Oh, wow, there's a quad-band phone in existence! That must mean that all new phones on the market are also quad-band, and also it must retroactively upgrade all existing phones to support both networks as well!
Well I'm glad that's over, and we never have to worry about these problems again.
I think you're misunderstanding the idea here. The point is, even if you are willing to shell out the extra money to get an unsubsidized unlocked phone, you're generally still stuck on a given carrier anyway. I can't just take my AT&T phone and hook up to Verizon's or Sprint's network because their networks are different technologies.
Even switching to T-Mobile, which should be possible because both AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM, doesn't really work because AT&T and T-Mobile use different frequencies for 3G. For example, if you bought a Nexus One, you would have had to have chosen whether you wanted the T-Mobile version or AT&T version, and there was never the option of using the Nexus One on Verizon. It wasn't because the Nexus One was locked.
That doesn't mean the carriers aren't greedy assholes. It means that getting the phones to be unlocked doesn't really solve the problem.
Basically, the answer is yes, they can work together. I'm not sure, though, whether that's the important question.
I've run a couple different networks, now, with a mixture of Linux, Windows, and OSX clients. The easiest way to do this is probably still to keep a Windows domain running, since Linux/OSX support Windows authentication and file sharing better than Windows supports Linux authentication and file sharing.
It will take a little work and a bit of knowledge, and even then you probably won't get everything running completely seamlessly. Some of the biggest problems are still pretty low-level stuff. Each uses different filesystems, including different methods of using permissions and metadata. If you're using external hard drives, you'll want to stick with FAT, which kind of sucks. Linux can support HFS and AFP. It's possible for Windows to support AFP and HFS, too. IIRC OSX can support ext3 and NTFS through FUSE. Everything can support SMB these days. None of these solutions are perfect, though.
When you have these different operating systems using the same file shares, you'll get some random hidden files here and there-- both Windows and OSX tend to do this. If you try to consolidate profiles/home-directories across operating systems, you'll get files from each OS that will seem useless in the others. So... yeah, it can work, but there are complications that you'll need to figure out.
**BUT** this is not really the best way to make this decision. These systems can hypothetically work together, but you don't work in a hypothetical office. You should start by figuring out your offices needs, taking the employee workflows into account, and then evaluate which products will best support those needs. You probably should take licensing costs into account, but you should also consider that it's more complicated and time-consuming to support a mixed environment. Also, if you're asking this question, I assume you don't exactly have the experience in dealing with this kind of mixed environment, so that's a strike against the idea.
I wouldn't generally rely on running things in WINE. If you want to run Adobe products, stick to a supported platform. It probably is a good idea to standardize as many applications across platforms as possible. If you can, get everyone on OpenOffice and Firefox. The more common applications and tools you're using cross-platform, the easier it will be to switch people between platforms without headaches. In fact, that may be a good place to start with your experiment: If you want to use OpenOffice, see if you can move everyone over to OpenOffice. If you can get people using OpenOffice and Firefox and Thunderbird(+Lightning) without any problems, and if those are the only apps those people are using, then moving them to Linux should be pretty easy. If people throw a hissy fit because they don't have MS Office anymore, then moving them to Linux is a non-starter.
Whatever you do, I advise coming up with standardized disk images per each department or job function. Customize them with whatever you need to work in your particular mixed environment, but try to keep them the same for people with the same jobs. Like put all of your graphic designers on Macs with Adobe CS installed, and put all your normal office workers on Windows with MS Office-- or whatever. Troubleshooting problems in a mixed environment is hard enough without dealing with everyone having a unique system.
I would highly decline that idea, since it's much more professional to have a @companyname e-mail over @gmail.
I assume he's talking about Google Apps, and will be keeping the domain name. The bigger problem is the potential security risk of having someone else host your email.
I don't know if you are currently using or plan to use active directory, but over multiple OSs, it won't always work. For exchange though, it will. Your exchange server can be easily configured in pretty much any OS to some degree, which would allow all of your users in either Linux, Mac, or Windows to have access to their e-mails, contacts, and calendars.
Not sure what you're getting at here. Gmail definitely works across different platforms. If nothing else, you can use the web UI. There's even an Outlook plugin for Google Apps.
... Linux has not progressed that much in the desktop environment...
I can understand if you think Windows is still better, but Linux has been progressing.
