Actually, quick'n dirty was a common term in those days and a sought after distinction from slow spaghetti code.
Yea, of course... as others have pointed out, plenty of projects ( today, in the past, technical or otherwise ) are characterised as 'quick and dirty', I was just attempting to point out that the D in QDOS stood clearly for disk, not dirty...
The characterization of QDOS as a quick-and-dirty system implementation, that I wouldn't argue with at all.
It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.
Right, but the guy has a point that it was in many, many ways completely unlike CP/M
... in that CP/M had many more features and was, well, just all-around better...;-) in that way they were completely different.
All kidding aside, QDOS was meant to be simple and 'quick' disk-based OS. Nobody ( OK, few people outside the p0rn industry ) wants to call their own software 'dirty'. That sounds like a story...
We all know now that thin-client pcs that run remote web apps isn't going to happen.
Change your definition of "thin" and "apps" and it's happening now. What is slashdot, if not a web app? What's my PII with it's 20GB hard drive, if not a thin client? ( not that it's what I'm using now, but it would work, I'm making a point here ).
they could easily repurpose a linux distro + wine + firefox into a very OSX like OS for intel/amd that is, to some extent, windows compatible.
"easily" is a matter of opinion, but "why" and how successful it would be are different matters, since what you're talking about already exists in one form or another. What I'm looking for is the business case... and it's just not there. Google's services ( like Yahoo's ) aren't about thin clients, they're about accessing data regardless of what computer you're using ( and leveraging search tech to organize it all and sell targeted ads ). Making a multi-OS browser makes sense for them. Making a server-side development platform makes sense for them. Making an OS? Not so much. They have an OS- it's called Linux.
And, yes, they really are just another "yahoo-like empire" in the final analysis... they just seem to be looking to out-Yahoo Yahoo. Given the success of Yahoo, even with how Yahoo has stagnated over the past few years, it seems like a good plan to me - there's plenty of room to improve on Yahoo, as Google has already shown.
The only reason I don't watch TV is the amount of chaff vs the number of shows that would interest me...
That, my friend, is what TiVo was invented for.
Other things people _think_ are key TiVo features - fast forwarding past commercials and time-shifting - are really just video recorder features. TiVo is a service, not a device... and it's a nice service, giving you the shows you _want_, in a hassle-free manner, allowing you to ignore the chaff, as you say.
It's a matter of priorities, of course, but if there really are more than 2 or 3 TV shows you would actually like to watch, I'll recommend a TiVo. Of course, after you get TiVo, you may decide you'd also like to watch some old, good movies ( TCM is running a bunch of Oscar-nominated movies, for example ) or this or that special, and you could find yourself watching more TV than you ever imagined, because the stuff you're interested in is always "on". The cable guys will try to sell you On Demand, but that misses the point entirely- you still have to sort through a long list of the crap _they_ think we want to see.
Resizing windows on OS X is a real pain, because you can only do it by adjusting the lower-right corner.
I agree with your entire post, except that this bit isn't quite right. There's the '+' maximize button. It just ( frequently ) doesn't do the resize you want. I know, you mean that you can't arbitrarily resize by grabing a window edge.
That said, most folks don't spend much time resizing windows, so I doubt that's the productivity issue you have. Other than focus-follows-pointer ( which only a true geek can love ), you just need to get a 3 button mouse ( a bluetooth one, to use with your PB as well ).
Oh, and there's nothing at all wrong ( IMHO ) with using X-Windows on OS X. Forget about it being a Mac. Think of it as the best NeXT machine ever made, it makes more sense that way. The Macintosh stuff is just grafted in there for compatability... it's really NeXTStep, which is all good...
Oh, and you don't mention Expose'... use it effectively, and it's a nice timesaver when multitasking. I thought it was just silly at first, but after using it a bit, you realize how useful it is.
Re:As an ASP/SQL developer, how can I QA better?
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I'm currently working on a monstrous behemoth of an application and the need exists for some way to automatically test my app out. Can anybody suggest free or trial-based tools/software packages that can help me unit-test my code before I submit it to end users from second-stage testing?
