One thing that I've had work a high percentage of times is to call in (the third or fourth time I've already had the runaround) and when I get a human being, simply request to see their supervisor. When they start stammering and wondering what kind of nutcase they are dealing with, explain that they have nothing to worry about but you have been routed to several dead ends already and are just not going to discuss the problem with a level that has already admitted your problem is not solveable by them.
Repeat until it doesn't work. Then explain what the situation is. When I use this technique I often get one or two levels up in 5-10 minutes and my successful resolution percentage goes way above 50%
depending on your jurisdiction, the above advice may be illegal. Think Linda Tripp. She just barely avoided going to jail for recording conversations with Monica Lewinsky when only she (Tripp) knew about them.
Check with a bonafide attorney as to what is legal or not.
Virtual PC doesn't run transparently, it just runs well. You are in another environment and inside that environment you get all the benefits and disadvantages of the Windows experience. It is something to be used when you have a required application that only exists on the Windows platform.
I didn't try mysql on my copy of the beta but Lynx compiled for me just fine with about 5 minutes of tweaking. The thing that will give me hope for widespread adoption of unix on Mac is if they make the terminal app recordable. If I can record my keystrokes in an applescript session and then turn my 5 minute hack into a 10 second applescript, all sorts of possibilities open up for the casual mac hacker.
Let's say that the average hardware replacement cycle is 5 years in the corporate world (some servers get replaced quicker, others hang around a bit longer). This means that, on average, in a given year, 20% of the corporate hardware is up for replacement. Considering that Apple's presence is probably around 3% of the installed hardware base, there is quite a lot of room for Apple to grow by just offering good, cheap file and print server that don't have CALs like all Windows servers do.
Mac OS X + Samba is a great value proposition that doesn't require a lot of corporate admin retraining. I would expect them to win a significantly greater amount of business in the hardware turnover market.
Whether OS X for x86 ever sees the light of day depends entirely on there being a profitable business plan that increases Apple's bottom line if they were to do it. End of story. OS X for x86 exists just like OS 9 for x86 exists and OS 8 for x86 exists. They were and are the corporate parachute that Apple is keeping handy in case IBM and Motoroloa decide to abandon PPC. Considering the issues that have periodically cropped up with the AIM alliance, it's a wise insurance investment.
It's not politics, it's business. As the dot.com shakeout is showing convincingly, cool technology without a way to make money is a disaster waiting to happen. Apple almost went down that road when it cloned the last time. When and if they port to other chipsets, they are going to have to do it with a rock solid business case.
As for backward compatibility with previous macs, there are people who have booted OS X on many macs not on the official list. It's just that it runs slowly.
By restricting the list, Apple has a ready answer to all those whiners who otherwise would be shouting from the ZDNet forums, "OS X Sucks! I can't get it to run on my 32Mb 6100/66 at any decent speed." Now you may want to be able to run this OS on old, crap hardware but by restricting the list of 'compatible' systems, it's clearly at your own risk and your user experience is simply not going to be up to Apple standards.
What would you call display PDF, the quartz engine, and Aqua? X windows is gone in Mac OS X and the replacement is mmm, mmm, good.
The fact that the display standard is PDF has enormous implications for computing on the desktop. BeOS has a huge app problem and Mac OS X is going to come out the gate with the ability to run more apps than any other startup OS ever. You have the few cocoa apps written by Next developers. You have the wave of carbonized apps that should be out this year. You have the great mass of Mac OS 9 compatible apps running in classic. You also have pine, apache, sendmail, and the thousands of other GNU and non-GNU unix tools that can be compiled and run from tarball. And if you truly want X-Windows, you can compile it, or you can buy it with support.
*nixes have a shot at the desktop. It's called Mac OS X
Actually, you don't need to spend lots of money to switch to Mac OS X. Let's say you are an NT4 Server based house and you are starting a new branch office (a fairly common scenario). You can buy an Intel based server for around $3-5k, load win2k on it, buy client seat licenses for the 50 people that are going to work there at $2.5-10k (depending on app use) and stretch your admins to add one more office to support or put in a cheap junior admin for on-site help.
