Many people don't get this, that the 'app' to beat is often a handful of young interns in sneakers and a giant row of filing cabinets. Think about the cost, redundancy, and availablity of that system seriously for a moment and compare yours to it. The 'Killer App' that I see in the office is the ability to bring up a customer's account details in a matter of seconds. This comes in handy while customers are on the phone in a sales situation. The filing cabinet system can compete with an electronic system on outgoing sales calls, especially if one 'upgrades' to a couple of people that are fast on the 10-key, for reports and analysis. But incoming calls are a problem, as requesting and getting account details is a matter of minutes at best, not seconds. Also this system doesn't scale very well.
PHBs, and the techs that convince them, lose sight of the fact that their multi-million dollar system just ain't worth it sometimes. Seriously, work got done, sales were made, money was counted before the computerized office. So we get all this whiz-bang stuff, that ought to allow unlimited productivity and creativity, and somehow it comes down to this giant restricted environment, that takes all these productivity savings and funnels them into the hands of admins, techs, hardware, and mostly, software companies, with a little left over for the business that's buying in. How does locking things down so tight that users can't change their own default paper size help a business? Well, I'll tell you; we now have a guy whose job it is to set your default paper size for you (his title is Windows Network Admin), that we never thought of needing when we were on Macs. Now this guy will go on and on about how this system will allow him to easily do all these things, and maybe he really believes it, but the punchline is that none of those things helps us sell product, they just allow the system itself to continue to exist. See, Linux and Apple are not fighting Microsoft, they're fighting Windows admins, who like things just the way they are.
We need: 1) customer account info in seconds 2) email 3) spreadsheet 4) word processing 5) web browser
Certainly Linux and Macs can handle these things with ease. Macs, I think, have an advantage over Linux in being easier to deploy; Linux in being more flexible. Windows advantage is it is what a Windows admin uses. Otherwise, it is much more expensive, brittle, insecure.
It hurts you snobs, but helps me. A company I was at was killed by the dot com bust, and went thru several rounds of layoffs. I stayed long past the point justified by my competence level or seniority simply because I enjoyed doing user support, and it showed. But then again, I come at the profession from a different perspective than most of you. My resume includes: weed sprayer, janitor, warehouse clerk, forklift driver, truck driver, Pepsi man, factory worker, building maintenance, painter, roofer,... So to me, at it's worst, this job is pretty good. (ask me about working a pepsi route sometime).
At the end, I was sole end user support for about 40 NT machines and 40 macs (there were 200+ when I started), along with still being email and phone admin and whatever else.
I know that burned up the laid off guys, especially the windows tech, (I was the mac tech); that here was a redneck with no computer schooling (hell, I barely passed my senior year of high school), doing 3 jobs basically, often better than they did. Example: user's Dell dies (everytime the power blinked I lost video card, network card, something), and they can't boot up or work at all. The other guys would make a big deal and take most of a day "restoring" or whatever they were doing. I didn't have time for that shit. Yank their drive, screw it into another box, and turn it on. 30 minutes, tops. Sometimes they had to live with vga video for the rest of the day, (until I got a chance to install that machine's video driver or run a repair install or whatever), but at least they were able to open excel files and generate revenue for the company, which is the point most techs miss.
And big networks NEED this kind of functionality You mean NON-functionality. You just said they can't do anything but the narrow tasks you specifically allow them to do. That's what a Windows network needs to function. I don't get how most techs today strip the office machines down to slightly more functional than the terminals we had 15 years ago and then act like they've built something special. You think the majority of the users show up for work wanting to break things? Anyway, you guarantee that office drones will never rise to the level of power user that way.
When they started throwing around the term "Homeland" a few years ago, it sounded a lot like "Fatherland" to me, and I knew then that no good could come of it.
"How much of that is Rubbermaids arrogance and sticking to a high price to keep inflated salaries?"
By arrogance, you mean a salary that will pay a mortgage and allow one to raise a family in America. Tell us about the Chinese shantytown you enjoy living in. (In your analogy, chinese workers making 60 cents or whatever a day are "vendor B".)
Only if they are money grubbing bastards. If they only take some percentage of sales, then it favors shareware devs over big software houses. Giant would love to see a $50K up-front price tag on this. That's assuming it works.
