If you would have swallowed your pride and gone through the 20 minute tutorial that ships with all macs, you not only would have learned how to copy, but most of the other essential skills that allow a complete novice to start bootstrapping his way to expertise in the OS.
Every linux user, at some point has to be told about man and then start reading. Once you've read man mount and man cp, it may seem obvious what to do but this is memory, not intuition at work.
At least Apple tells you about the tutorial (usually within the first 5 pages of the manual) and gives you a simple way of starting up.
The linux method takes 17 keystrokes and doesn't achieve the same result as the mac method. Note, step 1 in the mac method, double click folder. This is the equivalent of doing a cd directoryname
So here you are up to three steps and a variable number of key presses. since mac file names are limited to 32 characters, let's take the middle value of 16. I'm also assuming that you don't have to type in a full pathname, just a relative one (fair I think).
After correcting your error, the linux method takes 37 keystrokes.
The mac method you critique takes four mouse-clicks and 3 modifier key using key presses. Let's count command as separate and call it 6 keystrokes.
So Linux=37 keystrokes
Mac=6 keystrokes (all doable with one hand) and 4 mouse clicks.
Linux doesn't look to be too efficient, especially with people who don't type too fast. It's only advantage is redirection of output to a file doesn't require opening a program. But what if someone were to take mac os X and hack the GUI so that outputting the clipboard to a file was a keystroke. You would end up with
Linux=37 keystrokes
Mac OS X=8 keystrokes
I don't doubt that this capability will be in Mac OS X very quickly.
The people in western europe also leech off of US defense guarantees (shaving 1-2% of free GDP otherwise needed to defend themselves) and US R&D (if you look at universal healthcare it is highly correlated to drastically lowered medical research spending). But the hot political reform trends are all about moving away from the cradle-to-grave socialist model toward the US model. Take a look at the mess the German Krankenkasse (sp?) are in. Unlike Canada, they have no free market healthcare nearby to ship their overload to so they are bankrupting themselves to pay for the lavish benefits.
All the other benefits on the list are on the same schedule as healthcare but either more or less advanced.
One comment on housing in Europe. At least the US never has the laughable spectacle of anti-squatters (netherlands) being paid to squat in buildings before real squatters get there and thus steal away property ownership.
DB
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
Mac OS X for x86 is for running existing servers, often file & print with no apps on it. Why spend a ton of money on licensing when you could just simply replace the OS and add Samba. For a large portion of the companies running Exchange, Sendmail would work just as well (no group discussion needed), etc.
A while back I needed to rip out MS-mail from a 300 seat company. They bought a server, (4k, dual processor, overkill on the specs) for about 5k and spent another 5k on software and licensing. For about 6k, they could have gotten a more stable, easier to administrate Mac OS X for PPC with equivalent useability. But many shops are loathe to support multiple hardware platforms so it wasn't even an option. If they could have spent 10% of the money on software and put it on the same hardware, Apple would have rung up a sale and NT would have been on its way out.
OK, silly boy, then install Mac OS X. It's *nix, it's more stable, it'll run all the BSD compatible software as well as Mac software so you get vi *and* MS Word, it costs less for a business to adopt, fits right in to your network, and comes with no CAL costs. Oh, and it's also easier to administrate.
For those who love to tinker, there's linux. For those who want to save time, there's Mac OS X.
Security may be up to the admin, but if MS was in the securities business, they would be in jail for persistently selling products that are inappropriate for their customers.
Just one example. MS claimed for the longest time that their NT server matched Novell's Netware in their government security rating. The only difference? Novell got their rating while their server was hooked up to a network. Microsoft got its security rating by taking out the network cards on NT server.
MS software is deceptively simple to administrate until you need to make it secure. Then it becomes just as hard as linux or any other *nix because you need to monkey around in the registry and other obscure places to shut off all the security breaches. MS even has a checklist on how to do it. It's a very long checklist.
If MS put a big red sticker on the front of the CD of all their professional OS products that said "this software, as shipped, is insecure. Please go to http://ms.security.url.com for instructions on making it secure" then I could have a smidgen of respect for them as we watched their sales drop 40%. But they don't, and for obvious reasons. But they also don't fix the holes in a timely manner and they don't provide a disciplined programming environment so that common errors like buffer overflows dont' happen anymore. I mean, come on, these things happen in all OSs but they happen more often with MS and usually the consequence is more severe and the broken software stays broken much longer.
There's the flaw. Most Linux companies are catering to the wrong niche. If RedHat worked more for companies like AOL, who are going to try to bring Linux to the "I'm an idiot how do you turn this thing on" masses, they will inevitably make more money, as the product they are selling will be more wanted.
