wow, "Insightful" takes less and less all the time, doesn't it? in case you missed it, slashdot makes up "logos" for most of their categories. if they want to do the same here, great, but it certainly doesn't become a standard logo for the product or community in question. or do you really think all the microsoft groupies out there proudly display the "bill of borg" logo? of course, if i had read this without the points or mod type, i'd have assumed you were trying to be funny, and if this were 3, Funny, i wouldn't be upset at all.
good idea, but you're missing the most important point: that way he could see where he's going! of course, that would open up the debates over GTA all over again...
so you don't think Cairo ever came out, huh? that's because they don't want you to think it did. but it did. it's installed on tons of computers, and comes pre-installed on most systems you can buy today. let me explain: when the roman empire converted to christianity way back when, the first symbol of the change was an emblem plopped on top of the roman imperial banners. the contents of this emblem are still used widely by the Catholic church. anyone know what they are? the roman empire chose as symbol of their collective conversion the first two letters of the greek word "Christ" for this emblem. know what that looks like in greek? the letter "Chi" (pronounced "Ki", with a long "i") and "Rho" (pronounced "ro"). and know what those letters look like? yup: XP. Cairo == XP. masses of people are running Cairo and not even knowing it. now, parallels between the conversion to christianity, or between the roman empire and microsoft generally, are left as an exercise to the reader.
OT, but... "et.al" is incorrect. as is "et. cetera" or "e.t.c.". in each case, "et" is latin for "and". "etc" and "etc." are okay, "et c." is the most correct abbreviation (although kinda ugly).
related (hey, i'm already OT, why not go for broke?), the ampersand (thingie above the 7 on US keyboards) is a evolution of "Et" (curve the top and bottom of the E, connect the lower horizontal line of the E to the vertical line of the t, and the middle horizontal line of the E to the horizontal line of the t, to get a start). so in addition to being useful on its own as "and", "&c" is also a correct replacement for "et cetera".
an excellent post all around, and correct on most points (and from an AC! surely the end times are at hand). a response to some: i've developed (what i believe to be) a clear rational, i simply don't have it prepared in a form that i can present to C-level employees or BoD types. perhaps "research" was the wrong word to use - i've done the price/performance, TCO, overall functionality, and other comparisons. that's not so much what i needed - more the "nice shiny presentation" most higher-level types like so much. this guy was announced to the company less than a week ago, and it was announced he'd be coming to our location to talk with me and others (and see operations) friday. not a ton of prep time. building management consensus would have been good, you are correct. but the organization is in a bit of transition (having just about finished up the spin-out-to-buyer transition) and existing/previous management simply neglected IT (and, for the most part, R&D and operations!). the old CEO was more-or-less on board; it's just that this is a new guy.
dude, switch to decaf. learning time on a mac for applications related to business is tiny. everyone who's made the switch has been up to ~90% productivity in a few hours. even if your assertion that IT would get called for every issue were true (which it's proven not to be already), the total number of issues drops so dramatically as to still save time (and thus money). i'm not sure where this anti-IT rage comes from, but would you really rather large companies not have one? and require each individual to be their own admin? like the office secretaries? i've been in that kind of organization. someone (or ones) gets tapped to be the go-to guy, and can't do the rest of his/her work. that work suffers, the tech stuff's done poorly... it's just a bad idea. and i've bought one cisco box in my life: and ISDN bridge. it was and what company buys DIY laptops? for all their non-technical employees? i've worked in organizations (in IT and out) where PCs were self-built, and y'know what? they were down more. sorry, but you want reliability, you need engineering, not the ability to plug bits together. and engineering costs money. i have business experience. i've been in charge of tech budgets. and i've seen support costs dramatically decreased by moving people to macs where sensible, first hand. your post is FUD, pure and simple.
and you don't know me. pull your head outta your posterior.
*ahem* It's not always the IT staff that doesn't want the Mac in the door. I'm Director of Information Technology for a good sized company with offices on three continents. We were recently spun out from what is essentially a government lobbying body. It's all Windows, top to bottom. Or it was. When we had to replace the Exchange server that was part of our former parent, we got an XServe. We've now got three, in two locations. About a third of our U.S. based employees use Macs, and that percentage is growing. Tomorrow, I have to meet with the CEO and explain what the hell I'm doing (I'm hoping this article and posts will save me some research!). I'm assured by the CTO that he's open minded about it, but just thinks it's really "odd" and wants to know why. I hope that's the case. It's not always the IT folks that're "ignorant". I know more Macs mean lower admin costs and greater reliability. And I know what having Unix workstations means to the R&D work. But some of the upper management has doubts... mostly, I suspect, because they'll need to explain it to the board, who's likely to be even more conservative. Oh... and all our internally-developed software is Windows-only as well. The new CTO has already agreed that we're changing that. And we've got budget to ditch the few IE dependancies on our web site. Sometimes we get to move in the right direction.
like the concept of a backing store for windowing systems. AT&T never enforced it, but they held a patent on it until it expired a year or two ago. and that certainly remains useful.