So the dual core Intel is twice as fast at running integer code as the single core G5 it replaces. give or take. yippee.
Intel wanted in, because long term, Apple was a threat. (AMD is a short term threat) If OSX were to take off on somebody else's processor, well, that's somebody else's processor (that they can't build) selling, and Bill Gates would compile Windows in a heartbeat to run on that processor too. He's done it before for less. So Intel offers Apple everything; all you can eat chips, cheap, delivered, tested and wrapped up in a custom motherboard that you didn't have to build. And less power. And cheap.
I bet it's shocking what Apple's paying for duos. I bet they're paying next to nothing on the first round. Steve talked bad to them and they said yes sir. There was only one thing Intel insisted on...
Intel wouldn't put their chip in anything that said "Power" on it.
"MacBook" is stupid enough that weird California types could have conceivably come up with it. And they did, in a way; when forbidden to use "power", they had to keep the other half of the name; it is a book, after all. And a Mac.
Anyway, as soon as they can scrape AMD off, look for processor improvements to "plateau" soon after.
Too bad they never heard of Filemaker. Blows Access away and with version 8 it's a whole new ballgame. Not that that helps you linux users directly, but I assume they could port filemaker to linux if they wanted, and if there is demand, they will want to. They released a linux server once, then discontinued it. I guess peple likely to use filemaker (or access) are not likely to use linux for their server, and especially not for their desktop.
I mean, it's one little thing in your sea of applications, but having an access-killing desktop database program available might help you in your "Linux Everywhere" movement.
I'd help, but I've been evangelizing the mac for too many years and I am tired now.
If you had a fiber connection to your house, and could watch this, well, that's all you could do with it. You won't be able to save (and pirate) something like this for many years. I wouldn't feel ripped off because *it's that much better* than anything you can download. I guess people would downsample and I would be happy to watch it for free at my current resolutions. Just thinking about 8-10 years ago when nobody's computer had the speed/storage to do anything real with television/movies; DRM wasn't a big issue.
It would be nice, in a way, if broadcast/commercial tech leapt that far ahead of normal computers again. But for myself, I grew up with regular TV and will probably be satisfied with that for the rest of my life. If a show is good, it's good on regular tv, at the movie, in a book, as a play; the delivery really doesn't matter.
Yeah. We had to buy a copy of Norton AV at work because we had a windows person who was getting tired of us emailing him a word macro virus all the time. Turns out we had about 3 macs with it. We're a mac shop. Norton sucks.
From the first time I touched a mouse 10 years ago (when the plant shut down and I had 6 months of unemployment to burn), thru today (where I'm IT Manager at a small company) I have done some brainless shit in my time, and learned everything I know the hard way. I guess I can't learn, or maybe the mac makes me stupid, cause I download everything I can, especially obscure little shareware and freeware. I routinely fill my desktop on a download binge, run it all, throw out most of it. and find a few little gems here and there. i was really dissapointed that I didnt get that auto-start worm back in '98 when everybody else did...
I admit I skipped a page or two of the thread, but read at least half of it, and am suprised not to see anyone suggest an Apple solution. It uses open LDAP, can bind to existing LPAD or AD or be a master. Uses Cyrus, Postfix and squirrelmail, but would run Communigate Pro if you wanted. It clusters out of the box, has a nice plug-in raid box using fibrechannel, with a double-click install SAN solution. It's already configured to use the blacklists and anti-spam stuff. Needless to say, it's dead-easy to set up (compared to a lot of what I've read), and once it is, your granny could manage it. I can't imagine 5 xserves and an xraid not being able to handle this just fine, and that would set you back what, $25,000 -$30,000? That includes a fiberchannel switch. You'd have real support, and yet you have all your open standards and BSD. Just a thought.
It would be nice to be treated as a paying customer, but I haven't experienced that in several years. But that's because I'm not paying (10 bucks maybe), my insurance is. So I have no idea what stuff costs at the doctor's anymore.
Until I bring my 3 yr old boy to the doctor for a cut on the chin I would like to see stitches in. It's not even bleeding after 5 minutes, but he's 3 and you hate to see a big scar and you ask yourself "how much can 3 stitches cost?". (Family insurance where i work in Florida is $800 a month, so he and my wife are uninsured). Well, the "Think of the Children" people here made it illegal for the doctor to put stitches in the face at the office; a hospital has to do it. So for 30 minutes of the doctor's time (and a nurse), and the hospital room; $2500. For something that really doesn't take a doctor. Still paying for that 2 years later.