The tools you are looking for exist, but they're not cheap and they need someone to create test cases for them and run them. I assume it's a web app you're talking about? Really, you need to hire a professional and give them professional tools. There's no good way to test your app cheaply. What you really need is a copy of Mercury Interactive's Astra or Segue Silk and someone to run it for you.
If you have to do it cheaply and by yourself, good luck and have fun writing those tests. Do a web search and have fun evaluating tools and writing tests. Here is the first hit I got on google. I've never used it but maybe you could look into ieUnit.
Oh, and my advice is to find a job closer to home. That commute will literally kill you. No, really, I mean it, you'll die.
Nothing new here. Is that good or bad?
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I don't know if I'm happy that there's nothing here that's different from what I learned in my first introduction to Quality Assurance over 10 years ago, or if I'm sad that people still don't understand this stuff.
Quality isn't something that happens after the fact. Good products are the outcome of good design. Good designs are prototyped, rigorously evaluated, and redesigned as flaws are found. It's not even a software-specific concept.
Re:There are three variables for each project...
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QA != Testing
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Cost, Time and Quality and you can only have 2 out of the 3.
That's a gross oversimplification of a complex problem.
Each of those variables can have many values; they aren't booleans. You have all 3- actually more. The issue you're probably refering to about usually boils down to the problem of companies trying to minimize cost ( usually by reducing time and quality ).
If you don't have to care about the quality of your product for whatever reason, say you have a monopoly due to proprietary file formats or a market advantage due to restrictive licensing agreements ( do you like how I didn't mention a specific company there? ), you can get away with having sub-par quality. But unless you have some sort of unfair competetive advantage ( or even if you do ), low quality can result in either loss of business or significantly higher support or maintenance costs. It's generally a bad decision to rush a product just to cut down on short-term costs; it's usually artificial business influences ( i.e. quarterly earnings reports ) that result in poor decisions like rushing a v1.0 product that isn't even functionally complete.
Oh, and that oversimplification leaves out complexity of the product and resources needed to create it. It's really more like f( Time, Quality, Complexity, Resources ) = Cost.
So, yea, using "Cost, Time, Quality" like that makes a nice little phrase that sounds neat, but really, it's something a pointy-haired boss might say when he's trying to justify his penny-pinching of crucial project budgets before he gives himself a raise.
Force the design to be redone. Note that QA _must_ be given the ability and authority to do so from the beginning of the design process.
If docs are porly written, and incomplete, how does one decide what's bug an what's feature?
That's actually part of the design process. If you haven't written a complete specification, you shouldn't even hope to create a quality product. Of course, occasionally, there will be something that is needed and wasn't addressed in the design, but if it's needed, the design should be reconsidered ( not just updated, but fully reconsidered ) with buyoff of all parties, from the project management, development, design, QA, everyone. Such an issue showing up near the end of the development process should be a big red flag to project managers. Even what seem like minor things should be reviewed, at least briefly, by all parties, since what seems like a minor missing feature could point to a greater workflow design error.
If the docs depict the program's behavior, not define it, what can QA do?
Make someone define it. Create a specificiations document. If the document in question is supposed to define the product, it should do so, otherwise it's flawed. Your specs must define your implementation of a product, not a general type of product. Of course, there are all sorts of documentation- you shouldn't expect 'user' documentation to act as a specificiation, they're not the same at all.
Of course, only third of the two ways to write bugless programs works...
Huh? Good QA doesn't necessarily result in bugless programs, it results in products that fill a need to a defined degree of usability. Few, if any, complex systems are error-free. Most of the time, it's just that the errors are handled, or are not severe enough to be noticed. People who are actually engineers understand that there are such complexities as risks and tolerances.
Re:Capability Maturity Model
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I mentioned it in another post, but my dad has a good web site that deals with quality issues (IE only, unfortunately)
Very unfortunately, since I'm not likely to take any advice, especially quality-related, from someone who runs an IE-only website.
You should really talk to your dad about that one.
