extent. Read about g++ and all the optimizations they can't use for C++ a NEWER language and see why new isn't always better.
I've also noticed that engineers tend to like adding layers to designs to improve them. Perhaps adding another intermediate layer to compiler designs before we write assemly could improve the output for the architecture?
I'm not an expert on hardware or compiler design so maybe i'm talking nonsense. Ignore my comments if thats the case.
Please explain "If only people would put some effort into modern languages and actually using them." What languages? What effort? How is this beneficial?
Ahh grasshoper, but then intel got apple as a customer. All is not lost...
Prepare to rebuy all your software.. i know i am.