The biggest issues are probably the file servers (NFS is only allowed for the default Ubuntu install, Samba for everything else)
Is that right? I am pretty sure that Ubuntu Desktop can view Windows file shares with the default install. Or do you mean on the server end? Yes, you might need to install Samba in order to have Ubuntu file servers support Windows clients, but it's not particularly hard.
The bigger and more annoying problem that I've had with file servers supporting different client operating systems has been that the different systems treat metadata differently. Different operating systems have different methods of dealing with file permissions. Moving a file might not keep your old timestamp. Windows puts Desktop.ini and Thumbs.db files all over the place, and OSX puts.DS_store files and resource forks everywhere. Moving OSX files from a non-OSX system can still cause you to lose resource forks, which isn't generally a huge problem, but it's annoying.
printing (maintaining both Windows and Unix print queues is apparently difficult).
Again, my recollection was that I was able to set up Ubuntu desktop to use Windows print queues. Maybe I'm forgetting something.
Security experts will tell you that usability is a part of security.
This is very important. When you consider it properly, an ideal security scheme is not simply about denying access to intruders, but also about providing transparent access to authorized personnel. Making a lock impossible to pick is not generally useful if it is also impossible to open with the correct key.
And I'm not just saying that extremely high security is impractical, but rather that it often becomes less secure. If you install a lock on a heavily trafficked door and make it difficult or inconvenient to unlock through proper channels, you'll find that people will start leaving it unlocked or propping that door open.
It's not just jealous girlfriends/boyfriends. There's the potential for an attacker to glean personal information or account information on other services. If you get notifications from your bank, they now have some of your banking information. If you do your taxes through TurboTax or something and they email you a copy of your tax return, the attackers could get that too. They also know your friends' names and your family. If you ever send/receive login credentials for any accounts through email, they have those too.
So it's not hard to imagine that you would have an email in your account saying your bank is citibank and giving you some numbers of your bank account, some email with your SSN, and then an email from your mom which somehow includes her maiden name. For some banks, that's enough information to get access to your accounts.
Now I doubt that attackers are willing right now to expend the time and effort to read each of your emails individually, but I wouldn't put it past someone to get your email login, download every email you send or receive, and then use data-mining techniques to see what they can gather. Even something as simple as searching for the word "password" might net enough information to make it worthwhile.
And no matter how good your security is, it could always be better, so the market for add on products will always exist. Whether your average person needs more than reasonable baseline of security is a separate question of course.
Yes, I agree that there will be a market for making things ultra-super-duper secure somehow or other, but in general you should be able to install a standard OS image onto your computer and connect it directly to the internet without fear, and for a while there you really couldn't do that. Things have gotten better in the past few years, but these security vendors have been relying on the insecurity of Windows to force everyone to buy their products.
Now if the vendors can build a better firewall, a better antivirus/antispyware solution, then I say "have at it". But as much as I'm concerned about Microsoft's bundling of software, I don't think this is a problem.
People keep talking about the problem of having to pay a subscription while still watching ads, and I think that's a fair complaint, but it's not what really really bothers me. To my mind, the much bigger problem is that they still are missing tons of content. Looking at the list of shows available on Hulu Plus for the current season, I only see... something like 6 shows that I'd watch. Looking at the stuff that's not from the current season, there are a handful more, but it's still hardly a comprehensive library.
So ultimately this is not a service which competes with cable TV, but a service that competes with Netflix. That's all well and good, but I already have Netflix, and for about the same price as Hulu Plus, I get a bigger catalog (especially if you include everything that you can get on DVD).
So while it's bad enough to expect people to pay *and* watch ads, what puts it over the edge for me is that I still won't be able to watch whatever I want. To get a comprehensive set of the newest seasons of TV shows, I'll need to still go to my computer to watch things on Hulu or buy the season on iTunes or Amazon. And the reason you're not seeing a comprehensive catalog available on set-top boxes is because the media conglomerates don't want Internet services to compete with cable TV. They'd like to push us into paying for cable TV *and* Hulu while at the same time collecting ad revenue from both distribution channels.
It also seems worthwhile to note that AV vendors are not entitled to their businesses. They're running a business model that's largely dependent on MS Windows being horribly insecure, and insofar as Microsoft improves security, they're always going to lose out.
Really, I shouldn't need to buy a security suite in order to run my computer securely. Any security measures *should* be part of the OS.
If you verge away from "Provided by Apple" software, you are essentially doing things the BSD way: building things from ports.