Sorry, Apple saw that niche first. What is Mac OS X except Unix for the masses with a friendly enough front end that it's going to be easier to support than Windows.
Actually, that's subject of a story in the Register a UK publication. So stop your leering at goatse.cx and have a look (now, am I trolling, or is it a real link?).
All this talk about linux going down, how silly. How does a hobby go down? I mean really, Linux is like the ham operators, they are mostly hobbyists but damn are they useful when there is an emergency.
Of course, for the analogy to hold, you have to agree that MS software domination is a state of emergency.
DB
PS the link is real
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
That's why the x86 work is being done in the open source community through Darwin. If they are successful at making Darwin live on x86, Apple's technical difficulties largely go away.
That just leaves the business case to work out (a huge problem by itself)
While you are generally correct in your analysis of Romania, you are missing a few things.
Government action is a special case of non-competition. When Ceausescu wanted to stop something from happening, lots of people with guns, poisons, and other instruments of violence went into motion. In a corporate world, this doesn't generally happen. You *can* have corporations rent or hire governments to do the violence for them but if you have a decent constitution and a limited government, the amount of violence on sale is really quite limited. Free elections also tend to make it essential that such deals remain unpublicized.
Getting back to the chip market, Transmeta was formed as a startup around 5 years ago because somebody got a bright idea and a lot of bright people bored with the existing chip companies joined him to make it work. Nothing is stopping that process from repeating an infinite number of times except for a lack of imagination on the part of hardware engineers. As long as the process of forming new startups continues to be available, your nightmare scenario won't happen or won't happen for long.
Even if this speculation were true, Linus could certainly name his own paycheck at a Linux Advancement Institute funded by RedHat, Caldera, et al to allow the best Linux developers to go forward full time advancing the platform. If AMD were to do such a nasty thing, I would predict the formation of such an entity within the month, and AMD would know that going in. So why would they waste their time in something that would garner bad press and give them no real gain.
1. Please give me an example of a corporation bigger than the US government. The statistical trends are clear, places where government does most things are poor and the common people have measurably worse lives than in places where government is limited and corporations do most things in society.
2. Assigning blame isn't the point of the exercise when the issue is monetarily getting screwed over. Joe sixpack doesn't go to court if coke is priced too high, he just stops drinking it. If Intel, AMD, & Transmeta would collude to raise CPU prices 10x you would have a renaissance of mac sales, Alphas would become a force in the consumer market, and even Sparcs would have a renaissance period.
In short, you sound like some bitter socialist who's sad that Gorbachev's teaching in San Francisco instead of running the USSR.
Any economy gets run by supply and demand. The only way you can bid up the price of labor so that these countries get out of their hole (and I'm thinking more about 2nd world countries, not 3rd world) is to send more work their way. Code outsource is a relatively clean and easy way to give them relatively high paying jobs (in their local wage scale) while saving the job exporters enough money to increase total employment.
As for your anticipated glee at the insertion of back doors by outside the US programmers, that's why you compile from source after checking it. Besides, anything that malicious that it bankrupts a company is going to have some competent forensics people going over the mess. They'll trace it back to the outsourcing company and the hacker goes to jail. Most of the adults know this and thus don't hack from work no matter what country.
No arguments that companies hired their own thugs but that's pretty much taken care of in the legal code. The past abuses by Pinkerton in no way justify present legal preference for union violence.
When you get out of the early 20th Century, let me know. You are clearly living in the past.
It took all of 5 minutes to look up the Enmons decision, a 1973 ruling that exempts unions from extortion law if the extortion is undertaken to further legitimate union objectives. That includes cases of assault, even murder. You might want to check out the Cato institute. Here's an URL: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-316es.html
While you won't move your primary production to one facility in E. Europe in one shot, you might want to take a look at Rational Software's methodology. By breaking down projects into small pieces that cycle quickly, each cycle leaving useable artifacts, you have the basis for distributing your code to many shops in many countries all of which use this methodology (30 day free trial available at www.rational.com) to get requirements and manage changes. Great tools (expensive as hell though).
You end up having your high level folk in the US, gathering the requirements and managing the process while the bulk of the work goes on in 2nd world nations saving costs.
Third world countries are third world countries because the government steals too much and is too capricious to invest in without bribing left and right.
In that atmosphere workers are screwed already. The only hope is to get skills and emigrate into a high paid H1b job. If you're successful in the US, come back and build a business back home and treat people decently.