This a stupid stupid stupid move by them, Akin to shooting themselves in the foot with a 45 caliber pistol; it's going to anger a lot of people in the IT industry.
hey, i wouldn't say that. lots of people in the IT industry (myself included) would really like to see Verisign shot in the foot with a.45. wouldn't make me angry at all.
for everyone running around yelling "Apple + Sun would be so cool!" i want to suggest that maybe you're looking at the wrong company. sure Solaris is my personal favorite of the "Big Iron" unix systems who're still even remotely relevant (Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP-UX). but can anyone see one of the others in that list being a better fit?
Apple just anounced their G5 chip, based very strongly on IBM's Power 4 architecture. like Sun, IBM makes some damn serious hardware for the high-end market.
imagine: no issues of anyone converting architectures or emulating old ones. one architecture from entry level (future iMacs or eMacs) to workstation (PowerMac G5) through workgroup server (xServe) through IBM's offerings up to the ASCI Purple project. Sun's a good company and all, and Solaris has way more to offer than AIX, but where's Sun on the Top 500 supercomputer list? their first offering comes in at 211. IMB's got 9 of the top 20 spots already. i want Mac OS X on those.
that's even leaving aside the fact that this comment is more of a "gee, that'd be cool" than "it's something we're persuing" (as has been noted).
wow... the Apple Developer Connection web site seems to either developing extra-sensory perception, or doing some information gathering behind our collective backs. the bit that gave them away was this, on the first page i saw after logging in: You currently have no assets. well, damn! it's not bad enough that they're checking up on my financial status, but do they have to rub it in?
I have been annoyed on several occassions that the BSD command line utilities Apple provides lacked some feature that the GNU utilities have (I recall just replacing Apple's 'ls' with the GNU equivalent outright).
then, in the very next sentance:
At the same time, I don't want to mess with Fink, it introduces complexity.
and, just to close it up:
I'd much rather that Apple just installed the GNU stuff by default.
man! i've got mod points, and i almost moderated this funny, but i wanted to make sure people got it. you don't want extra complexity, but you prefer the GNU tools to the BSD tools? y'er kiddin', right? how on earth can anyone make sense of that? the GNU tools are, on average, dramatically more complicated than the BSD tools. i used to build Linux boxes that dumped the GNU tools in favor of the BSD tools. then i got annoyed with the GNU C library and tried swapping that out. halfway through the project of rebuilding everything so that it didn't have the stupid glibc dependancies, i got fed up and went back to a BSD system - because the tools were so much simpler. Apple made a great decision in using the BSD tools rather than the GNU tools (license questions aside).
oh, and as a parting kick:
...in Linux you can just assemble your system to do what you want.
right. yup. unless you want it to be a good desktop system.
// What college is this that you can play games 14 hours a day and still pass? who said they're passing? personally, i'm more worried about the recently unemployed techie armies out there.
i think you're having chronology issues. the BSD code was in Windows by the middle of 1993 (i'm not sure of when it got it, but i can find references from June '93 that talk about it). for example:
/* WINSOCK.H--definitions to be used with the WINSOCK.DLL * Copyright (c) 1993-1996, Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. * * This header file corresponds to version 1.1 of the Windows Sockets specification. * * This file includes parts which are Copyright (c) 1982-1986 Regents * of the University of California. All rights reserved. The * Berkeley Software License Agreement specifies the terms and * conditions for redistribution.
the internet was hardly the driving force in '93 it is today. had using IP cost Microsoft much money, or caused them to open their source, i'm pretty confident they would've done somethign propriatary (as they've done several times since). Microsoft really likes propriatary stuff, and the internet wasn't a money-making enterprise for them until about 1996. your point on the entrenchment of IPv4 is true, but i'm confused as to how it's related.
iSCSI is just another way of solving a problem that's already been solved in any number of other ways.
absolutely right. and not even an improvement. i'd say quite the oposite. what's so great about the SCSI command set that makes people think it'll be such a wonderful networked protocol? there's lots of things it doesn't do that you'd like a network protocol to do. presumably many of these are addressed by the "i" up front, but why do this stupid layering? is elegance totally lost on modern programers? this all doesn't even get into the question of whether a block-level network storage system is a good thing. can someone explain to me why it's an improvement over a good network file system? and please don't talk about problems with specific network file systems. we all know NFS sucks.
