This will be a bit of a long one, but here goes anyway.
I am involved with trying to secure funding for my own business at the moment, and it has taken two years before people are seriously looking at throwing money at it.
In the last two years, my business has morphed as I have worked hard at recognising the core skills and competencies that I have, and how that applies to what the market place wants, and will want in the future. The problem in the IT sector is that there are too many snake-oil salesmen (Microsoft I am looking at you), who sell promises of bullshit, and only deliver bullshit. Unfortunately, the market has come to accept this as being the norm, and when things work as promised, they get suspicious.
While my company has been through some tough periods (and has shut down for a few months at a time), I continue to work 50 hours a week at another job, and the entrepeneurial spirit sticks. Looking at the successful entrepeneurs it isn't in how big you make it straight away, it is in how many times you get back up after you fail. As long as the times you get back up is times failed + 1, you will eventually succeed.
Talking of funding alone, I have literally sold my soul to the devil numerous times attempting to secure VC funding, but no one likes investing in R & D. At least I have controlled my IP, and have been very cautious around people who tell me that they need access to it to invest. I started asking, and being offered hundreds of thousands (with severe restrictions), but in my latest efforts, I have been offered tens of millions (with fairly comfortable restrictions).
Having the right advisors on board is essential, devloping business skills, and learning to become a salesperson is essential (even if you are the world's greatest ubergeek), ethics and morals help, and knowing where you want to end up, and how much control you want to relinquish is also important.
Ultimately, you have total control, you can say no to someone who is asking for too much from you. The money is still out there, but it is a lot more cautious about being invested. A solid business plan and direction go a long way to helping.
Probably the best yardstick that I have found is that if you can get potential investors and other business people as interested in the business and projects as you are - and can see the potential, and aren't afraid to wear out some shoe leather, and to have people tell you to piss off, then the money will find you.
These exploits were released to the security mailing lists earlier in the week, not immediately before the US holiday weekend.
NEWSFLASH! The rest of the world does not follow US public holiday schedules.
I think that the people developing exploits have been developing them for a little longer than the 48 hours that you give them.
The biggest threat to come out of this, I think, is the possible generation of a new blended worm / other threat. Just look at what happened to Valve, with their experiences with IE exploits. The timing for the end of year holidays is probably more critical, and I dare say that there is something significant brewing in the wings, with an actual harmful payload.
I was at one of the Apple roadshows when Jaguar was being released and they ran a demo of the you-beaut Samba connectivity straight out of the box.
It was interesting to see the PowerBook had no issues, while the Vaio had a couple of issues trying to see the PowerBook.
My own experience has been that it is easier to handle the connection and data transfer from the Mac, than it is from the Wintel box. I got so frustrated with the poor networking options on XP that I just ignored it, and let my iBook sort it all out.
I only had two double point outlets in my 9' X 12' room, and used two surge protected power strips to run everything (6 and 4 port).
With this, I managed to run a stereo, clock radio, fish tank, desk lights, computer, TV, VCR, powered internal aerial and PlayStation, with sufficient flexibility to be able to run a fan and other various electrical items on the spare ports. This was a pretty standard load for the rooms in the college, although some people had some fairly fancy kit setups (like major tropical fishtanks and home entertainment setups).
Of more interest is that I managed to fit all my gear into the room for three years (all clothes, toiletries, computer, books and books and books, hundreds of CD's, pictures, all notes and textbooks, software boxes, videos, playstation games, beanbag, guitar, music stand, fishtank, foldaway massage table) and still have room for the bed, desk and student chair and at least 80% of the original floor space still free of crap.
I never got to play with the C64, or any of the Amiga's, it was Apple II's and Vic-20's that I got to cut my teeth on.
The tape player with the Vic-20 was fun, but programming the Apple II when the floppy drive wasn't attached was always a lesson in masochism. Several hours programming only to lose everything when the system is turned off.
The next beast was an XT clone, with 20 MB HD Space, EGA card, 5.25 DD floppy and keyboard driven Turbo mode (no fancy turbo buttons on that beast). The great thing was that the clone and the Samsung EGA monitor came with schematics, and the inch thick MS-DOS manual was great bedtime reading.
X-Tree,.bat hacking, brick-sized Genius Pro mice, and Turbo Pascal was an absolute joy on the old XT, and the Turbo Pascal manual really opened my eyes to the joys of programming.
I don't think that it would have been a very good move for Apple if they switched. It is like saying Sun should ignore their hardware developments and just rely upon x86 / commodity for everything.
It would have been difficult for Apple to maintain their quality control, especially when any Joe could have installed their OS. IIRC the article states that Apple would have become just another relatively small PC supplier and essentially just a competing OS company.