I'm not even going to take a jab at the US Military's idea of quality, I can see others have done so already...
Like I said, the guy I'm talking about did this with is original iPod. I think it was 10 GB, but it may have been 5. He stripped out anything he could think of ( foreign language files, etc ) since he actually wanted to put his music collection on it as well. I figure you'd want to make the install as small as possible, to maximize your music library space... but if you aren't keeping 15GB of tunes on it, sure, you probably could get away with mirroring your entire system, minus multimedia files. Syncing, now there's a problem..
Launchcast has some great ideas going and it's genre selecting features are pretty awesome, but if I can't even use it simply because I'm on a different platform, then it'll get no support from me anymore. It's a shame such a good idea will go to waste.
I actually absolutely agree. It just seems that Yahoo hasn't put one ounce of development effort into it since they bought it, and it's a bit of a shame, because it did have some promise... the whole idea of being able to rate ( and especially, block ) songs and customize streams is pretty neat. Still, at this point... I have songs in my personal collection ( mostly ripped from CDs I own, honest! ) that I've forgotten about... add iTunes playlist sharing ( allowed and actually used quite a bit at my work )... I almost never listen to shoutcast streams anymore, even though I like them. I "party shuffle" my own music...
I wonder if going to the launchcast feedback page and telling them they're screwing up by not recognizing 10 million potential users in OS X would get them to actually do something...
X-Servers good....very good.......better with Yellow Dog....=)
Yea, but if you're going to go that route, you're tossing out a copy of OS X Server... and shouldn't you be able to find something almost as good from IBM, like the BladeCenter jS20?
du... what the hell am I saying? Yea, buy an XServe!! I has cool blinkinlights!
LAUNCHcast is currently compatible only with Internet Explorer 5.x and 6.x for Windows based PCs and Netscape 4.5 to 4.79 on the Macintosh OS.
Seriously?!? Ha-ha!!
There are a thousand and one different sources for music. Pick one that doesn't require you to use an outdated browser, then buy a Mac mini.
What, you're saying there isn't a Windows-based solution to do this kind of thing ?
And what the heck is up with those Launchcast browser requirements, that's so 1999... over 10 million OS X users is a market they don't want to be bothered with ?
Not if it was booting from your iPod. Think about it.
In fairness, the original poster wasn't talking about booting from your iPod, he was talking using it to transport just your user directory. There would actually need to be a little more support for that kind of thing built into the OS for it to really work like a true end-user would want it to... and the demand for such a feature isn't really there.
People who want to do such a thing probably would figure out how to install a minimal bootable system ( we've done it, it's easy ) and/or would know how to manually set up the mount points or would just do the more reasonable thing and take just the files they're interested in, not the entire user directory.
Either way, the post you responded to is a little extra silly and paranoid... if I don't trust the install of a machine, I'm not going to hook my data storage devices to it in the first place. Otherwise, I'm not going to worry about getting hijacked.
But really, how often are you at some random computer where you'd really like to have your particular user environment? It just doesn't happen to me very often... and by that I mean, well, never.
I mean, really, someone opened a box of software, then tried to return it, and found they couldn't...
and he is surprised?!?
Name one store which will accept returns of opened software. One. If you can name one, then just maybe this guy has a valid complaint and the folks at the Apple Store should have refunded this guy his software. Otherwise, that there is a troll. You can't think of one? Of course not.
Other folks have pointed it out, but if he needs Motion, he wants to buy one of these for $1499, not one of these for $499. My advice ? Return the Mini and get a PowerMac, you'll be happy you did... it's worth the money, and if you're buying $300 software packages, you have the money.
Feel free to shoot my down if I'm spouting gibberish, but maybe you could carry your desktop around on your iPod?
You are so far from spouting gibberish you don't even realize what you're saying.
In other words, duh.
Sorry, had to do that. See, we have an engineer around here who's had an iPod since version 1... and practically the first thing he did with it was install a bootable version of OS X on it. Screw just your desktop, one of the larger iPods has more than enough room to put an entire ( if minimal ) system on it. And yes, he did boot and run a system off of it... not the fastest drive in the world, but it worked.