Tell that tripe to the people who get harrassed, beaten, or killed breaking strikes. If unions are more than violent extortion rackets, why have they lobbied for and gotten special legal protections so that they cannot ever be blamed for union violence? If a company were to be as violent as unions are, the board would go directly to jail for the violence and probably also get nailed under criminal RICO.
I notice you are still too chicken to advertise who you are or where you work. My point stands, even you know better than to let that little secret out of the bag.
As for my own reports, I've had at various times 3 or 4 at a time in a few companies. I'm currently on my own and hiring for my own company which organized a whole three months ago so I only have 5 on the payroll at the moment. I'm financing this out of my own pocket so if my attitude is so destructive, it's certainly my own ass on the line.
As to loyalty, I need to have loyalty to everybody I contract with. That includes employees and that includes customers. I certainly understand that some customers are money losers and need to be dropped, but that's not what I was complaining about. I was taking a dim view to the idea that customer escalation efforts are a reason to give purposefully bad service. That's mean, nasty, and doesn't serve anybody well. It's a betrayal on the part of my subordinates because it gives me an angrier customer base that I have to deal with and it's a lack of faith in my ability to tell the difference between a legitimate gripe and a blowhard customer inventing problems.
I'm sure we both are glad we don't have a business relationship.
In an interstate call, federal law and both state laws would need to be complied with. Again, see the case of L. Tripp. She called from Virginia where one party knowledge was legal into Maryland where both parties are required to know.
Again, it is worth consulting a professional to determine legality in the particular circumstances at hand.
One thing that nobody seems to be mentioning is that this also increases indirect OS competition. One of the biggest perceived problems to going to Mac OS X is the need to get new hardware. With a Transmeta server all you would need to do is change the emulation and voila, same hardware, Unix OS, and you don't have to up your admin costs for a unix admin, just use Aqua as your admin interface.
The above two anonymous cowards obviously didn't advertise where they work because they knew that their attitudes, if publicly known, would negatively impact sales and profitability.
Guess what, they still negatively impact sales and profitability. If you worked for me and had that attitude, I would fire your ass.
One piece of the problem you don't mention is that your local government has most likely signed monopoly contracts so that you only have one cable provider.
But I don't understand why you threw apple in there at the end. They seem to be one of the few companies going in the opposite direction, from proprietary to open.
Slashdot Mirror
If you would have swallowed your pride and gone through the 20 minute tutorial that ships with all macs, you not only would have learned how to copy, but most of the other essential skills that allow a complete novice to start bootstrapping his way to expertise in the OS.
Every linux user, at some point has to be told about man and then start reading. Once you've read man mount and man cp, it may seem obvious what to do but this is memory, not intuition at work.
At least Apple tells you about the tutorial (usually within the first 5 pages of the manual) and gives you a simple way of starting up.
DB
How are you measuring ease?
The linux method takes 17 keystrokes and doesn't achieve the same result as the mac method. Note, step 1 in the mac method, double click folder. This is the equivalent of doing a cd directoryname
So here you are up to three steps and a variable number of key presses. since mac file names are limited to 32 characters, let's take the middle value of 16. I'm also assuming that you don't have to type in a full pathname, just a relative one (fair I think).
After correcting your error, the linux method takes 37 keystrokes.
The mac method you critique takes four mouse-clicks and 3 modifier key using key presses. Let's count command as separate and call it 6 keystrokes.
So Linux=37 keystrokes
Mac=6 keystrokes (all doable with one hand) and 4 mouse clicks.
Linux doesn't look to be too efficient, especially with people who don't type too fast. It's only advantage is redirection of output to a file doesn't require opening a program. But what if someone were to take mac os X and hack the GUI so that outputting the clipboard to a file was a keystroke. You would end up with
Linux=37 keystrokes
Mac OS X=8 keystrokes
I don't doubt that this capability will be in Mac OS X very quickly.
DB
The people in western europe also leech off of US defense guarantees (shaving 1-2% of free GDP otherwise needed to defend themselves) and US R&D (if you look at universal healthcare it is highly correlated to drastically lowered medical research spending). But the hot political reform trends are all about moving away from the cradle-to-grave socialist model toward the US model. Take a look at the mess the German Krankenkasse (sp?) are in. Unlike Canada, they have no free market healthcare nearby to ship their overload to so they are bankrupting themselves to pay for the lavish benefits.
All the other benefits on the list are on the same schedule as healthcare but either more or less advanced.
One comment on housing in Europe. At least the US never has the laughable spectacle of anti-squatters (netherlands) being paid to squat in buildings before real squatters get there and thus steal away property ownership.
