Aside from this not being in the US...
Has anyone else noticed that the second paragraph tends to contradict the first? (Yes, I'm aware that the two are not mutually exclusive...)
I have been using Leopard since 12 hours before it was officially released. I have had two kernel panics. Both panics were my fault. (As in I explicitly loaded a kernel extension that caused the crash. Both times.)
Three or four of my friends have been using Leopard since it came out and have had no crashes at all.
My whole family's been on Leopard since it came out and has also had no crashes at all.
Clearly, LEOPARD HATES YOU!
My experience of issues was 1) blue screen among three computers, and some rogue ACL's on two of same that were all upgraded.
The blue screen was due to the APE extension I'd unwittingly had installed (thanks logitech)
Other than that, I love it.
Side note, there are some horrible factual inaccuracies in his article.
So, tell me, why is it's Microsoft's responsibility to supply you with tools to administer non-Microsoft systems? We're talking about an ssh client for fuck sake. It takes two minutes to track down and install one. If you're not capable of that, you certainly shouldn't be administering routers.
*shrug* It's not their responsibility. "Responsibility" is beside the point.
Not providing a commonly used and needed tool (after all, they DO provide two ways to use telnet) which is provided in just about every other common dekstop/server OS is something to validly complain about.
Microsoft would love it if the desktops and servers in any given office only ran Windows. the problem is that the same admins will be administering gear such as routers that quite decidedly don't, never will, and need SSH for proper security, etc.
In all fairness, Win2K was available as an option (at least in the Dell business stores) for several years after XP came out.
That said, I fully remember the rancor when Xp came out, and the attitude of "wait". Perhaps the years have softened my memory but even the people who didn't like the new look admitted that it didn't slow the computer down much (once the extra graphics were turned off) and that games/hardware compatibility was noticeably better. Even though a lot of people then doggedly stuck with W98, I don't remember the companies balking this thoroughly at MS either.
As you say though, closing off those choices turns it yet another expensive phone, albeit w/ a slick UI. Frankly, I want a tiny useable computer which doubles as a phone -- not a phone which mimics some aspects of a computer. I wish Apple understood that.
OTOH, as a consultant I'm constantly with my laptop. What I want is a phone that lets me easily use it as a phone - the biggest reason I've avidly stayed away from any treo/crackberry.
Sure, it's out of my price range at the moment, but just the phone portion of that is like waking up and discovering what I've always wanted in a phone, but better.
I can say for a fact that MS is already handing out copies of the Zune, and various accessory manufacturers are already finishing designing not only the devices, but the packaging/etc. they will be shipped in.
As a side note, the self-same companies (I don't work for one) are not terribly impressed with the Zune. Dookie - brown is NOT the "new black."
With more limitations (can't backup, can't play in normal dvd players) - can't backup
.... and? You couldn't backup DVDs for the first few years of their life either due to DRM and that didn't stop them taking over the world. I hypothesise that most people don't care; I know I never backed up any of my DVDs and I wouldn't care about backing up these movies either. I'd probably rent them instead. Don't play in normal DVD players... yes this will have an impact and stop some people using the service. But lots of people already watch TV on their computers, it's no big deal.
I've had enough of a failure rate in HD's to be very concerned about my ability to back up data on a HD
Wow. You must not have seen the same episodes that I was watching...so you're saying that Andreas Katsulas, Mira Furlan and Peter Jurasik couldn't act. Astounding...*shakes head*
Katsulas and Jurasik were IMO the best two regualrs on the show. The style was odd, but it was the nature of the characters, and once you got used to that.... it's like when you finally overcome the "odd" english in a shakespeare play and can concentrate on the beauty of it. Doyle could also act well, and many, MANY of the bit parts were wonderfully handled (Mr. Sebastian from "Comes the Inquisitor" comes to mind, as well as Dr. Franklin's father in "GROPOS"). Too damn bad Bruce couldn't act well, but even he had his moments, and I could ignore him while falling into the story.
I think I must be the only person left on this planet who thinks that BSG is massively overrated. That's not to say it's not good, but I just really can't see why everyone sees it as some kind of Sci-fi messiah.
You're not. I liked the first season, and especially the pilot, a lot. but the characters kept making stupid decisions, and even more stupid decisions, and were jerked around and did things with such sudden shifts in interest and personality, especially the second season, that I really started getting bored halfway through season 2.
I'd still recommend season 1, but season 2... meh.
... and you'd think that something as simple as an external RS-232 serial-port modem would require extra work to be made so that it would blue-screen a computer.
I kid you not. One brand of commonly available external modems is "not supported on windows 2003 server."