Of course, in that mode, it really is just an extremely portable firewire hard drive, there are many devices that could be put to the same use. The iPod, on the other hand, is a great music player as well as being a general-purpose storage device. So, rather than just being an extra thing you lug around and use only when you're at an unfamiliar computer ( really, that's not a common experience, is it? ), it's something you use all the time and can use to transfer files or keep a backup of some files ( user directory, system, MRI scans, whatever ) if that's something useful to you.
That said, as good an idea as it is, I don't see Apple building it as an explicit feature, simply because the demand for it isn't huge. Oh, and it's something you could always do, Apple doesn't really need to provide special support for it... I suppose they could throw in some hooks to make it easier for the casual, average user, but Apple's not going to confuse people by complicating the iPod user experience if they can help it.
I know it's easy to double your sales when they start small, but an increase of over119% is always impressive. Especially after you've been seeing triple-digit or near triple-digit sales increases for seven quarters in a row.
Too bad the story submitter and the slashdot editors have worked together to give us a dollar amount an label it a server unit number, but still.... when looking at server deployments, I'm going to guess that if you're just looking for percent increases in units shipped, nobody this past year is going to beat XServe numbers.
These statistics are always hard to digest, though... what segment of the server market are we talking about, what constitutes a server, is that UnixTM or does BSD/Darwin count, etc... I always have more questions than such articles are prepared to answer.
The XServe is so insanely great that people are really starting to take notice, even with Apple's historically bad server-side track record. A 36% revenue increase? That's nothing compared to the XServe over 119% unit sales increase. We're installing ours now, and I can see why people like them. They just work, they're damn fast, and they're really pretty cheaply priced when you compare them to similarly-capable systems, and it's honestly really, really hard to think of something they can't do.
Apple may not come off as a server company to you, but if you were to fairly evaluate the XServe? That thing sells itself... complete with BSD unixy goodness.
There's more IBM parts in a Mac these days than there is in an IBM PC. How odd is that?
+5 insightful! Not to mention hi-frickin'-larious!
That's just weird. Why hadn't I thought of it that way? Of course... this dual G5 PowerMac sitting on my desk has way, way more to do with IBM than any "IBM PC"...
You know, someone should set up a Slashdot fund and make it available to view on a website. Just a fantasy stock market thing that would track the stock prices of all the companies Slashdot loves to hate.
Not to totally karma-whore ( I don't need the karma, folks, I wast all my time on this damn site ), anyone want to help me get together a list of symbols to track? Here's a start :
MSFT SCOXE SCOX IFLB.OB SNE RNWK TWTC
I may just make my first journal entry because of this... it can serve as a meeting-point for those of us interested in tracking stocks by slashdot preference...
Lord Dweomer writes: You know, someone should set up a Slashdot fund and make it available to view on a website. Just a fantasy stock market thing that would track the stock prices of all the companies Slashdot loves to hate.
Actually, that's a great idea... where would you pick up the data?
Some website? you mean like stocks.slashdot.org? Taco, you guys listening? That would actually be pretty cool. There should be two stock tracking lists, one for companies we hate, one for companies we like, and companies should move between the two ( and drop out ) as we change our minds about them and/or stop caring. IBM, for example, would currently be on our "like" list, along with Apple and Red Hat. There could be a really, really busy forum just to discuss if we like or hate a particular company... like Sony, I never can tell, do we hate them or like them? I know *I* am conflicted on that one...
There could be a way we all 'vote' to invest, voting to either like or hate a company, that way a company could be on both lists, weighted based on our individual opinions! Perfect! It's the ultimate ongoing poll!
Until Taco finds time to implement this excellent idea ( think of the advert views, guys! ), Lord Dweomer and I will set up pages on My Yahoo or something like that to track these, just for our own entertainment...
Dude, it was 1992, not frickin' 1982... I was honestly shocked to hear an HTTP image wasn't transfered earlier. It must have been early in '92... I would have thought a black & white image would have been done first.
What did you think those SCSI connectors were for ?