For a linux solution, it's the same $3-5k for the Intel hardware, and free for the licensing costs but you have to hire a new admin for the new infrastructure ($60-90k yearly) or train one of your admins to be win/unix capable which will drive their market value so high you have to either raise their salary to the point where it eliminates the software cost savings or live with retention problems as recruiters keep robbing your very marketable admin pool.
For a Mac OS X solution, it's $3.5-5.5k for the PPC hardware w/OS and you add Samba along with the rest of your Unix app servers so it looks like the NT box. No licensing costs so it's nearly as cheap as the Linux solution but the admin is so easy that retraining is minimal and the salary pain and retention problems are low as well.
Mac OS X not only is the least expensive solution when you add salary into the equation (and good PHBs do this) but it gives you the best bang for the buck.
Oh, BTW: the reason that Mac OS X doesn't run on Intel is because Steve Jobs can't figure out how to make money doing it. If he could (and I'm betting he will eventually), it's not too hard to recompile the code for x86 since work on x86 Darwin has done most of the job for him.
If you don't want the GUI, just type >console into the login window. Poof! No GUI. I'm sure it can be automated for server installs so you have to manually invoke the GUI for easy maintenance features.
I would bet that a surprising number of hardcore open source bigots are going to be advocating OS X even though they won't like it. The fight won't be with Apple advocates but Win2K advocates. They will start off suggesting Linux or FreeBSD to their PHB but when the Win2K camp sneers at the maintenance issues and the difficulty of finding and keeping qualified Unix administrators, Mac OS X comes to the rescue by being cheaper than Win2k, a true Unix that can be run in console mode or w/GUI if the PHB's have to maintain it while looking for a real admin, and moderately less sacriligious than the Win2k is to their blessed open source hearts by being based on the open source Darwin platform.
Right now, the cost of an OS isn't the OS itself, it's the seat licenses. Apple doesn't charge $50-$200 a seat like Microsoft but gives better value by offering Unix goodness and stability.
I own VirtualPC so I am familiar with its joys and frustrations. What people often don't like about VirtualPC (and what is going to drive the sales of Carbon and Coca upgrades) is that you have to boot another environment which can take up huge amounts of resources.
Marrying Wine with some sort of seamless, underlying, always on hardware emulator is the true killer app because then you have something that, while it doesn't meet the Mac interface guidelines, does run. This will allow Macs to escape from the 'doesn't run required software' hell that has kept them out of an awful lot of businesses.
What I was thinking about when I wrote that was the 'misuse of a computer' section, not the obscenity charge. I see your point. I do hope you see mine.
In the normal course of American law (obscenity, like slavery was before the Civil War, is not a normal section of the law), a crime is defined, you know where you stand before, during, and after your acts and if you get arrested, you have a fairly good idea of what's the verdict going to be.
This predictability is what the whole system is based on, a principle that lets society function with a minimum of legal friction.
>>Mac OS X is, without question, the first UNIX that will break into the mainstream desktop market. But unless they start thinking about being a little more practical with it and with their hardware designs, people just won't care enough to continue buying Mac>>
The entire move to Mac OS X is based on practicality. The ability to run BSD applications is finally going to kill the 'not enough apps' argument because somewhere in Cupertino, is somebody porting WINE to OS X. Right next door is the group that is taking all the open source standard bearers and creating automated ways of taking the code and wrapping a Mac OS X compliant interface on them.
As for their hardware designs, what is impractical about a 5 hour battery life? Or does 5.3 pounds in a notebook strike you as too flighty? Is adding a PCI slot to their desktop line and upping their bus speed to 133Mhz something that is a problem for you?
Apple may occasionally come out with something like their twentieth century machine or the cube but, on average, they have a higher percentage of hits per design risk than most other computer companies. This is partly because so much of the industry is made up of commoditized herd followers.
Whenever you innovate, you are going to have your share of duds and your share of hits. Apple's salvation is keeping the ratio of hits to duds as high as possible. These new machines are likely to further that goal.
Actually, the kid is guilty or not guilty depending on what he did, irrespective of whether he was caught or charged properly.
This isn't quantum physics. There is no uncertainty principle. What the presumption of innocence is about is that the legal system is charged with treating the accused as innocent irrespective of his guilt or innocence until a trial has settled matters.