So you don't like BSD and you don't like Ports. Some BSD people would probably debate whether Ports is bad, but I'd just point out that you can also use Fink, which uses apt.
How is this modded "informative"? There's no information here.
I'm disappointed because Xserves were actually pretty nice little servers. I don't currently have one in my office, but I'd worked on them before, and the hardware was solid and well-designed. OSX is a reasonably good server OS. It had some nice features built-in and support for Mac-specific stuff (e.g. Time Machine). Administration could reasonably be done through simple GUI stuff that was provided, but if you wanted to do something more complicated you could do normal UNIX-y stuff. It's apparently not as fast as Linux for many things, but for most businesses speed is not actually *that* important.
I think the disappointing thing here is that it means Apple's servers are now all desktop models, which means Apple is definitely not aiming to get into enterprise stuff anymore.
Well the silly thing is there was a stigma attached to high-bandwidth users while at the same time ISPs were advertising their high bandwidth. The simple reality is that the major ISPs don't want to be on the hook for providing the services that they're offering to provide.
It's like if I wanted to build and run a public pool, so I go around raising some money and I build a pool. Because it's a public pool, I get the government to subsidize my construction and I get them to make sure no one else is allowed to build a pool nearby. I charge membership fees and get everyone around the neighborhood to sign up, and then when summer comes around people are lining up to get in. I wait until it's 95 degrees out and then open the pool, and when a bunch of kids climb in, I yell, "Hey, what are you brats doing? You can't go swimming in there! The water will get dirty!"
In the end Fred Brooks got it right decades ago: "there is no silver bullet". Software development is just hard. Anything promising massive gains in success or effectiveness is snake oil.
I wish people would recognize this in general. Doing a good job at most things-- whether you're a developer building a piece of software, an engineer building a car, or a politician running a country-- doing a good job is just hard. It takes intelligence, dedication, good judgment, teamwork, and a lot of other virtues.
We keep looking for "silver bullets". We keep looking for processes and systems and rules that do it for us. We argue about "If we just used this development model..." or "if we just used electrical power instead of fuel..." or "if we just restructured our government this way..." We act like there's a fool-proof single way of doing things which will always work without downsides, but you can almost always follow the rules to the letter and still do a bad job.
The truth is that a good system can help and a bad system can hurt, but either way we need good people with good judgment to be spending a lot of time and effort to make sure the results turn out well. No system of rules and processes can replace good people working their asses off. Hell, even being a janitor, doing a good job cleaning toilets, can require judgement and dedication.
Nothing about SELinux, nothing about filesystems, nothing about updated packages like SSH, Postfix, Bind, or anything.
Maybe because most of those things are relatively stable, common to various Linux distributions, and have nothing to do with the desktop user experience.
The purpose of polling is often not to predict elections, but to influence them. The obvious case is with push polls, where the poll itself is a means of spreading propaganda, e.g. "How do you feel about the fact that [Candidate A] is corrupt?" The less obvious thing is that political organizations want the news to say, "[Candidate A] is beating [Candidate B]. This means that if you like [Candidate B], you're stupid and all your friends will disagree with you, and there's no point in voting."
Well it's a little like saying, "All our laptops must be Macs. We'll be taking quotes from Apple and MacMall and Amazon, so it's still an open bidding process."
Now maybe that might happen in some government contract, and someone will say, "Well their workflow uses software only available on the Mac, and their IT people are trained on OSX. What, you want the government to be less efficient?" That guy might have a point. Still, such a deal wouldn't benefit Apple much less than just mandating that you have to buy everything directly from Apple.
Yeah, it's worth noting that our brains use a lot of different cues to decode a 3D scene, and stereoscopic vision is just one of those cues. We also use light and shadow, motion, perspective, and parallax, for example. Shadow and perspective are available in traditional "2D" films, and we do in fact decode "2D" pictures into 3D scenes without stereoscopic vision. However, eve the stereoscopic "3D" movies lack the ability to move your head and "look around" an object the way you could if you had real parallax.
So in general I'd say the distinction between "2D" and "3D" films is not as meaningful as most people believe. It's not as though the "2D" films are actually presenting you with a 2 dimensional scene without any depth, and it's not as though the "3D" films are actually giving you a full 3D representation of the scene.
Well Napster was long-dead. Fairplay wasn't bad for a DRM scheme (of course, any DRM kind of sucks, but that's a side issue).