...about 50k reasons not to use it on a home machine or small network.
then:
...very few people are using macs in a data center serving up real applications to lots of clients - the sorta place where a well managed SAN makes sense.
uh, which one is it, then? if you're working in a real data center, you're presumably not in your home. and, not incidently, i've still yet to have it explained to me why a block level network storage system is a good thing as compared to a network file system (although not NFS particularly), other than for developers who can't wrap their minds around any model that doesn't involve every PC having a "disk".
Had [Microsoft & other commercial vendors who picked up the BSD TCP/IP stack] been required by license (GPL) to keep the code open, then it could be fixed by other people. Instead, the implementation has languished. This in fact is one of Stallman's great resons for keeping all code free.
yeah, and it's also indicitive of why Stallman's a simplistic fool. the fact that commercial vendors wern't required to reliese their derived source is why it took off. before adopting the BSD code, Micorsoft (and other networking vendors like Novel) had networking, but it was substantially more proprietary in nature. the BSD license provided a financial incentive for standardization. had Microsoft been required to release the code to the TCP/IP stack, they most likely would have either developed a propriatary protocol in-house, bought somebody else who was doing so, or licensed Novel's implementation (which, at the time, was substantially faster than the IP stack that got into Windows). so, in this case as in many others, the GPL would have been detrimental to the adoption of cross-platform standards. it also, of course, assumes that Microsoft would take back any of the changes people came up with. GPL makes no requirement that they do so. sorry, Richie.
um... well,/. is indeed HTML, and the original question may well have come from a nimrod, but you're not actually providing any useful information. you can do html in ascii, y'know? an earlier reply to the same question managed to answer the question (suggesting that the phrase was meant to imply the lack of html-like formating) without getting overly nasty. of course, a more useful - and more correct - observation would have been that/. in fact isn't based on ascii, but can use international characters as well. you nimrod.
I am now ready for a little less convenience and a little more privacy. How about you?
um, nope. thanks for asking.
i have EZ-pass. i like the fact that it speeds things up for me, but more than that, i like the fact that i no longer have to worry about keeping a ash tray full of change sitting around. i'm not really concerned with people knowing where i went when. sure, i'd rather people didn't keep that sort of tabs on me, but y'know what? i really don't care so much. wanna know where i drive? fine, whatever. similarly with credit cards. if my credit card company want to keep tabs on what i buy, fine. as long as they don't spam me with "promotional offers" (nicely worded spam), i don't care. as long as the person on the other end doesn't care, i'm happy to tell anyone who wants to know who i call on the phone, who i give money too, who i send email to.
i agree it'd be a problem if this sort of stuff was unavoidable. but you don't like EZpass tracking where you drive? don't use it. pay cash for things. the obvious counter-argument is that, in things like credit cards, you often don't have a choice. but if enough people "defect", somebody'll come along to fill that market demand. it's just that most people don't think about it. and many who do (like me) simply don't care that much about keeping their lives a secret.
this is just plain stupid. ever been to the UK? they've got really tight gun control laws - tighter than Taiwan. and y'know what? in most of the country, no bars on windows. by contrast, ever been to Harlem? or DC? or Newark? there's lots of cities in the United States - where we've got pretty loose gun control laws, by contrast, and where there's a fair rate of gun ownership - where most every house has bars over the windows - or the whole front of the house. i can't believe this tripe got mod'ed up.
If Mosaic had been licensed under the GPL, then the browser wars would almost certainly have turned out differently.
that's a pretty strong assertion there, with not much weight behind it. why would the browser wars have turned out differently if Joe User could get the source to IE, Mosaic, and their descendants? please be realistic: easialy better than 90% of computer users - probably closer to 99% - couldn't care less about "open source", "Free Software" (except in the sense that they'd like to not pay for things), or even know what "source code" means. the browser wars turned out the way they did primarilay because MS abused their monopoly of the desktop to drive netscape out of business by undercuting netscape's business model. source code never came into the picture.
If Apple does not include functionality to use OS7/8/9 apps in OSX, then it will hurt them.
you, uh, read the article, right? or at least the original slashdot post? they're not doing away with Classic, which is exactly what you're saying they'd better do! what a great idea! and it's been there since day one of OS X.
uh, MS - and every other OS vendor, and every other systems vendor - does do this, and it's entirely reasonable. when was the last time you think Dell sold a system with Win95 pre-installed? or Sun sold a Solaris 2 system? when a new version comes out, there's a transition period, and then you stop supporting the old stuff. standard fare. unless you're Caldera/SCO, in which case you've got a half dozen OSs to keep selling...