Course if I had insurance it would be $50 or whatever. Doctors office visits usually run me $25 to $40 for the uninsured kid, instead of $80-$150, when they find out there is no insurance and I'm writing them a check. I understand that's the "charity" rate, but it gives an idea how much it costs to run the office, pay the help, light bill, etc.
Which is my point. The insurance paying the doctor or hospital directly is criminal. And it's the doctors' fault for starting this trend, but they used to have the hardest time getting paid, when it was customary to bill patients thru the mail. Analogy: You go to the grocery store, they tell you what you should eat, deliver the food to your fridge, and debit your checking account for the amount they and the bank agree it should cost. Who's watching the hen house? Not entirely accurate because I'm more qualified to buy food than diagnose illness, but if you've ever itemized a decent medical bill you will see some pricing that is completely arbitrary.
Fix for all health-care cost woes in the country:
Make it illegal for insurance/HMO/PPO to pay providers directly: claims must be paid to the patient, who is responsible to the provider (of course the check could be made out to patient AND provider to prevent the skipping of town by patient)
That way, medical care costs whatever it costs and they don't care if you have insurance; the price is the same. I realize this fix would break HMOs and such, but they only exist in the first place because of the current situation. Also, these sue-happy people would be uninsurable in short order, forcing them to put up their own money to start their process. In a short time doctors would begin competing with each other like they used to before we had this crisis; going to the doctor would be like going to the store - you don't like that doctor, go to another. One doctor is too high, another will undercut him. Your insurance doesn't care; they pay $80 for X- poor people's doctors will charge $85 for x, rich people's doctors will charge $160 for x, I'd try to find one charging $100, knowing I'd have to pay it and get $80 back from the insurance.
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Many people don't get this, that the 'app' to beat is often a handful of young interns in sneakers and a giant row of filing cabinets. Think about the cost, redundancy, and availablity of that system seriously for a moment and compare yours to it. The 'Killer App' that I see in the office is the ability to bring up a customer's account details in a matter of seconds. This comes in handy while customers are on the phone in a sales situation. The filing cabinet system can compete with an electronic system on outgoing sales calls, especially if one 'upgrades' to a couple of people that are fast on the 10-key, for reports and analysis. But incoming calls are a problem, as requesting and getting account details is a matter of minutes at best, not seconds. Also this system doesn't scale very well.
PHBs, and the techs that convince them, lose sight of the fact that their multi-million dollar system just ain't worth it sometimes. Seriously, work got done, sales were made, money was counted before the computerized office. So we get all this whiz-bang stuff, that ought to allow unlimited productivity and creativity, and somehow it comes down to this giant restricted environment, that takes all these productivity savings and funnels them into the hands of admins, techs, hardware, and mostly, software companies, with a little left over for the business that's buying in. How does locking things down so tight that users can't change their own default paper size help a business? Well, I'll tell you; we now have a guy whose job it is to set your default paper size for you (his title is Windows Network Admin), that we never thought of needing when we were on Macs. Now this guy will go on and on about how this system will allow him to easily do all these things, and maybe he really believes it, but the punchline is that none of those things helps us sell product, they just allow the system itself to continue to exist. See, Linux and Apple are not fighting Microsoft, they're fighting Windows admins, who like things just the way they are.
We need:
1) customer account info in seconds
2) email
3) spreadsheet
4) word processing
5) web browser
Certainly Linux and Macs can handle these things with ease. Macs, I think, have an advantage over Linux in being easier to deploy; Linux in being more flexible. Windows advantage is it is what a Windows admin uses. Otherwise, it is much more expensive, brittle, insecure.
"Access is best in what it does."
Try FileMaker sometime
It hurts you snobs, but helps me. A company I was at was killed by the dot com bust, and went thru several rounds of layoffs. I stayed long past the point justified by my competence level or seniority simply because I enjoyed doing user support, and it showed. But then again, I come at the profession from a different perspective than most of you. My resume includes: weed sprayer, janitor, warehouse clerk, forklift driver, truck driver, Pepsi man, factory worker, building maintenance, painter, roofer, ... So to me, at it's worst, this job is pretty good. (ask me about working a pepsi route sometime).