There was a $500 or so color hand scanner, and apple sold a few scanners themselves, if I recall. Google for it if you're really curious.
Still, an actual scanner was a rarity back in the day. I was always impressed that so many images were on Usenet...
Ibm is behaving great, and I'll support them. My mom bought a thinkpad, if I buy a laptop it'll be a thinkpad
If you want to help out IBM, you'd be doing them a much bigger favor by contributing to one of their open source efforts ( and promoting Linux over Windows ) than by supporting the PC hardware division they just sold off. ThinkPads are cool and all, but they're not being sold by the the same company that's releasing this source. If you want to buy IBM hardware that actually supports IBM, it's going to have to be a Power server.
Actually, I suppose in the near-term the sale isn't officially complete, but if it isn't now, it will be soon... it's time to stop thinking of IBM as a company that sells what once were known as "IBM-compatable" systems, as odd as that sounds.
Plenty of folks distrust most any business, and often with good reason. I'd link to recent examples of businesses not taking proper care of customer data, or otherwise breaking trust and committing fraud, both online and off ( ChoicePoint certainly comes to mind, as does T-Mobile... then there's Enron, WorldCom, Tyco... ), but the instances are almost too many to list.
If businesses want people's trust, they need to earn it.
Should online businesses be trusted ?
I myself give out accurate personal data only when I really, really have to, and even then am pretty picky about the companies I work with - both online and offline. If confidence has declined, maybe people are learning...
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, of course... as others have pointed out, plenty of projects ( today, in the past, technical or otherwise ) are characterised as 'quick and dirty', I was just attempting to point out that the D in QDOS stood clearly for disk, not dirty...
The characterization of QDOS as a quick-and-dirty system implementation, that I wouldn't argue with at all.
Right, but the guy has a point that it was in many, many ways completely unlike CP/M
... in that CP/M had many more features and was, well, just all-around better... ;-) in that way they were completely different.
All kidding aside, QDOS was meant to be simple and 'quick' disk-based OS. Nobody ( OK, few people outside the p0rn industry ) wants to call their own software 'dirty'. That sounds like a story...
Change your definition of "thin" and "apps" and it's happening now. What is slashdot, if not a web app? What's my PII with it's 20GB hard drive, if not a thin client? ( not that it's what I'm using now, but it would work, I'm making a point here ).
they could easily repurpose a linux distro + wine + firefox into a very OSX like OS for intel/amd that is, to some extent, windows compatible.
"easily" is a matter of opinion, but "why" and how successful it would be are different matters, since what you're talking about already exists in one form or another. What I'm looking for is the business case... and it's just not there. Google's services ( like Yahoo's ) aren't about thin clients, they're about accessing data regardless of what computer you're using ( and leveraging search tech to organize it all and sell targeted ads ). Making a multi-OS browser makes sense for them. Making a server-side development platform makes sense for them. Making an OS? Not so much. They have an OS- it's called Linux.
And, yes, they really are just another "yahoo-like empire" in the final analysis... they just seem to be looking to out-Yahoo Yahoo. Given the success of Yahoo, even with how Yahoo has stagnated over the past few years, it seems like a good plan to me - there's plenty of room to improve on Yahoo, as Google has already shown.
That, my friend, is what TiVo was invented for.
Other things people _think_ are key TiVo features - fast forwarding past commercials and time-shifting - are really just video recorder features. TiVo is a service, not a device... and it's a nice service, giving you the shows you _want_, in a hassle-free manner, allowing you to ignore the chaff, as you say.
It's a matter of priorities, of course, but if there really are more than 2 or 3 TV shows you would actually like to watch, I'll recommend a TiVo. Of course, after you get TiVo, you may decide you'd also like to watch some old, good movies ( TCM is running a bunch of Oscar-nominated movies, for example ) or this or that special, and you could find yourself watching more TV than you ever imagined, because the stuff you're interested in is always "on". The cable guys will try to sell you On Demand, but that misses the point entirely- you still have to sort through a long list of the crap _they_ think we want to see.