By "not supported" they mean the computer hangs and blue screens anytime any modem-related function is accessed.
Needless to say, there should be NO EXCUSE for this on an external, serial modem. But I also have to retell this story whenever a client who wants a fax server wonders why I'm buying an even more expensive external serial modem than the cheaper external, or why not an even cheaper winmodem instead?? *shudder*
Have you ever met a mac user that you could imagine doing this? Most of the ones I met think that sitting them in front of windows is pretty close to asking them to do differential calculus in their head while juggling. For 99% of mac users booting into windows will be a distateful task that is required to play games, and nothing more.
For this Mac Head, booting into windows (and fixing Windows problems... or is that redundant) is what I do for a living.
... and very elitist to boot. As if we computer users aren't capable of making a good decision for ourselves, because if we were, we'd obviously agree with him (because he's "smart" and "knows better"). Anyone disagreeing with him is obviously stupid, a "pod person".
Fortunately in my case, I've watched enough TV with laugh tracks to be thoroughly sick of them... as the canned laughter is usually laughing when something isn't funny to me.
I've seen enough live comic performances to know that if the guy is doing his job right (also known as "funny"), people are laughing.... which makes me suspicious of anyone claiming he was doing a great job with the audience when they aren't laughing, or worse, because they weren't laughing.
...And the sheer elitism of claiming that anyone who didn't think it was funny is too jaded from bad sitcoms or stupid to get it... *shakes head*...
So we blanket 1/10th of nevada with a solid blanket PV cells, eliminating all of the sunlight below... and killing of hundreds of square kilometers of land. Or, we spread them out.
Now, if we spread them out we immediately start using far more land.
Let's say that the PV sheets are 5m x 5m. To allow grass to grow you'll need a support structure to raise it off the ground so people can move below it (and despite which, the support footings will STILL take up a lot of space... it's a lot of post holes my friend). To allow sufficient light below the mirrors, and space for maintenance vehicles, we will need 3 meters between each mirror, meaning that we need (approximately) an 8m x 8m space for each mirror. This already doubles the amount of land needed. Even by your numbers, unless we really want to kill off the tenth of Nevada we're using, we'll get at most 1000 GW or so (very rough numbers here.)
Now, let's talk logistical nightmare.
30,000 Km squared (roughly one tenth of the 286 thousand Km squared) requires a square about 175Km across (or about 110 miles for us Americans). Putting up an individual array component is less work than putting up a small house, because we don't have to "finish" it in place beyond digging supports and foundation, and much of the assembly work can be pr-fab. Nevertheless, at best every four of these is going to require as much work as a decent home in terms of landscaping, construction gear, digging, setting supports, etc.
So, that's an equivalent to building one house every 15 (let's be generous, 20) meters. Every 60 feet. In other words, more dense than your typical, houses-nearly-stacked-on-top-of-each-other suburb. That's going to require putting up 76 MILLION structures.Even if these things only cost a thousand dollars each to manufacture and install (I doubt it) we're talking 7.6 BILLION dollars
Now, let's talk maintenance.
All of the construction trucks are going to tear the hell out of the ground and vegetation. Trees will almost certainly have to be cut down. The land will have to be regularly mowed. Any PV cell that breaks will have to be replaced, and all of this land will have to be patrolled to prevent theft of PV cells and vandalism. Nevermind if we decide to use motorized mounts........
And then you STILL need a nation full of power lines to distribute this, and if a main trunk dies, so does power to a large chunk of the country. Oh, wait, we can still build standby stations with sufficient local capacity, so now we have two redundant power systems.
And then there's weather... it's not always sunny, 24/7.
The difference is, I don't think my wife wants to have a giant cable following her around that she can trip over, while she is reading up on her Soap Opera Digest while watching TV in the living room.
Luckily, Cat 5 cable and ports are extremely cheap, allowing me to have multiple Cat 5 ports all through my house. Much faster and much more reliable than any kind of wireless.
And I can tell you from personal experience that running multiple wall-jacks to nearly every room, esp. in a two-story house, without having cabling show up everywhere making the workmanship look like ass, is not an easy task. At that point it's actually easier to pull all of the drywall and redo your interior from the ground up...
No, I think Russia has the U.S. beat hands down for combat casualties. 7 to 8 MILLION Russian soldiers died. Of course their combat strategies sometimes resembled "jam enemy tank treads with bodies", but that is beside the point. And yes Virginia, the Commie Pinko Russkies were on the Allied side (gasp) against Herr Hitler and friends.
Of course that was AFTER the non-agression pact that divvied up eastern europe between the USSR and Germany, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, etc.