Actually, Russian, not British. If you read the article, the West is playing catch up to the Russians in this area who have had such shells for at least two years. The scary part is that the Russians are dying off and desperate for money. The IRA (according to the article) is interested in a suitcase version of this and I would guess that the Russians would sell it when they develop it.
Imagine this in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or any other high value electronics concentration. For network administrators it means that they have to military harden their networks *right now* and hope that they keep ahead of the kooks.
The Soviets (who can't run an economy worth a damn) would have eventually run out of land if it weren't for the supplies & support they were getting from the US.
It's impossible to run a WWII mechanized conflict when your entire industrial base is smashed. The assistance we gave stabilized them and allowed them to continue to fight.
"Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats"
Unless you're running MacOS X where XML does take over every single program and tool. There's something to be said for a company that anal retentive (in UI).
DB
Re:There has to be a practical reason...
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
$2k-3k for an orbit ride up? It would be the hot vacation spot of the century.
You ask, who's left? The consumer is left. Right now, it is basically acceptable to charge $4 for an aspirin in a hospital. Nobody blinks twice because they, personally, do not perceive themselves as paying for it. Ditto with unnecessary tests & procedures. Take away the third party payer and you kick back into action the awesome power of enlightened self-interest by exposing just how stupid the US tort system is (defensive medicine is much of the cause of medical waste) and the insurance companies will change their behavior when their customer base changes and they become little more than buyers' collectives.
Socialism is "least of all evils" only when you are short-sighted. The long-term destructiveness of the system is on display everywhere east of the old iron curtain. Government has never found a practical, efficient way to ration any economic goods, much less the really important stuff like healthcare. The free market can work, but fascistic corporatism (the current system) doesn't.
Let's turn it around. If you were the employer, would you test? As long as the answer is no and there are actual employers who agree with you, they will reap the benefits of hiring the genetically weak who are superior in actual job performance.
I'm setting up my own company and frankly, I wouldn't test legal or not. I won't be doing drug tests either.
The chinese are doing wonderful work with assymetric warfare... coming soon to a world war near you.
Frankly, the 2nd amendment comes into play here. Not the way people think, with fearless teens fighting back the invading commies (what was that silly movie title?) but the simple statistical fact that if you grind a widely armed mass population down sufficiently, a certain number of them are simply going to commit suicide by randomly shooting some overlords.
They'll get stomped of course, but there goes all that genetic superiority into the meat locker all the same. The hypothetical ubermen would have to ease up to avoid carnage, at least until they can get the populace disarmed...
Your diagnosis of the problem (employers are gatekeepers for healthcare) is spot on. The problem is your solution. In two words, it sucks.
The history of employee provided health care starts off in WW II when there were wage freezes and other socialist/fascist monkeying with the economy in order to get it into war footing. People couldn't find enough workers and the law prevented them from paying higher wages to bid up what was available (ironically enough, those who were unhealthy enough not to be accepted in the armed forces or the aged). The work around? Offer lavish benefits including health care.
The problem is that people got used to it and it stuck. The thing that keeps it going though is that the tax laws give employers preferential treatment over other health care financing methods such as self-pay.
So what do we have here, govt. interference screws up the medical system by introducing massive third-party pay situations and to nobody's surprise who knows economics, costs spiral out of control.
The fix isn't to go all the way to a socialized system which will kill R&D into new medicine and procedures but to eliminate the original government caused distortions and make healthcare available without employers being involved in any way.
Please, don't ever run anything important. If you have a corrupt, inefficient organization, you come in with a new administrator and fire PHBs, not engineers. You certainly don't let the corrupt, incompetent PHBs pick their own targets for firing, they are guaranteed to go after the productive geeks to protect their personal boot lickers. This is management 101.
And before we go there, yeah, private industry does this too. It's just that when private industry does it, the fired often group together, form competitors, and beat the crap out of their former employers. With the government's monopoly power, it doesn't work.
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One thing that I've had work a high percentage of times is to call in (the third or fourth time I've already had the runaround) and when I get a human being, simply request to see their supervisor. When they start stammering and wondering what kind of nutcase they are dealing with, explain that they have nothing to worry about but you have been routed to several dead ends already and are just not going to discuss the problem with a level that has already admitted your problem is not solveable by them.