DB
Mac OS X for x86 is for running existing servers, often file & print with no apps on it. Why spend a ton of money on licensing when you could just simply replace the OS and add Samba. For a large portion of the companies running Exchange, Sendmail would work just as well (no group discussion needed), etc.
A while back I needed to rip out MS-mail from a 300 seat company. They bought a server, (4k, dual processor, overkill on the specs) for about 5k and spent another 5k on software and licensing. For about 6k, they could have gotten a more stable, easier to administrate Mac OS X for PPC with equivalent useability. But many shops are loathe to support multiple hardware platforms so it wasn't even an option. If they could have spent 10% of the money on software and put it on the same hardware, Apple would have rung up a sale and NT would have been on its way out.
DB
OK, silly boy, then install Mac OS X. It's *nix, it's more stable, it'll run all the BSD compatible software as well as Mac software so you get vi *and* MS Word, it costs less for a business to adopt, fits right in to your network, and comes with no CAL costs. Oh, and it's also easier to administrate.
For those who love to tinker, there's linux. For those who want to save time, there's Mac OS X.
DB
Security may be up to the admin, but if MS was in the securities business, they would be in jail for persistently selling products that are inappropriate for their customers.
Just one example. MS claimed for the longest time that their NT server matched Novell's Netware in their government security rating. The only difference? Novell got their rating while their server was hooked up to a network. Microsoft got its security rating by taking out the network cards on NT server.
MS software is deceptively simple to administrate until you need to make it secure. Then it becomes just as hard as linux or any other *nix because you need to monkey around in the registry and other obscure places to shut off all the security breaches. MS even has a checklist on how to do it. It's a very long checklist.
If MS put a big red sticker on the front of the CD of all their professional OS products that said "this software, as shipped, is insecure. Please go to http://ms.security.url.com for instructions on making it secure" then I could have a smidgen of respect for them as we watched their sales drop 40%. But they don't, and for obvious reasons. But they also don't fix the holes in a timely manner and they don't provide a disciplined programming environment so that common errors like buffer overflows dont' happen anymore. I mean, come on, these things happen in all OSs but they happen more often with MS and usually the consequence is more severe and the broken software stays broken much longer.
DB
Sorry, Apple saw that niche first. What is Mac OS X except Unix for the masses with a friendly enough front end that it's going to be easier to support than Windows.
DB
All this talk about linux going down, how silly. How does a hobby go down? I mean really, Linux is like the ham operators, they are mostly hobbyists but damn are they useful when there is an emergency.
Of course, for the analogy to hold, you have to agree that MS software domination is a state of emergency.
DB
PS the link is real
That's why the x86 work is being done in the open source community through Darwin. If they are successful at making Darwin live on x86, Apple's technical difficulties largely go away.
That just leaves the business case to work out (a huge problem by itself)
DB
While you are generally correct in your analysis of Romania, you are missing a few things.
Government action is a special case of non-competition. When Ceausescu wanted to stop something from happening, lots of people with guns, poisons, and other instruments of violence went into motion. In a corporate world, this doesn't generally happen. You *can* have corporations rent or hire governments to do the violence for them but if you have a decent constitution and a limited government, the amount of violence on sale is really quite limited. Free elections also tend to make it essential that such deals remain unpublicized.
Getting back to the chip market, Transmeta was formed as a startup around 5 years ago because somebody got a bright idea and a lot of bright people bored with the existing chip companies joined him to make it work. Nothing is stopping that process from repeating an infinite number of times except for a lack of imagination on the part of hardware engineers. As long as the process of forming new startups continues to be available, your nightmare scenario won't happen or won't happen for long.
Another romanian on slashdot
DB
Even if this speculation were true, Linus could certainly name his own paycheck at a Linux Advancement Institute funded by RedHat, Caldera, et al to allow the best Linux developers to go forward full time advancing the platform. If AMD were to do such a nasty thing, I would predict the formation of such an entity within the month, and AMD would know that going in. So why would they waste their time in something that would garner bad press and give them no real gain.
DB
1. Please give me an example of a corporation bigger than the US government. The statistical trends are clear, places where government does most things are poor and the common people have measurably worse lives than in places where government is limited and corporations do most things in society.
2. Assigning blame isn't the point of the exercise when the issue is monetarily getting screwed over. Joe sixpack doesn't go to court if coke is priced too high, he just stops drinking it. If Intel, AMD, & Transmeta would collude to raise CPU prices 10x you would have a renaissance of mac sales, Alphas would become a force in the consumer market, and even Sparcs would have a renaissance period.