The soviets were allies of necessity, no because they loved freedom, etc. hell, they managed to kill more jews than hitler, and far, far more of their own people in work caps, gulags, "mental words," etc.
There was the one boss who, coming in the first day, told everybody that he wasn't there to be a friend, and he could fire the whole department at a moment's notice if he wanted.
Unfortunately, the first half ("Not here to be a friend") is utterly necessary. There is a very fine, but required line between the traits of being a good boss, and being a "buddy."
That said, the second half of his statement is a major red flag that the guy was a flaming ass.
Woah, there's a load of difference between developers supporting a platform and developers releasing a bunch of new binaries to existing customers without charge. Sure, Apple developers are going to recompile their apps, and some of them are going to take advantage of the opportunity to add a few features and make your Intel-native version a paid upgrade. Users who find the overhead incurred by Rosetta are going to come up with the extra cash ( or pirate the native version while cursing the developer, or find a cheaper competing product ).
As a side note, since most people buying an intel-based mac will likely be buying it well after their most recent PPC mac, either as a replacement or as an add-on, even with the slowdowns in Rosetta the program will likely run as fast, in absolute terms, as it did on their previous computer, possibly still faster. Not as quick as the native stuff, but not a crawl either.
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Aside from this not being in the US... Has anyone else noticed that the second paragraph tends to contradict the first? (Yes, I'm aware that the two are not mutually exclusive...)
My experience of issues was 1) blue screen among three computers, and some rogue ACL's on two of same that were all upgraded.
The blue screen was due to the APE extension I'd unwittingly had installed (thanks logitech)
Other than that, I love it.
Side note, there are some horrible factual inaccuracies in his article.
*shrug* It's not their responsibility. "Responsibility" is beside the point.
Not providing a commonly used and needed tool (after all, they DO provide two ways to use telnet) which is provided in just about every other common dekstop/server OS is something to validly complain about.
Microsoft would love it if the desktops and servers in any given office only ran Windows. the problem is that the same admins will be administering gear such as routers that quite decidedly don't, never will, and need SSH for proper security, etc.
In all fairness, Win2K was available as an option (at least in the Dell business stores) for several years after XP came out.
That said, I fully remember the rancor when Xp came out, and the attitude of "wait". Perhaps the years have softened my memory but even the people who didn't like the new look admitted that it didn't slow the computer down much (once the extra graphics were turned off) and that games/hardware compatibility was noticeably better. Even though a lot of people then doggedly stuck with W98, I don't remember the companies balking this thoroughly at MS either.
Actually, they have.
Am I the only one who slips up and occasionally thinks of it as "The OW! starts now." ?
It may not stay that way though... check out this "Joel on Software" on what's been happening with the Windows API....
l
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
You also don't spend an hour or two removing software you DONT want that throws itself all over your desktop and in your face.
OTOH, as a consultant I'm constantly with my laptop. What I want is a phone that lets me easily use it as a phone - the biggest reason I've avidly stayed away from any treo/crackberry.
Sure, it's out of my price range at the moment, but just the phone portion of that is like waking up and discovering what I've always wanted in a phone, but better.
I can say for a fact that MS is already handing out copies of the Zune, and various accessory manufacturers are already finishing designing not only the devices, but the packaging/etc. they will be shipped in.
As a side note, the self-same companies (I don't work for one) are not terribly impressed with the Zune. Dookie - brown is NOT the "new black."
I've had enough of a failure rate in HD's to be very concerned about my ability to back up data on a HD
Katsulas and Jurasik were IMO the best two regualrs on the show. The style was odd, but it was the nature of the characters, and once you got used to that.... it's like when you finally overcome the "odd" english in a shakespeare play and can concentrate on the beauty of it. Doyle could also act well, and many, MANY of the bit parts were wonderfully handled (Mr. Sebastian from "Comes the Inquisitor" comes to mind, as well as Dr. Franklin's father in "GROPOS"). Too damn bad Bruce couldn't act well, but even he had his moments, and I could ignore him while falling into the story.
You're not. I liked the first season, and especially the pilot, a lot. but the characters kept making stupid decisions, and even more stupid decisions, and were jerked around and did things with such sudden shifts in interest and personality, especially the second season, that I really started getting bored halfway through season 2.
I'd still recommend season 1, but season 2
... and you'd think that something as simple as an external RS-232 serial-port modem would require extra work to be made so that it would blue-screen a computer.
I kid you not. One brand of commonly available external modems is "not supported on windows 2003 server."
By "not supported" they mean the computer hangs and blue screens anytime any modem-related function is accessed.