The entire music industry was united behind WMA and Plays-For-Sure, and pretty much every online store was using it and pretty much every MP3 player supported it. Apple was the roadblock.
The record industry insisted that Apple use DRM, so they created their own. The record industry tried to get Apple to support Plays-For-Sure or to license their FairPlay to other stores, and Apple refused on both counts. Meanwhile Apple was dominating the market, which meant that the record industry had two choices: let Apple own music distribution, or allow other stores to drop DRM so that they could sell songs that would play on the iPod and on other players.
If that's the case, why has Apple spent years updating iTunes, sending cease and desist letters and filing lawsuits to prevent people from being able to do so?
They were contractually obligated by record labels to make their best effort to maintain their DRM system. If they hadn't tried to keep it intact, record labels would pull their content from the store.
You're creating some revisionist history here. Jobs had been outspoken about the problems of DRM for years, and it's known that Apple created their DRM scheme, above Jobs's objections, because record labels insisted. Record labels also had Apple remove the ability to copy music off of your iPod, which was possible in early iPod models.
After years of trying to negotiate for DRM-free tracks, Jobs wrote an open letter asking record labels to give up their position. The record labels began to fear Apple's influence, and decided to prop up Amazon as a competitor. They gave Amazon a better deal, allowing for cheaper prices and DRM-free tracks. Eventually Apple came to a deal with the record labels-- the record labels would give Apple DRM-free songs, while Apple would allow record labels to sell their songs at higher prices (until then, Apple had insisted in keeping prices at $0.99/song and $9.99/album). Apple would also get higher-quality encodes in order to help justify the increased prices.
Yet again, we all benefit from the fact that Steve Jobs is an asshole. His refusal to adopt WMA or license FairPlay killed DRM in the music industry, and now his refusal to allow Flash/Silverlight is pushing Internet standards forward.
What's next? Video? Can we get a real TVoIP system to kill cable? DRM-free movie/TV purchases?
The point is that the US is heading towards bankruptcy (~$150,000 per home is our current national debt), and it's time to eliminate services that are inefficient/waste money compared to other alternatives (like buses, cars).
Jesus, cars? Our obsession with cars has been part of what has made us horrifically inefficient. We hide the economic waste and inefficiency, but it's there. Pollution, energy costs, maintenance, car insurance, damage due to accidents, road construction, having each person buy their own car, subsidies to car companies, subsidies for oil companies, law enforcement (speeding, drunk driving), education and licensing, etc. We spend *so much* money trying to make sure everyone gets to feel good about driving around in their personal little bubbles, but we cannot achieve a sustainable system (sustainable either environmentally or economically) until we start building a world where most people do not need to drive a car on a daily or even weekly basis.
Our *cars* are a waste of money. You've got it all backwards.
My statement was just asserting that if we don't look at it holistically, you can judge anything to be successful.
Right, but that statement all by itself doesn't mean anything. It's like if I cite a statistic and you say, "sometimes statistics are misleading." Yeah, sometimes. So what?
My original response was to someone who said Amtrak was a failure because it's not profitable. I responded by pointing out that, although that Amtrak hasn't been successful by that one measure, there are other ways in which Amtrak is successful. So my original argument was that you have to look at these things holistically.
But then my real point wasn't even so much about Amtrak itself, but to support the idea that different beliefs about the correct course of action are often not just about better/worse logic, but about different perspectives and different priorities and different factors being taken into account.
Trains require special infrastructure to be built for them to travel on, whereas buses can use the already existing roadways.
Again, that's a little like saying, "We should take buses instead of planes, since planes require special infrastructure whereas busses can drive on existing roads." And anyway, roads are special infrastructure that need to be built/maintained as well, so it's really more that trains require special infrastructure whereas buses require different special infrastructure.
But, as a ruthless pragmatist, since we can get a large percentage of the benefits in a much shorter time for less cost with buses, I'm more for that option.
As a ruthless pragmatist myself, I recognize that the path we're on is completely unsustainable, and we *need* to begin developing a sustainable model of transportation if we want to continue to grow economically. If someone goes to the drawing board and says, "we can get to sustainability through roads and busses alone," then I would support that-- but knowing some people who are studying this problem, it doesn't sound like anyone is saying that.