Repeat until it doesn't work. Then explain what the situation is. When I use this technique I often get one or two levels up in 5-10 minutes and my successful resolution percentage goes way above 50%
DB
depending on your jurisdiction, the above advice may be illegal. Think Linda Tripp. She just barely avoided going to jail for recording conversations with Monica Lewinsky when only she (Tripp) knew about them.
Check with a bonafide attorney as to what is legal or not.
DB
Virtual PC doesn't run transparently, it just runs well. You are in another environment and inside that environment you get all the benefits and disadvantages of the Windows experience. It is something to be used when you have a required application that only exists on the Windows platform.
DB
I didn't try mysql on my copy of the beta but Lynx compiled for me just fine with about 5 minutes of tweaking. The thing that will give me hope for widespread adoption of unix on Mac is if they make the terminal app recordable. If I can record my keystrokes in an applescript session and then turn my 5 minute hack into a 10 second applescript, all sorts of possibilities open up for the casual mac hacker.
DB
Let's say that the average hardware replacement cycle is 5 years in the corporate world (some servers get replaced quicker, others hang around a bit longer). This means that, on average, in a given year, 20% of the corporate hardware is up for replacement. Considering that Apple's presence is probably around 3% of the installed hardware base, there is quite a lot of room for Apple to grow by just offering good, cheap file and print server that don't have CALs like all Windows servers do.
Mac OS X + Samba is a great value proposition that doesn't require a lot of corporate admin retraining. I would expect them to win a significantly greater amount of business in the hardware turnover market.
DB
Whether OS X for x86 ever sees the light of day depends entirely on there being a profitable business plan that increases Apple's bottom line if they were to do it. End of story. OS X for x86 exists just like OS 9 for x86 exists and OS 8 for x86 exists. They were and are the corporate parachute that Apple is keeping handy in case IBM and Motoroloa decide to abandon PPC. Considering the issues that have periodically cropped up with the AIM alliance, it's a wise insurance investment.
DB
It's not politics, it's business. As the dot.com shakeout is showing convincingly, cool technology without a way to make money is a disaster waiting to happen. Apple almost went down that road when it cloned the last time. When and if they port to other chipsets, they are going to have to do it with a rock solid business case.
As for backward compatibility with previous macs, there are people who have booted OS X on many macs not on the official list. It's just that it runs slowly.
By restricting the list, Apple has a ready answer to all those whiners who otherwise would be shouting from the ZDNet forums, "OS X Sucks! I can't get it to run on my 32Mb 6100/66 at any decent speed." Now you may want to be able to run this OS on old, crap hardware but by restricting the list of 'compatible' systems, it's clearly at your own risk and your user experience is simply not going to be up to Apple standards.
DB
What would you call display PDF, the quartz engine, and Aqua? X windows is gone in Mac OS X and the replacement is mmm, mmm, good.
The fact that the display standard is PDF has enormous implications for computing on the desktop. BeOS has a huge app problem and Mac OS X is going to come out the gate with the ability to run more apps than any other startup OS ever. You have the few cocoa apps written by Next developers. You have the wave of carbonized apps that should be out this year. You have the great mass of Mac OS 9 compatible apps running in classic. You also have pine, apache, sendmail, and the thousands of other GNU and non-GNU unix tools that can be compiled and run from tarball. And if you truly want X-Windows, you can compile it, or you can buy it with support.
*nixes have a shot at the desktop. It's called Mac OS X
DB
Actually, you don't need to spend lots of money to switch to Mac OS X. Let's say you are an NT4 Server based house and you are starting a new branch office (a fairly common scenario). You can buy an Intel based server for around $3-5k, load win2k on it, buy client seat licenses for the 50 people that are going to work there at $2.5-10k (depending on app use) and stretch your admins to add one more office to support or put in a cheap junior admin for on-site help.
For a linux solution, it's the same $3-5k for the Intel hardware, and free for the licensing costs but you have to hire a new admin for the new infrastructure ($60-90k yearly) or train one of your admins to be win/unix capable which will drive their market value so high you have to either raise their salary to the point where it eliminates the software cost savings or live with retention problems as recruiters keep robbing your very marketable admin pool.