Needless to say, there should be NO EXCUSE for this on an external, serial modem. But I also have to retell this story whenever a client who wants a fax server wonders why I'm buying an even more expensive external serial modem than the cheaper external, or why not an even cheaper winmodem instead?? *shudder*
Have you ever met a mac user that you could imagine doing this? Most of the ones I met think that sitting them in front of windows is pretty close to asking them to do differential calculus in their head while juggling. For 99% of mac users booting into windows will be a distateful task that is required to play games, and nothing more.
:-)
For this Mac Head, booting into windows (and fixing Windows problems... or is that redundant) is what I do for a living.
... and very elitist to boot. As if we computer users aren't capable of making a good decision for ourselves, because if we were, we'd obviously agree with him (because he's "smart" and "knows better"). Anyone disagreeing with him is obviously stupid, a "pod person".
meh.
Fortunately in my case, I've watched enough TV with laugh tracks to be thoroughly sick of them... as the canned laughter is usually laughing when something isn't funny to me.
...And the sheer elitism of claiming that anyone who didn't think it was funny is too jaded from bad sitcoms or stupid to get it... *shakes head*...
I've seen enough live comic performances to know that if the guy is doing his job right (also known as "funny"), people are laughing.... which makes me suspicious of anyone claiming he was doing a great job with the audience when they aren't laughing, or worse, because they weren't laughing.
A perfect example disassembling similar obfuscation in writing, and political writing in particular is this one from George Orwell.
So we blanket 1/10th of nevada with a solid blanket PV cells, eliminating all of the sunlight below... and killing of hundreds of square kilometers of land. Or, we spread them out.
Now, if we spread them out we immediately start using far more land.
Let's say that the PV sheets are 5m x 5m. To allow grass to grow you'll need a support structure to raise it off the ground so people can move below it (and despite which, the support footings will STILL take up a lot of space... it's a lot of post holes my friend). To allow sufficient light below the mirrors, and space for maintenance vehicles, we will need 3 meters between each mirror, meaning that we need (approximately) an 8m x 8m space for each mirror. This already doubles the amount of land needed. Even by your numbers, unless we really want to kill off the tenth of Nevada we're using, we'll get at most 1000 GW or so (very rough numbers here.)
Now, let's talk logistical nightmare.
30,000 Km squared (roughly one tenth of the 286 thousand Km squared) requires a square about 175Km across (or about 110 miles for us Americans). Putting up an individual array component is less work than putting up a small house, because we don't have to "finish" it in place beyond digging supports and foundation, and much of the assembly work can be pr-fab. Nevertheless, at best every four of these is going to require as much work as a decent home in terms of landscaping, construction gear, digging, setting supports, etc.
So, that's an equivalent to building one house every 15 (let's be generous, 20) meters. Every 60 feet. In other words, more dense than your typical, houses-nearly-stacked-on-top-of-each-other suburb. That's going to require putting up 76 MILLION structures.Even if these things only cost a thousand dollars each to manufacture and install (I doubt it) we're talking 7.6 BILLION dollars
Now, let's talk maintenance.
All of the construction trucks are going to tear the hell out of the ground and vegetation. Trees will almost certainly have to be cut down. The land will have to be regularly mowed. Any PV cell that breaks will have to be replaced, and all of this land will have to be patrolled to prevent theft of PV cells and vandalism. Nevermind if we decide to use motorized mounts........
And then you STILL need a nation full of power lines to distribute this, and if a main trunk dies, so does power to a large chunk of the country. Oh, wait, we can still build standby stations with sufficient local capacity, so now we have two redundant power systems.
And then there's weather... it's not always sunny, 24/7.
And Station Wagons!
And I can tell you from personal experience that running multiple wall-jacks to nearly every room, esp. in a two-story house, without having cabling show up everywhere making the workmanship look like ass, is not an easy task. At that point it's actually easier to pull all of the drywall and redo your interior from the ground up...
Of course that was AFTER the non-agression pact that divvied up eastern europe between the USSR and Germany, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, etc. The soviets were allies of necessity, no because they loved freedom, etc. hell, they managed to kill more jews than hitler, and far, far more of their own people in work caps, gulags, "mental words," etc.
Unfortunately, the first half ("Not here to be a friend") is utterly necessary. There is a very fine, but required line between the traits of being a good boss, and being a "buddy." That said, the second half of his statement is a major red flag that the guy was a flaming ass.
As a side note, since most people buying an intel-based mac will likely be buying it well after their most recent PPC mac, either as a replacement or as an add-on, even with the slowdowns in Rosetta the program will likely run as fast, in absolute terms, as it did on their previous computer, possibly still faster. Not as quick as the native stuff, but not a crawl either.