At the end, I was sole end user support for about 40 NT machines and 40 macs (there were 200+ when I started), along with still being email and phone admin and whatever else.
I know that burned up the laid off guys, especially the windows tech, (I was the mac tech); that here was a redneck with no computer schooling (hell, I barely passed my senior year of high school), doing 3 jobs basically, often better than they did. Example: user's Dell dies (everytime the power blinked I lost video card, network card, something), and they can't boot up or work at all. The other guys would make a big deal and take most of a day "restoring" or whatever they were doing. I didn't have time for that shit. Yank their drive, screw it into another box, and turn it on. 30 minutes, tops. Sometimes they had to live with vga video for the rest of the day, (until I got a chance to install that machine's video driver or run a repair install or whatever), but at least they were able to open excel files and generate revenue for the company, which is the point most techs miss.
So it takes 3000 years for a snowflake to melt off the bottom. Cool.
and by posting as AC, you become part of the problem
When they started throwing around the term "Homeland" a few years ago, it sounded a lot like "Fatherland" to me, and I knew then that no good could come of it.
apx. $11,000 per incident.
Nice. I love girls.
"How much of that is Rubbermaids arrogance and sticking to a high price to keep inflated salaries?" By arrogance, you mean a salary that will pay a mortgage and allow one to raise a family in America. Tell us about the Chinese shantytown you enjoy living in. (In your analogy, chinese workers making 60 cents or whatever a day are "vendor B".)
And that sir, makes you a good american. I tip my hat to you from the other side of the aisle.
Only if they are money grubbing bastards. If they only take some percentage of sales, then it favors shareware devs over big software houses. Giant would love to see a $50K up-front price tag on this. That's assuming it works.
One word: applescript
"The Windows Genuine Advantage Kit is not available in the region you have selected." His selected location was the United States
So the dual core Intel is twice as fast at running integer code as the single core G5 it replaces. give or take. yippee.
Intel wanted in, because long term, Apple was a threat. (AMD is a short term threat) If OSX were to take off on somebody else's processor, well, that's somebody else's processor (that they can't build) selling, and Bill Gates would compile Windows in a heartbeat to run on that processor too. He's done it before for less. So Intel offers Apple everything; all you can eat chips, cheap, delivered, tested and wrapped up in a custom motherboard that you didn't have to build. And less power. And cheap.
I bet it's shocking what Apple's paying for duos. I bet they're paying next to nothing on the first round. Steve talked bad to them and they said yes sir. There was only one thing Intel insisted on...
Intel wouldn't put their chip in anything that said "Power" on it.
"MacBook" is stupid enough that weird California types could have conceivably come up with it. And they did, in a way; when forbidden to use "power", they had to keep the other half of the name; it is a book, after all. And a Mac.
Anyway, as soon as they can scrape AMD off, look for processor improvements to "plateau" soon after.
I'm underwhelmed.
"well educated athiests" and you can't even spell your own religion.
I got over 320,000 miles out of my '91 Escort. Never used a drop of oil. The automatic transmission was getting soggy so we sold it.
Too bad they never heard of Filemaker. Blows Access away and with version 8 it's a whole new ballgame. Not that that helps you linux users directly, but I assume they could port filemaker to linux if they wanted, and if there is demand, they will want to. They released a linux server once, then discontinued it. I guess peple likely to use filemaker (or access) are not likely to use linux for their server, and especially not for their desktop.
I mean, it's one little thing in your sea of applications, but having an access-killing desktop database program available might help you in your "Linux Everywhere" movement.
I'd help, but I've been evangelizing the mac for too many years and I am tired now.
If you had a fiber connection to your house, and could watch this, well, that's all you could do with it. You won't be able to save (and pirate) something like this for many years. I wouldn't feel ripped off because *it's that much better* than anything you can download. I guess people would downsample and I would be happy to watch it for free at my current resolutions. Just thinking about 8-10 years ago when nobody's computer had the speed/storage to do anything real with television/movies; DRM wasn't a big issue. It would be nice, in a way, if broadcast/commercial tech leapt that far ahead of normal computers again. But for myself, I grew up with regular TV and will probably be satisfied with that for the rest of my life. If a show is good, it's good on regular tv, at the movie, in a book, as a play; the delivery really doesn't matter.