For a Mac OS X solution, it's $3.5-5.5k for the PPC hardware w/OS and you add Samba along with the rest of your Unix app servers so it looks like the NT box. No licensing costs so it's nearly as cheap as the Linux solution but the admin is so easy that retraining is minimal and the salary pain and retention problems are low as well.
Mac OS X not only is the least expensive solution when you add salary into the equation (and good PHBs do this) but it gives you the best bang for the buck.
Oh, BTW: the reason that Mac OS X doesn't run on Intel is because Steve Jobs can't figure out how to make money doing it. If he could (and I'm betting he will eventually), it's not too hard to recompile the code for x86 since work on x86 Darwin has done most of the job for him.
DB
If you don't want the GUI, just type >console into the login window. Poof! No GUI. I'm sure it can be automated for server installs so you have to manually invoke the GUI for easy maintenance features.
I would bet that a surprising number of hardcore open source bigots are going to be advocating OS X even though they won't like it. The fight won't be with Apple advocates but Win2K advocates. They will start off suggesting Linux or FreeBSD to their PHB but when the Win2K camp sneers at the maintenance issues and the difficulty of finding and keeping qualified Unix administrators, Mac OS X comes to the rescue by being cheaper than Win2k, a true Unix that can be run in console mode or w/GUI if the PHB's have to maintain it while looking for a real admin, and moderately less sacriligious than the Win2k is to their blessed open source hearts by being based on the open source Darwin platform.
Right now, the cost of an OS isn't the OS itself, it's the seat licenses. Apple doesn't charge $50-$200 a seat like Microsoft but gives better value by offering Unix goodness and stability.
DB
I own VirtualPC so I am familiar with its joys and frustrations. What people often don't like about VirtualPC (and what is going to drive the sales of Carbon and Coca upgrades) is that you have to boot another environment which can take up huge amounts of resources.
Marrying Wine with some sort of seamless, underlying, always on hardware emulator is the true killer app because then you have something that, while it doesn't meet the Mac interface guidelines, does run. This will allow Macs to escape from the 'doesn't run required software' hell that has kept them out of an awful lot of businesses.
DB
What I was thinking about when I wrote that was the 'misuse of a computer' section, not the obscenity charge. I see your point. I do hope you see mine.
In the normal course of American law (obscenity, like slavery was before the Civil War, is not a normal section of the law), a crime is defined, you know where you stand before, during, and after your acts and if you get arrested, you have a fairly good idea of what's the verdict going to be.
This predictability is what the whole system is based on, a principle that lets society function with a minimum of legal friction.
DB
OK, ok, so you wouldn't do a kernel hack but a hardware hack and replace the pad. Now *that* would be worth several stories on /.
B-)
DB
>>Mac OS X is, without question, the first UNIX that will break into the mainstream desktop market. But unless they start thinking about being a little more practical with it and with their hardware designs, people just won't care enough to continue buying Mac>>
The entire move to Mac OS X is based on practicality. The ability to run BSD applications is finally going to kill the 'not enough apps' argument because somewhere in Cupertino, is somebody porting WINE to OS X. Right next door is the group that is taking all the open source standard bearers and creating automated ways of taking the code and wrapping a Mac OS X compliant interface on them.
As for their hardware designs, what is impractical about a 5 hour battery life? Or does 5.3 pounds in a notebook strike you as too flighty? Is adding a PCI slot to their desktop line and upping their bus speed to 133Mhz something that is a problem for you?
Apple may occasionally come out with something like their twentieth century machine or the cube but, on average, they have a higher percentage of hits per design risk than most other computer companies. This is partly because so much of the industry is made up of commoditized herd followers.
Whenever you innovate, you are going to have your share of duds and your share of hits. Apple's salvation is keeping the ratio of hits to duds as high as possible. These new machines are likely to further that goal.
DB
A funny post considering this machine won't run Windows...
DB
Actually, the kid is guilty or not guilty depending on what he did, irrespective of whether he was caught or charged properly.