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Oh, wow, there's a quad-band phone in existence! That must mean that all new phones on the market are also quad-band, and also it must retroactively upgrade all existing phones to support both networks as well!
Well I'm glad that's over, and we never have to worry about these problems again.
I think you're misunderstanding the idea here. The point is, even if you are willing to shell out the extra money to get an unsubsidized unlocked phone, you're generally still stuck on a given carrier anyway. I can't just take my AT&T phone and hook up to Verizon's or Sprint's network because their networks are different technologies.
Even switching to T-Mobile, which should be possible because both AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM, doesn't really work because AT&T and T-Mobile use different frequencies for 3G. For example, if you bought a Nexus One, you would have had to have chosen whether you wanted the T-Mobile version or AT&T version, and there was never the option of using the Nexus One on Verizon. It wasn't because the Nexus One was locked.
That doesn't mean the carriers aren't greedy assholes. It means that getting the phones to be unlocked doesn't really solve the problem.
Basically, the answer is yes, they can work together. I'm not sure, though, whether that's the important question.
I've run a couple different networks, now, with a mixture of Linux, Windows, and OSX clients. The easiest way to do this is probably still to keep a Windows domain running, since Linux/OSX support Windows authentication and file sharing better than Windows supports Linux authentication and file sharing.
It will take a little work and a bit of knowledge, and even then you probably won't get everything running completely seamlessly. Some of the biggest problems are still pretty low-level stuff. Each uses different filesystems, including different methods of using permissions and metadata. If you're using external hard drives, you'll want to stick with FAT, which kind of sucks. Linux can support HFS and AFP. It's possible for Windows to support AFP and HFS, too. IIRC OSX can support ext3 and NTFS through FUSE. Everything can support SMB these days. None of these solutions are perfect, though.
When you have these different operating systems using the same file shares, you'll get some random hidden files here and there-- both Windows and OSX tend to do this. If you try to consolidate profiles/home-directories across operating systems, you'll get files from each OS that will seem useless in the others. So... yeah, it can work, but there are complications that you'll need to figure out.
**BUT** this is not really the best way to make this decision. These systems can hypothetically work together, but you don't work in a hypothetical office. You should start by figuring out your offices needs, taking the employee workflows into account, and then evaluate which products will best support those needs. You probably should take licensing costs into account, but you should also consider that it's more complicated and time-consuming to support a mixed environment. Also, if you're asking this question, I assume you don't exactly have the experience in dealing with this kind of mixed environment, so that's a strike against the idea.
I wouldn't generally rely on running things in WINE. If you want to run Adobe products, stick to a supported platform. It probably is a good idea to standardize as many applications across platforms as possible. If you can, get everyone on OpenOffice and Firefox. The more common applications and tools you're using cross-platform, the easier it will be to switch people between platforms without headaches. In fact, that may be a good place to start with your experiment: If you want to use OpenOffice, see if you can move everyone over to OpenOffice. If you can get people using OpenOffice and Firefox and Thunderbird(+Lightning) without any problems, and if those are the only apps those people are using, then moving them to Linux should be pretty easy. If people throw a hissy fit because they don't have MS Office anymore, then moving them to Linux is a non-starter.
Whatever you do, I advise coming up with standardized disk images per each department or job function. Customize them with whatever you need to work in your particular mixed environment, but try to keep them the same for people with the same jobs. Like put all of your graphic designers on Macs with Adobe CS installed, and put all your normal office workers on Windows with MS Office-- or whatever. Troubleshooting problems in a mixed environment is hard enough without dealing with everyone having a unique system.
I would highly decline that idea, since it's much more professional to have a @companyname e-mail over @gmail.
I assume he's talking about Google Apps, and will be keeping the domain name. The bigger problem is the potential security risk of having someone else host your email.
I don't know if you are currently using or plan to use active directory, but over multiple OSs, it won't always work. For exchange though, it will. Your exchange server can be easily configured in pretty much any OS to some degree, which would allow all of your users in either Linux, Mac, or Windows to have access to their e-mails, contacts, and calendars.
Not sure what you're getting at here. Gmail definitely works across different platforms. If nothing else, you can use the web UI. There's even an Outlook plugin for Google Apps.
... Linux has not progressed that much in the desktop environment...
I can understand if you think Windows is still better, but Linux has been progressing.