While a lot of Apple's decisions have seemed bizarre to the public, history has shown that they have something special (especially their HIG and provocative industrial design), and their ongoing relationship with Big Blue will be profitable for a long time. They haven't looked stronger than this for a long time, and are guaranteed of their future without needing to go x86 (although it took the G5, iMac, iTMS and iPod to do it).
Anybody saying that they should be going x86 is just pissing in the wind. If you don't like the Apple tax, don't pay it (although it doesn't really exist for comparable specs), but don't bleat about Apple not giving you beige box pricing, I don't hear anyone calling for Sun to sell their HD's for $100.
If I remember correctly, there was an earlier update which tried to erase local hard drives (one of the 10.0.x updates I think), so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to occasionally see an update not work. The recent MS bashing Cyberinsecurity paper that was released highlighted that software is not infallible (although Apple has a fairly good track record)
It sounds like a lot of the hardware with issues is several releases old, which isn't surprising in itself, but it is much better than Wintel machines - I would like to see a Lombard equivalent Wintel laptop running Win XP with all functionality, so things don't really seem to be all that bad. At least Apple is making an effort to keep the users who could run the system before up to date.
Hopefully this will mark the start of a number of educational institutions and enterprises making the shift from MS, then Linux, to the beauty of OS X.
Bring on Ford and the city of Hamburg, once they realise that there is a system which carries the power of *nix, but doesn't need as much fiddling as Linux (unless you really want it to).
There is a course at one of the Universities in Western Australia which hands out iPods to the students, for them to store their course work on them. And who could forget the G5 based supercomputer at Virginia Tech.
The more vocal the complaints get against the Microsoft monopoly, the more chances that the other platforms get, so the future looks good.
First there was the TiBook, and now the AlBook, then there was the brushed metal skinned software in OS X, then the sexy G5, now the logo.
With the rumours of Panther being brushed metal heaven, is this a new corporate image, moving away from the lickable aqua (at least the iMac, eMac, and iBook range remain lickable) to a smooth, sharp image?
The best way to check will be to see what Dell and Co will bring out in 12-18 months time, and look at the interface on MS Bonghorn when it comes out in 3 years time.
Pardon my ignorance, but I thought that Jupiter and Saturn were the only true Gas Giants, and Uranus wasn't (irrespective of composition). Then again, I am not an Astronomer, so I could be wrong here.
This seems pretty impressive for the Hubble, who knows whether it would have found them earlier if the optics had worked from day one?
Slashdot Mirror
This will be a bit of a long one, but here goes anyway.
I am involved with trying to secure funding for my own business at the moment, and it has taken two years before people are seriously looking at throwing money at it.
In the last two years, my business has morphed as I have worked hard at recognising the core skills and competencies that I have, and how that applies to what the market place wants, and will want in the future. The problem in the IT sector is that there are too many snake-oil salesmen (Microsoft I am looking at you), who sell promises of bullshit, and only deliver bullshit. Unfortunately, the market has come to accept this as being the norm, and when things work as promised, they get suspicious.
While my company has been through some tough periods (and has shut down for a few months at a time), I continue to work 50 hours a week at another job, and the entrepeneurial spirit sticks. Looking at the successful entrepeneurs it isn't in how big you make it straight away, it is in how many times you get back up after you fail. As long as the times you get back up is times failed + 1, you will eventually succeed.
Talking of funding alone, I have literally sold my soul to the devil numerous times attempting to secure VC funding, but no one likes investing in R & D. At least I have controlled my IP, and have been very cautious around people who tell me that they need access to it to invest. I started asking, and being offered hundreds of thousands (with severe restrictions), but in my latest efforts, I have been offered tens of millions (with fairly comfortable restrictions).
Having the right advisors on board is essential, devloping business skills, and learning to become a salesperson is essential (even if you are the world's greatest ubergeek), ethics and morals help, and knowing where you want to end up, and how much control you want to relinquish is also important.
Ultimately, you have total control, you can say no to someone who is asking for too much from you. The money is still out there, but it is a lot more cautious about being invested. A solid business plan and direction go a long way to helping.
Probably the best yardstick that I have found is that if you can get potential investors and other business people as interested in the business and projects as you are - and can see the potential, and aren't afraid to wear out some shoe leather, and to have people tell you to piss off, then the money will find you.
Some of your comments seem a little bizarre.
These exploits were released to the security mailing lists earlier in the week, not immediately before the US holiday weekend.
NEWSFLASH! The rest of the world does not follow US public holiday schedules.
I think that the people developing exploits have been developing them for a little longer than the 48 hours that you give them.
The biggest threat to come out of this, I think, is the possible generation of a new blended worm / other threat. Just look at what happened to Valve, with their experiences with IE exploits. The timing for the end of year holidays is probably more critical, and I dare say that there is something significant brewing in the wings, with an actual harmful payload.
I was at one of the Apple roadshows when Jaguar was being released and they ran a demo of the you-beaut Samba connectivity straight out of the box.