This isn't quantum physics. There is no uncertainty principle. What the presumption of innocence is about is that the legal system is charged with treating the accused as innocent irrespective of his guilt or innocence until a trial has settled matters.
DB
Actually, Russian, not British. If you read the article, the West is playing catch up to the Russians in this area who have had such shells for at least two years. The scary part is that the Russians are dying off and desperate for money. The IRA (according to the article) is interested in a suitcase version of this and I would guess that the Russians would sell it when they develop it.
Imagine this in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or any other high value electronics concentration. For network administrators it means that they have to military harden their networks *right now* and hope that they keep ahead of the kooks.
Vain hope.
DB
The Soviets (who can't run an economy worth a damn) would have eventually run out of land if it weren't for the supplies & support they were getting from the US.
It's impossible to run a WWII mechanized conflict when your entire industrial base is smashed. The assistance we gave stabilized them and allowed them to continue to fight.
Don't they teach logistics in Nazi weenie school?
"Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats"
Unless you're running MacOS X where XML does take over every single program and tool. There's something to be said for a company that anal retentive (in UI).
DB
$2k-3k for an orbit ride up? It would be the hot vacation spot of the century.
DB
You ask, who's left? The consumer is left. Right now, it is basically acceptable to charge $4 for an aspirin in a hospital. Nobody blinks twice because they, personally, do not perceive themselves as paying for it. Ditto with unnecessary tests & procedures. Take away the third party payer and you kick back into action the awesome power of enlightened self-interest by exposing just how stupid the US tort system is (defensive medicine is much of the cause of medical waste) and the insurance companies will change their behavior when their customer base changes and they become little more than buyers' collectives.
Socialism is "least of all evils" only when you are short-sighted. The long-term destructiveness of the system is on display everywhere east of the old iron curtain. Government has never found a practical, efficient way to ration any economic goods, much less the really important stuff like healthcare. The free market can work, but fascistic corporatism (the current system) doesn't.
DB
Let's turn it around. If you were the employer, would you test? As long as the answer is no and there are actual employers who agree with you, they will reap the benefits of hiring the genetically weak who are superior in actual job performance.
I'm setting up my own company and frankly, I wouldn't test legal or not. I won't be doing drug tests either.
OTOH, you don't perform, you don't have a job.
DB
The chinese are doing wonderful work with assymetric warfare... coming soon to a world war near you.
Frankly, the 2nd amendment comes into play here. Not the way people think, with fearless teens fighting back the invading commies (what was that silly movie title?) but the simple statistical fact that if you grind a widely armed mass population down sufficiently, a certain number of them are simply going to commit suicide by randomly shooting some overlords.
They'll get stomped of course, but there goes all that genetic superiority into the meat locker all the same. The hypothetical ubermen would have to ease up to avoid carnage, at least until they can get the populace disarmed...
DB
Your diagnosis of the problem (employers are gatekeepers for healthcare) is spot on. The problem is your solution. In two words, it sucks.
The history of employee provided health care starts off in WW II when there were wage freezes and other socialist/fascist monkeying with the economy in order to get it into war footing. People couldn't find enough workers and the law prevented them from paying higher wages to bid up what was available (ironically enough, those who were unhealthy enough not to be accepted in the armed forces or the aged). The work around? Offer lavish benefits including health care.
The problem is that people got used to it and it stuck. The thing that keeps it going though is that the tax laws give employers preferential treatment over other health care financing methods such as self-pay.
So what do we have here, govt. interference screws up the medical system by introducing massive third-party pay situations and to nobody's surprise who knows economics, costs spiral out of control.
The fix isn't to go all the way to a socialized system which will kill R&D into new medicine and procedures but to eliminate the original government caused distortions and make healthcare available without employers being involved in any way.
DB
Please, don't ever run anything important. If you have a corrupt, inefficient organization, you come in with a new administrator and fire PHBs, not engineers. You certainly don't let the corrupt, incompetent PHBs pick their own targets for firing, they are guaranteed to go after the productive geeks to protect their personal boot lickers. This is management 101.
And before we go there, yeah, private industry does this too. It's just that when private industry does it, the fired often group together, form competitors, and beat the crap out of their former employers. With the government's monopoly power, it doesn't work.
DB