I agree with your entire post, except that this bit isn't quite right. There's the '+' maximize button. It just ( frequently ) doesn't do the resize you want. I know, you mean that you can't arbitrarily resize by grabing a window edge.
That said, most folks don't spend much time resizing windows, so I doubt that's the productivity issue you have. Other than focus-follows-pointer ( which only a true geek can love ), you just need to get a 3 button mouse ( a bluetooth one, to use with your PB as well ).
Oh, and there's nothing at all wrong ( IMHO ) with using X-Windows on OS X. Forget about it being a Mac. Think of it as the best NeXT machine ever made, it makes more sense that way. The Macintosh stuff is just grafted in there for compatability... it's really NeXTStep, which is all good...
Oh, and you don't mention Expose'... use it effectively, and it's a nice timesaver when multitasking. I thought it was just silly at first, but after using it a bit, you realize how useful it is.
The tools you are looking for exist, but they're not cheap and they need someone to create test cases for them and run them. I assume it's a web app you're talking about? Really, you need to hire a professional and give them professional tools. There's no good way to test your app cheaply. What you really need is a copy of Mercury Interactive's Astra or Segue Silk and someone to run it for you.
If you have to do it cheaply and by yourself, good luck and have fun writing those tests. Do a web search and have fun evaluating tools and writing tests. Here is the first hit I got on google. I've never used it but maybe you could look into ieUnit.
Oh, and my advice is to find a job closer to home. That commute will literally kill you. No, really, I mean it, you'll die.
Quality isn't something that happens after the fact. Good products are the outcome of good design. Good designs are prototyped, rigorously evaluated, and redesigned as flaws are found. It's not even a software-specific concept.
That's a gross oversimplification of a complex problem.
Each of those variables can have many values; they aren't booleans. You have all 3- actually more. The issue you're probably refering to about usually boils down to the problem of companies trying to minimize cost ( usually by reducing time and quality ).
If you don't have to care about the quality of your product for whatever reason, say you have a monopoly due to proprietary file formats or a market advantage due to restrictive licensing agreements ( do you like how I didn't mention a specific company there? ), you can get away with having sub-par quality. But unless you have some sort of unfair competetive advantage ( or even if you do ), low quality can result in either loss of business or significantly higher support or maintenance costs. It's generally a bad decision to rush a product just to cut down on short-term costs; it's usually artificial business influences ( i.e. quarterly earnings reports ) that result in poor decisions like rushing a v1.0 product that isn't even functionally complete.
Oh, and that oversimplification leaves out complexity of the product and resources needed to create it. It's really more like f( Time, Quality, Complexity, Resources ) = Cost.
So, yea, using "Cost, Time, Quality" like that makes a nice little phrase that sounds neat, but really, it's something a pointy-haired boss might say when he's trying to justify his penny-pinching of crucial project budgets before he gives himself a raise.
Force the design to be redone. Note that QA _must_ be given the ability and authority to do so from the beginning of the design process.
If docs are porly written, and incomplete, how does one decide what's bug an what's feature?
That's actually part of the design process. If you haven't written a complete specification, you shouldn't even hope to create a quality product. Of course, occasionally, there will be something that is needed and wasn't addressed in the design, but if it's needed, the design should be reconsidered ( not just updated, but fully reconsidered ) with buyoff of all parties, from the project management, development, design, QA, everyone. Such an issue showing up near the end of the development process should be a big red flag to project managers. Even what seem like minor things should be reviewed, at least briefly, by all parties, since what seems like a minor missing feature could point to a greater workflow design error.
If the docs depict the program's behavior, not define it, what can QA do?
Make someone define it. Create a specificiations document. If the document in question is supposed to define the product, it should do so, otherwise it's flawed. Your specs must define your implementation of a product, not a general type of product. Of course, there are all sorts of documentation- you shouldn't expect 'user' documentation to act as a specificiation, they're not the same at all.
Of course, only third of the two ways to write bugless programs works...