It was interesting to see the PowerBook had no issues, while the Vaio had a couple of issues trying to see the PowerBook.
My own experience has been that it is easier to handle the connection and data transfer from the Mac, than it is from the Wintel box. I got so frustrated with the poor networking options on XP that I just ignored it, and let my iBook sort it all out.
I only had two double point outlets in my 9' X 12' room, and used two surge protected power strips to run everything (6 and 4 port).
With this, I managed to run a stereo, clock radio, fish tank, desk lights, computer, TV, VCR, powered internal aerial and PlayStation, with sufficient flexibility to be able to run a fan and other various electrical items on the spare ports. This was a pretty standard load for the rooms in the college, although some people had some fairly fancy kit setups (like major tropical fishtanks and home entertainment setups).
Of more interest is that I managed to fit all my gear into the room for three years (all clothes, toiletries, computer, books and books and books, hundreds of CD's, pictures, all notes and textbooks, software boxes, videos, playstation games, beanbag, guitar, music stand, fishtank, foldaway massage table) and still have room for the bed, desk and student chair and at least 80% of the original floor space still free of crap.
I never got to play with the C64, or any of the Amiga's, it was Apple II's and Vic-20's that I got to cut my teeth on.
The tape player with the Vic-20 was fun, but programming the Apple II when the floppy drive wasn't attached was always a lesson in masochism. Several hours programming only to lose everything when the system is turned off.
The next beast was an XT clone, with 20 MB HD Space, EGA card, 5.25 DD floppy and keyboard driven Turbo mode (no fancy turbo buttons on that beast). The great thing was that the clone and the Samsung EGA monitor came with schematics, and the inch thick MS-DOS manual was great bedtime reading.
X-Tree, .bat hacking, brick-sized Genius Pro mice, and Turbo Pascal was an absolute joy on the old XT, and the Turbo Pascal manual really opened my eyes to the joys of programming.
I don't think that it would have been a very good move for Apple if they switched. It is like saying Sun should ignore their hardware developments and just rely upon x86 / commodity for everything.
It would have been difficult for Apple to maintain their quality control, especially when any Joe could have installed their OS. IIRC the article states that Apple would have become just another relatively small PC supplier and essentially just a competing OS company.
While a lot of Apple's decisions have seemed bizarre to the public, history has shown that they have something special (especially their HIG and provocative industrial design), and their ongoing relationship with Big Blue will be profitable for a long time. They haven't looked stronger than this for a long time, and are guaranteed of their future without needing to go x86 (although it took the G5, iMac, iTMS and iPod to do it).
Anybody saying that they should be going x86 is just pissing in the wind. If you don't like the Apple tax, don't pay it (although it doesn't really exist for comparable specs), but don't bleat about Apple not giving you beige box pricing, I don't hear anyone calling for Sun to sell their HD's for $100.
WTF??
Obviously there are some moderators who just don't understand the subtlety of humour.
Poor pmz, feeling all rejected and hurt, and now the moderators go and make him a troll, hurting him even more.
It's okay pmz, people still love you,
somewhere,
maybe...
It sounds like a lot of the hardware with issues is several releases old, which isn't surprising in itself, but it is much better than Wintel machines - I would like to see a Lombard equivalent Wintel laptop running Win XP with all functionality, so things don't really seem to be all that bad. At least Apple is making an effort to keep the users who could run the system before up to date.
Hopefully this will mark the start of a number of educational institutions and enterprises making the shift from MS, then Linux, to the beauty of OS X.
Bring on Ford and the city of Hamburg, once they realise that there is a system which carries the power of *nix, but doesn't need as much fiddling as Linux (unless you really want it to).
There is a course at one of the Universities in Western Australia which hands out iPods to the students, for them to store their course work on them. And who could forget the G5 based supercomputer at Virginia Tech.
The more vocal the complaints get against the Microsoft monopoly, the more chances that the other platforms get, so the future looks good.
First there was the TiBook, and now the AlBook, then there was the brushed metal skinned software in OS X, then the sexy G5, now the logo.
With the rumours of Panther being brushed metal heaven, is this a new corporate image, moving away from the lickable aqua (at least the iMac, eMac, and iBook range remain lickable) to a smooth, sharp image?
The best way to check will be to see what Dell and Co will bring out in 12-18 months time, and look at the interface on MS Bonghorn when it comes out in 3 years time.
This is Slashdot for fsck's sake, let's hear about it in terms of elephants, swallows carrying coconuts, the size of San Francisco or SCO licences.
The rationality that is creeping into Slashdot is disturbing.
Pardon my ignorance, but I thought that Jupiter and Saturn were the only true Gas Giants, and Uranus wasn't (irrespective of composition). Then again, I am not an Astronomer, so I could be wrong here. This seems pretty impressive for the Hubble, who knows whether it would have found them earlier if the optics had worked from day one?