The biggest issues are probably the file servers (NFS is only allowed for the default Ubuntu install, Samba for everything else)
Is that right? I am pretty sure that Ubuntu Desktop can view Windows file shares with the default install. Or do you mean on the server end? Yes, you might need to install Samba in order to have Ubuntu file servers support Windows clients, but it's not particularly hard.
The bigger and more annoying problem that I've had with file servers supporting different client operating systems has been that the different systems treat metadata differently. Different operating systems have different methods of dealing with file permissions. Moving a file might not keep your old timestamp. Windows puts Desktop.ini and Thumbs.db files all over the place, and OSX puts .DS_store files and resource forks everywhere. Moving OSX files from a non-OSX system can still cause you to lose resource forks, which isn't generally a huge problem, but it's annoying.
printing (maintaining both Windows and Unix print queues is apparently difficult).
Again, my recollection was that I was able to set up Ubuntu desktop to use Windows print queues. Maybe I'm forgetting something.
Security experts will tell you that usability is a part of security.
This is very important. When you consider it properly, an ideal security scheme is not simply about denying access to intruders, but also about providing transparent access to authorized personnel. Making a lock impossible to pick is not generally useful if it is also impossible to open with the correct key.
And I'm not just saying that extremely high security is impractical, but rather that it often becomes less secure. If you install a lock on a heavily trafficked door and make it difficult or inconvenient to unlock through proper channels, you'll find that people will start leaving it unlocked or propping that door open.
It's not just jealous girlfriends/boyfriends. There's the potential for an attacker to glean personal information or account information on other services. If you get notifications from your bank, they now have some of your banking information. If you do your taxes through TurboTax or something and they email you a copy of your tax return, the attackers could get that too. They also know your friends' names and your family. If you ever send/receive login credentials for any accounts through email, they have those too.
So it's not hard to imagine that you would have an email in your account saying your bank is citibank and giving you some numbers of your bank account, some email with your SSN, and then an email from your mom which somehow includes her maiden name. For some banks, that's enough information to get access to your accounts.
Now I doubt that attackers are willing right now to expend the time and effort to read each of your emails individually, but I wouldn't put it past someone to get your email login, download every email you send or receive, and then use data-mining techniques to see what they can gather. Even something as simple as searching for the word "password" might net enough information to make it worthwhile.
And no matter how good your security is, it could always be better, so the market for add on products will always exist. Whether your average person needs more than reasonable baseline of security is a separate question of course.
Yes, I agree that there will be a market for making things ultra-super-duper secure somehow or other, but in general you should be able to install a standard OS image onto your computer and connect it directly to the internet without fear, and for a while there you really couldn't do that. Things have gotten better in the past few years, but these security vendors have been relying on the insecurity of Windows to force everyone to buy their products.
Now if the vendors can build a better firewall, a better antivirus/antispyware solution, then I say "have at it". But as much as I'm concerned about Microsoft's bundling of software, I don't think this is a problem.
People keep talking about the problem of having to pay a subscription while still watching ads, and I think that's a fair complaint, but it's not what really really bothers me. To my mind, the much bigger problem is that they still are missing tons of content. Looking at the list of shows available on Hulu Plus for the current season, I only see... something like 6 shows that I'd watch. Looking at the stuff that's not from the current season, there are a handful more, but it's still hardly a comprehensive library.
So ultimately this is not a service which competes with cable TV, but a service that competes with Netflix. That's all well and good, but I already have Netflix, and for about the same price as Hulu Plus, I get a bigger catalog (especially if you include everything that you can get on DVD).
So while it's bad enough to expect people to pay *and* watch ads, what puts it over the edge for me is that I still won't be able to watch whatever I want. To get a comprehensive set of the newest seasons of TV shows, I'll need to still go to my computer to watch things on Hulu or buy the season on iTunes or Amazon. And the reason you're not seeing a comprehensive catalog available on set-top boxes is because the media conglomerates don't want Internet services to compete with cable TV. They'd like to push us into paying for cable TV *and* Hulu while at the same time collecting ad revenue from both distribution channels.
It also seems worthwhile to note that AV vendors are not entitled to their businesses. They're running a business model that's largely dependent on MS Windows being horribly insecure, and insofar as Microsoft improves security, they're always going to lose out.
Really, I shouldn't need to buy a security suite in order to run my computer securely. Any security measures *should* be part of the OS.
If you verge away from "Provided by Apple" software, you are essentially doing things the BSD way: building things from ports.