>Stop creating the warm-water conditions that feed them. That'd help for starters.
But until we do that hurricanes are neccessary ocean air conditioners. Just damned inconvienent for our houses and stuff.
Yeah. We had to buy a copy of Norton AV at work because we had a windows person who was getting tired of us emailing him a word macro virus all the time. Turns out we had about 3 macs with it. We're a mac shop. Norton sucks. From the first time I touched a mouse 10 years ago (when the plant shut down and I had 6 months of unemployment to burn), thru today (where I'm IT Manager at a small company) I have done some brainless shit in my time, and learned everything I know the hard way. I guess I can't learn, or maybe the mac makes me stupid, cause I download everything I can, especially obscure little shareware and freeware. I routinely fill my desktop on a download binge, run it all, throw out most of it. and find a few little gems here and there. i was really dissapointed that I didnt get that auto-start worm back in '98 when everybody else did...
I admit I skipped a page or two of the thread, but read at least half of it, and am suprised not to see anyone suggest an Apple solution. It uses open LDAP, can bind to existing LPAD or AD or be a master. Uses Cyrus, Postfix and squirrelmail, but would run Communigate Pro if you wanted. It clusters out of the box, has a nice plug-in raid box using fibrechannel, with a double-click install SAN solution. It's already configured to use the blacklists and anti-spam stuff. Needless to say, it's dead-easy to set up (compared to a lot of what I've read), and once it is, your granny could manage it. I can't imagine 5 xserves and an xraid not being able to handle this just fine, and that would set you back what, $25,000 -$30,000? That includes a fiberchannel switch. You'd have real support, and yet you have all your open standards and BSD. Just a thought.
It would be nice to be treated as a paying customer, but I haven't experienced that in several years. But that's because I'm not paying (10 bucks maybe), my insurance is. So I have no idea what stuff costs at the doctor's anymore.
Until I bring my 3 yr old boy to the doctor for a cut on the chin I would like to see stitches in. It's not even bleeding after 5 minutes, but he's 3 and you hate to see a big scar and you ask yourself "how much can 3 stitches cost?". (Family insurance where i work in Florida is $800 a month, so he and my wife are uninsured). Well, the "Think of the Children" people here made it illegal for the doctor to put stitches in the face at the office; a hospital has to do it. So for 30 minutes of the doctor's time (and a nurse), and the hospital room; $2500. For something that really doesn't take a doctor. Still paying for that 2 years later.
Course if I had insurance it would be $50 or whatever. Doctors office visits usually run me $25 to $40 for the uninsured kid, instead of $80-$150, when they find out there is no insurance and I'm writing them a check. I understand that's the "charity" rate, but it gives an idea how much it costs to run the office, pay the help, light bill, etc.
Which is my point. The insurance paying the doctor or hospital directly is criminal. And it's the doctors' fault for starting this trend, but they used to have the hardest time getting paid, when it was customary to bill patients thru the mail.
Analogy:
You go to the grocery store, they tell you what you should eat, deliver the food to your fridge, and debit your checking account for the amount they and the bank agree it should cost. Who's watching the hen house? Not entirely accurate because I'm more qualified to buy food than diagnose illness, but if you've ever itemized a decent medical bill you will see some pricing that is completely arbitrary.
Fix for all health-care cost woes in the country:
Make it illegal for insurance/HMO/PPO to pay providers directly: claims must be paid to the patient, who is responsible to the provider (of course the check could be made out to patient AND provider to prevent the skipping of town by patient)
That way, medical care costs whatever it costs and they don't care if you have insurance; the price is the same. I realize this fix would break HMOs and such, but they only exist in the first place because of the current situation. Also, these sue-happy people would be uninsurable in short order, forcing them to put up their own money to start their process. In a short time doctors would begin competing with each other like they used to before we had this crisis; going to the doctor would be like going to the store - you don't like that doctor, go to another. One doctor is too high, another will undercut him. Your insurance doesn't care; they pay $80 for X- poor people's doctors will charge $85 for x, rich people's doctors will charge $160 for x, I'd try to find one charging $100, knowing I'd have to pay it and get $80 back from the insurance.