Huh? Good QA doesn't necessarily result in bugless programs, it results in products that fill a need to a defined degree of usability. Few, if any, complex systems are error-free. Most of the time, it's just that the errors are handled, or are not severe enough to be noticed. People who are actually engineers understand that there are such complexities as risks and tolerances.
Very unfortunately, since I'm not likely to take any advice, especially quality-related, from someone who runs an IE-only website.
You should really talk to your dad about that one.
I'm not even going to take a jab at the US Military's idea of quality, I can see others have done so already...
Like I said, the guy I'm talking about did this with is original iPod. I think it was 10 GB, but it may have been 5. He stripped out anything he could think of ( foreign language files, etc ) since he actually wanted to put his music collection on it as well. I figure you'd want to make the install as small as possible, to maximize your music library space... but if you aren't keeping 15GB of tunes on it, sure, you probably could get away with mirroring your entire system, minus multimedia files. Syncing, now there's a problem..
I actually absolutely agree. It just seems that Yahoo hasn't put one ounce of development effort into it since they bought it, and it's a bit of a shame, because it did have some promise... the whole idea of being able to rate ( and especially, block ) songs and customize streams is pretty neat. Still, at this point... I have songs in my personal collection ( mostly ripped from CDs I own, honest! ) that I've forgotten about... add iTunes playlist sharing ( allowed and actually used quite a bit at my work )... I almost never listen to shoutcast streams anymore, even though I like them. I "party shuffle" my own music...
I wonder if going to the launchcast feedback page and telling them they're screwing up by not recognizing 10 million potential users in OS X would get them to actually do something...
Yea, but if you're going to go that route, you're tossing out a copy of OS X Server... and shouldn't you be able to find something almost as good from IBM, like the BladeCenter jS20?
du... what the hell am I saying? Yea, buy an XServe!! I has cool blinkinlights!
From the LAUNCHcast website :
Seriously?!? Ha-ha!!
There are a thousand and one different sources for music. Pick one that doesn't require you to use an outdated browser, then buy a Mac mini.
What, you're saying there isn't a Windows-based solution to do this kind of thing ?
And what the heck is up with those Launchcast browser requirements, that's so 1999... over 10 million OS X users is a market they don't want to be bothered with ?
In fairness, the original poster wasn't talking about booting from your iPod, he was talking using it to transport just your user directory. There would actually need to be a little more support for that kind of thing built into the OS for it to really work like a true end-user would want it to... and the demand for such a feature isn't really there.
People who want to do such a thing probably would figure out how to install a minimal bootable system ( we've done it, it's easy ) and/or would know how to manually set up the mount points or would just do the more reasonable thing and take just the files they're interested in, not the entire user directory.
Either way, the post you responded to is a little extra silly and paranoid... if I don't trust the install of a machine, I'm not going to hook my data storage devices to it in the first place. Otherwise, I'm not going to worry about getting hijacked.
But really, how often are you at some random computer where you'd really like to have your particular user environment? It just doesn't happen to me very often... and by that I mean, well, never.
and he is surprised?!?
Name one store which will accept returns of opened software. One. If you can name one, then just maybe this guy has a valid complaint and the folks at the Apple Store should have refunded this guy his software. Otherwise, that there is a troll. You can't think of one? Of course not.
Other folks have pointed it out, but if he needs Motion, he wants to buy one of these for $1499, not one of these for $499. My advice ? Return the Mini and get a PowerMac, you'll be happy you did... it's worth the money, and if you're buying $300 software packages, you have the money.
You are so far from spouting gibberish you don't even realize what you're saying.
In other words, duh.
Sorry, had to do that. See, we have an engineer around here who's had an iPod since version 1... and practically the first thing he did with it was install a bootable version of OS X on it. Screw just your desktop, one of the larger iPods has more than enough room to put an entire ( if minimal ) system on it. And yes, he did boot and run a system off of it... not the fastest drive in the world, but it worked.
Of course, in that mode, it really is just an extremely portable firewire hard drive, there are many devices that could be put to the same use. The iPod, on the other hand, is a great music player as well as being a general-purpose storage device. So, rather than just being an extra thing you lug around and use only when you're at an unfamiliar computer ( really, that's not a common experience, is it? ), it's something you use all the time and can use to transfer files or keep a backup of some files ( user directory, system, MRI scans, whatever ) if that's something useful to you.