In short, you sound like some bitter socialist who's sad that Gorbachev's teaching in San Francisco instead of running the USSR.
DB
Any economy gets run by supply and demand. The only way you can bid up the price of labor so that these countries get out of their hole (and I'm thinking more about 2nd world countries, not 3rd world) is to send more work their way. Code outsource is a relatively clean and easy way to give them relatively high paying jobs (in their local wage scale) while saving the job exporters enough money to increase total employment.
As for your anticipated glee at the insertion of back doors by outside the US programmers, that's why you compile from source after checking it. Besides, anything that malicious that it bankrupts a company is going to have some competent forensics people going over the mess. They'll trace it back to the outsourcing company and the hacker goes to jail. Most of the adults know this and thus don't hack from work no matter what country.
DB
No arguments that companies hired their own thugs but that's pretty much taken care of in the legal code. The past abuses by Pinkerton in no way justify present legal preference for union violence.
DB
When you get out of the early 20th Century, let me know. You are clearly living in the past.
It took all of 5 minutes to look up the Enmons decision, a 1973 ruling that exempts unions from extortion law if the extortion is undertaken to further legitimate union objectives. That includes cases of assault, even murder. You might want to check out the Cato institute. Here's an URL: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-316es.html
12 state codes also follow the federal rules.
DB
While you won't move your primary production to one facility in E. Europe in one shot, you might want to take a look at Rational Software's methodology. By breaking down projects into small pieces that cycle quickly, each cycle leaving useable artifacts, you have the basis for distributing your code to many shops in many countries all of which use this methodology (30 day free trial available at www.rational.com) to get requirements and manage changes. Great tools (expensive as hell though).
You end up having your high level folk in the US, gathering the requirements and managing the process while the bulk of the work goes on in 2nd world nations saving costs.
DB
Third world countries are third world countries because the government steals too much and is too capricious to invest in without bribing left and right.
In that atmosphere workers are screwed already. The only hope is to get skills and emigrate into a high paid H1b job. If you're successful in the US, come back and build a business back home and treat people decently.
DB
Tell that tripe to the people who get harrassed, beaten, or killed breaking strikes. If unions are more than violent extortion rackets, why have they lobbied for and gotten special legal protections so that they cannot ever be blamed for union violence? If a company were to be as violent as unions are, the board would go directly to jail for the violence and probably also get nailed under criminal RICO.
DB
I notice you are still too chicken to advertise who you are or where you work. My point stands, even you know better than to let that little secret out of the bag.
As for my own reports, I've had at various times 3 or 4 at a time in a few companies. I'm currently on my own and hiring for my own company which organized a whole three months ago so I only have 5 on the payroll at the moment. I'm financing this out of my own pocket so if my attitude is so destructive, it's certainly my own ass on the line.
As to loyalty, I need to have loyalty to everybody I contract with. That includes employees and that includes customers. I certainly understand that some customers are money losers and need to be dropped, but that's not what I was complaining about. I was taking a dim view to the idea that customer escalation efforts are a reason to give purposefully bad service. That's mean, nasty, and doesn't serve anybody well. It's a betrayal on the part of my subordinates because it gives me an angrier customer base that I have to deal with and it's a lack of faith in my ability to tell the difference between a legitimate gripe and a blowhard customer inventing problems.
I'm sure we both are glad we don't have a business relationship.
DB
In an interstate call, federal law and both state laws would need to be complied with. Again, see the case of L. Tripp. She called from Virginia where one party knowledge was legal into Maryland where both parties are required to know.
Again, it is worth consulting a professional to determine legality in the particular circumstances at hand.
DB
One thing that nobody seems to be mentioning is that this also increases indirect OS competition. One of the biggest perceived problems to going to Mac OS X is the need to get new hardware. With a Transmeta server all you would need to do is change the emulation and voila, same hardware, Unix OS, and you don't have to up your admin costs for a unix admin, just use Aqua as your admin interface.
DB
Unless you are running your business on a shoestring (hint: Telocity lets you do this with residential service as long as the traffic is low).
DB
The above two anonymous cowards obviously didn't advertise where they work because they knew that their attitudes, if publicly known, would negatively impact sales and profitability.
Guess what, they still negatively impact sales and profitability. If you worked for me and had that attitude, I would fire your ass.
DB
One piece of the problem you don't mention is that your local government has most likely signed monopoly contracts so that you only have one cable provider.
But I don't understand why you threw apple in there at the end. They seem to be one of the few companies going in the opposite direction, from proprietary to open.
DB
No rumor on that last part. If you want to keep up with that, take a look at the netcraft survey (http://www.netcraft.com)