So you don't like BSD and you don't like Ports. Some BSD people would probably debate whether Ports is bad, but I'd just point out that you can also use Fink, which uses apt.
FUD.
No, installing software on your Mac does not void your warranty.
How is this modded "informative"? There's no information here.
I'm disappointed because Xserves were actually pretty nice little servers. I don't currently have one in my office, but I'd worked on them before, and the hardware was solid and well-designed. OSX is a reasonably good server OS. It had some nice features built-in and support for Mac-specific stuff (e.g. Time Machine). Administration could reasonably be done through simple GUI stuff that was provided, but if you wanted to do something more complicated you could do normal UNIX-y stuff. It's apparently not as fast as Linux for many things, but for most businesses speed is not actually *that* important.
I think the disappointing thing here is that it means Apple's servers are now all desktop models, which means Apple is definitely not aiming to get into enterprise stuff anymore.
Well the silly thing is there was a stigma attached to high-bandwidth users while at the same time ISPs were advertising their high bandwidth. The simple reality is that the major ISPs don't want to be on the hook for providing the services that they're offering to provide.
It's like if I wanted to build and run a public pool, so I go around raising some money and I build a pool. Because it's a public pool, I get the government to subsidize my construction and I get them to make sure no one else is allowed to build a pool nearby. I charge membership fees and get everyone around the neighborhood to sign up, and then when summer comes around people are lining up to get in. I wait until it's 95 degrees out and then open the pool, and when a bunch of kids climb in, I yell, "Hey, what are you brats doing? You can't go swimming in there! The water will get dirty!"
In the end Fred Brooks got it right decades ago: "there is no silver bullet". Software development is just hard. Anything promising massive gains in success or effectiveness is snake oil.
I wish people would recognize this in general. Doing a good job at most things-- whether you're a developer building a piece of software, an engineer building a car, or a politician running a country-- doing a good job is just hard. It takes intelligence, dedication, good judgment, teamwork, and a lot of other virtues.
We keep looking for "silver bullets". We keep looking for processes and systems and rules that do it for us. We argue about "If we just used this development model..." or "if we just used electrical power instead of fuel..." or "if we just restructured our government this way..." We act like there's a fool-proof single way of doing things which will always work without downsides, but you can almost always follow the rules to the letter and still do a bad job.
The truth is that a good system can help and a bad system can hurt, but either way we need good people with good judgment to be spending a lot of time and effort to make sure the results turn out well. No system of rules and processes can replace good people working their asses off. Hell, even being a janitor, doing a good job cleaning toilets, can require judgement and dedication.
Nothing about SELinux, nothing about filesystems, nothing about updated packages like SSH, Postfix, Bind, or anything.
Maybe because most of those things are relatively stable, common to various Linux distributions, and have nothing to do with the desktop user experience.
The purpose of polling is often not to predict elections, but to influence them. The obvious case is with push polls, where the poll itself is a means of spreading propaganda, e.g. "How do you feel about the fact that [Candidate A] is corrupt?" The less obvious thing is that political organizations want the news to say, "[Candidate A] is beating [Candidate B]. This means that if you like [Candidate B], you're stupid and all your friends will disagree with you, and there's no point in voting."
Well it's a little like saying, "All our laptops must be Macs. We'll be taking quotes from Apple and MacMall and Amazon, so it's still an open bidding process."
Now maybe that might happen in some government contract, and someone will say, "Well their workflow uses software only available on the Mac, and their IT people are trained on OSX. What, you want the government to be less efficient?" That guy might have a point. Still, such a deal wouldn't benefit Apple much less than just mandating that you have to buy everything directly from Apple.
I don't think that really makes it much better. Either way, they're favoring a specific company rather than requesting specific functionality.
Yeah, it's worth noting that our brains use a lot of different cues to decode a 3D scene, and stereoscopic vision is just one of those cues. We also use light and shadow, motion, perspective, and parallax, for example. Shadow and perspective are available in traditional "2D" films, and we do in fact decode "2D" pictures into 3D scenes without stereoscopic vision. However, eve the stereoscopic "3D" movies lack the ability to move your head and "look around" an object the way you could if you had real parallax.
So in general I'd say the distinction between "2D" and "3D" films is not as meaningful as most people believe. It's not as though the "2D" films are actually presenting you with a 2 dimensional scene without any depth, and it's not as though the "3D" films are actually giving you a full 3D representation of the scene.