That said, as good an idea as it is, I don't see Apple building it as an explicit feature, simply because the demand for it isn't huge. Oh, and it's something you could always do, Apple doesn't really need to provide special support for it... I suppose they could throw in some hooks to make it easier for the casual, average user, but Apple's not going to confuse people by complicating the iPod user experience if they can help it.
Too bad the story submitter and the slashdot editors have worked together to give us a dollar amount an label it a server unit number, but still.... when looking at server deployments, I'm going to guess that if you're just looking for percent increases in units shipped, nobody this past year is going to beat XServe numbers.
These statistics are always hard to digest, though... what segment of the server market are we talking about, what constitutes a server, is that UnixTM or does BSD/Darwin count, etc... I always have more questions than such articles are prepared to answer.
Still, any increase in Linux sales is good news.
That opinion is so last century.
The XServe is so insanely great that people are really starting to take notice, even with Apple's historically bad server-side track record. A 36% revenue increase? That's nothing compared to the XServe over 119% unit sales increase. We're installing ours now, and I can see why people like them. They just work, they're damn fast, and they're really pretty cheaply priced when you compare them to similarly-capable systems, and it's honestly really, really hard to think of something they can't do.
Apple may not come off as a server company to you, but if you were to fairly evaluate the XServe? That thing sells itself... complete with BSD unixy goodness.
+5 insightful! Not to mention hi-frickin'-larious!
That's just weird. Why hadn't I thought of it that way? Of course... this dual G5 PowerMac sitting on my desk has way, way more to do with IBM than any "IBM PC"...
Not to totally karma-whore ( I don't need the karma, folks, I wast all my time on this damn site ), anyone want to help me get together a list of symbols to track? Here's a start :
MSFT SCOXE SCOX IFLB.OB SNE RNWK TWTC
I may just make my first journal entry because of this... it can serve as a meeting-point for those of us interested in tracking stocks by slashdot preference...
Actually, that's a great idea... where would you pick up the data?
Some website? you mean like stocks.slashdot.org? Taco, you guys listening? That would actually be pretty cool. There should be two stock tracking lists, one for companies we hate, one for companies we like, and companies should move between the two ( and drop out ) as we change our minds about them and/or stop caring. IBM, for example, would currently be on our "like" list, along with Apple and Red Hat. There could be a really, really busy forum just to discuss if we like or hate a particular company... like Sony, I never can tell, do we hate them or like them? I know *I* am conflicted on that one...
There could be a way we all 'vote' to invest, voting to either like or hate a company, that way a company could be on both lists, weighted based on our individual opinions! Perfect! It's the ultimate ongoing poll!
Until Taco finds time to implement this excellent idea ( think of the advert views, guys! ), Lord Dweomer and I will set up pages on My Yahoo or something like that to track these, just for our own entertainment...
What did you think those SCSI connectors were for ?
There was a $500 or so color hand scanner, and apple sold a few scanners themselves, if I recall. Google for it if you're really curious.
Still, an actual scanner was a rarity back in the day. I was always impressed that so many images were on Usenet...
If you want to help out IBM, you'd be doing them a much bigger favor by contributing to one of their open source efforts ( and promoting Linux over Windows ) than by supporting the PC hardware division they just sold off. ThinkPads are cool and all, but they're not being sold by the the same company that's releasing this source. If you want to buy IBM hardware that actually supports IBM, it's going to have to be a Power server.
Actually, I suppose in the near-term the sale isn't officially complete, but if it isn't now, it will be soon... it's time to stop thinking of IBM as a company that sells what once were known as "IBM-compatable" systems, as odd as that sounds.
If businesses want people's trust, they need to earn it.
Should online businesses be trusted ?
I myself give out accurate personal data only when I really, really have to, and even then am pretty picky about the companies I work with - both online and offline. If confidence has declined, maybe people are learning...