Well Napster was long-dead. Fairplay wasn't bad for a DRM scheme (of course, any DRM kind of sucks, but that's a side issue).
The entire music industry was united behind WMA and Plays-For-Sure, and pretty much every online store was using it and pretty much every MP3 player supported it. Apple was the roadblock.
The record industry insisted that Apple use DRM, so they created their own. The record industry tried to get Apple to support Plays-For-Sure or to license their FairPlay to other stores, and Apple refused on both counts. Meanwhile Apple was dominating the market, which meant that the record industry had two choices: let Apple own music distribution, or allow other stores to drop DRM so that they could sell songs that would play on the iPod and on other players.
If that's the case, why has Apple spent years updating iTunes, sending cease and desist letters and filing lawsuits to prevent people from being able to do so?
They were contractually obligated by record labels to make their best effort to maintain their DRM system. If they hadn't tried to keep it intact, record labels would pull their content from the store.
You're creating some revisionist history here. Jobs had been outspoken about the problems of DRM for years, and it's known that Apple created their DRM scheme, above Jobs's objections, because record labels insisted. Record labels also had Apple remove the ability to copy music off of your iPod, which was possible in early iPod models.
After years of trying to negotiate for DRM-free tracks, Jobs wrote an open letter asking record labels to give up their position. The record labels began to fear Apple's influence, and decided to prop up Amazon as a competitor. They gave Amazon a better deal, allowing for cheaper prices and DRM-free tracks. Eventually Apple came to a deal with the record labels-- the record labels would give Apple DRM-free songs, while Apple would allow record labels to sell their songs at higher prices (until then, Apple had insisted in keeping prices at $0.99/song and $9.99/album). Apple would also get higher-quality encodes in order to help justify the increased prices.
Yet again, we all benefit from the fact that Steve Jobs is an asshole. His refusal to adopt WMA or license FairPlay killed DRM in the music industry, and now his refusal to allow Flash/Silverlight is pushing Internet standards forward.
What's next? Video? Can we get a real TVoIP system to kill cable? DRM-free movie/TV purchases?
The point is that the US is heading towards bankruptcy (~$150,000 per home is our current national debt), and it's time to eliminate services that are inefficient/waste money compared to other alternatives (like buses, cars).
Jesus, cars? Our obsession with cars has been part of what has made us horrifically inefficient. We hide the economic waste and inefficiency, but it's there. Pollution, energy costs, maintenance, car insurance, damage due to accidents, road construction, having each person buy their own car, subsidies to car companies, subsidies for oil companies, law enforcement (speeding, drunk driving), education and licensing, etc. We spend *so much* money trying to make sure everyone gets to feel good about driving around in their personal little bubbles, but we cannot achieve a sustainable system (sustainable either environmentally or economically) until we start building a world where most people do not need to drive a car on a daily or even weekly basis.
Our *cars* are a waste of money. You've got it all backwards.
My statement was just asserting that if we don't look at it holistically, you can judge anything to be successful.
Right, but that statement all by itself doesn't mean anything. It's like if I cite a statistic and you say, "sometimes statistics are misleading." Yeah, sometimes. So what?
My original response was to someone who said Amtrak was a failure because it's not profitable. I responded by pointing out that, although that Amtrak hasn't been successful by that one measure, there are other ways in which Amtrak is successful. So my original argument was that you have to look at these things holistically.
But then my real point wasn't even so much about Amtrak itself, but to support the idea that different beliefs about the correct course of action are often not just about better/worse logic, but about different perspectives and different priorities and different factors being taken into account.
Trains require special infrastructure to be built for them to travel on, whereas buses can use the already existing roadways.
Again, that's a little like saying, "We should take buses instead of planes, since planes require special infrastructure whereas busses can drive on existing roads." And anyway, roads are special infrastructure that need to be built/maintained as well, so it's really more that trains require special infrastructure whereas buses require different special infrastructure.
But, as a ruthless pragmatist, since we can get a large percentage of the benefits in a much shorter time for less cost with buses, I'm more for that option.
As a ruthless pragmatist myself, I recognize that the path we're on is completely unsustainable, and we *need* to begin developing a sustainable model of transportation if we want to continue to grow economically. If someone goes to the drawing board and says, "we can get to sustainability through roads and busses alone," then I would support that-- but knowing some people who are studying this problem, it doesn't sound like anyone is saying that.