Slashdot Mirror
wow, "Insightful" takes less and less all the time, doesn't it?
in case you missed it, slashdot makes up "logos" for most of their categories. if they want to do the same here, great, but it certainly doesn't become a standard logo for the product or community in question. or do you really think all the microsoft groupies out there proudly display the "bill of borg" logo?
of course, if i had read this without the points or mod type, i'd have assumed you were trying to be funny, and if this were 3, Funny, i wouldn't be upset at all.
This is ESR, remember? Progress isn't the point.
:-)
and yes, i've got the Karma to burn.
// That way we can see where you are going.
good idea, but you're missing the most important point: that way he could see where he's going!
of course, that would open up the debates over GTA all over again...
so you don't think Cairo ever came out, huh? that's because they don't want you to think it did. but it did. it's installed on tons of computers, and comes pre-installed on most systems you can buy today. let me explain:
when the roman empire converted to christianity way back when, the first symbol of the change was an emblem plopped on top of the roman imperial banners. the contents of this emblem are still used widely by the Catholic church. anyone know what they are?
the roman empire chose as symbol of their collective conversion the first two letters of the greek word "Christ" for this emblem. know what that looks like in greek? the letter "Chi" (pronounced "Ki", with a long "i") and "Rho" (pronounced "ro"). and know what those letters look like?
yup: XP. Cairo == XP. masses of people are running Cairo and not even knowing it.
now, parallels between the conversion to christianity, or between the roman empire and microsoft generally, are left as an exercise to the reader.
OT, but...
"et.al" is incorrect. as is "et. cetera" or "e.t.c.". in each case, "et" is latin for "and". "etc" and "etc." are okay, "et c." is the most correct abbreviation (although kinda ugly).
related (hey, i'm already OT, why not go for broke?), the ampersand (thingie above the 7 on US keyboards) is a evolution of "Et" (curve the top and bottom of the E, connect the lower horizontal line of the E to the vertical line of the t, and the middle horizontal line of the E to the horizontal line of the t, to get a start). so in addition to being useful on its own as "and", "&c" is also a correct replacement for "et cetera".
an excellent post all around, and correct on most points (and from an AC! surely the end times are at hand). a response to some:
i've developed (what i believe to be) a clear rational, i simply don't have it prepared in a form that i can present to C-level employees or BoD types. perhaps "research" was the wrong word to use - i've done the price/performance, TCO, overall functionality, and other comparisons. that's not so much what i needed - more the "nice shiny presentation" most higher-level types like so much. this guy was announced to the company less than a week ago, and it was announced he'd be coming to our location to talk with me and others (and see operations) friday. not a ton of prep time.
building management consensus would have been good, you are correct. but the organization is in a bit of transition (having just about finished up the spin-out-to-buyer transition) and existing/previous management simply neglected IT (and, for the most part, R&D and operations!). the old CEO was more-or-less on board; it's just that this is a new guy.
dude, switch to decaf.
learning time on a mac for applications related to business is tiny. everyone who's made the switch has been up to ~90% productivity in a few hours.
even if your assertion that IT would get called for every issue were true (which it's proven not to be already), the total number of issues drops so dramatically as to still save time (and thus money).
i'm not sure where this anti-IT rage comes from, but would you really rather large companies not have one? and require each individual to be their own admin? like the office secretaries? i've been in that kind of organization. someone (or ones) gets tapped to be the go-to guy, and can't do the rest of his/her work. that work suffers, the tech stuff's done poorly... it's just a bad idea.
and i've bought one cisco box in my life: and ISDN bridge. it was and what company buys DIY laptops? for all their non-technical employees? i've worked in organizations (in IT and out) where PCs were self-built, and y'know what? they were down more. sorry, but you want reliability, you need engineering, not the ability to plug bits together. and engineering costs money.
i have business experience. i've been in charge of tech budgets. and i've seen support costs dramatically decreased by moving people to macs where sensible, first hand. your post is FUD, pure and simple.
and you don't know me. pull your head outta your posterior.
*ahem*
It's not always the IT staff that doesn't want the Mac in the door. I'm Director of Information Technology for a good sized company with offices on three continents. We were recently spun out from what is essentially a government lobbying body. It's all Windows, top to bottom.
Or it was. When we had to replace the Exchange server that was part of our former parent, we got an XServe. We've now got three, in two locations. About a third of our U.S. based employees use Macs, and that percentage is growing.
Tomorrow, I have to meet with the CEO and explain what the hell I'm doing (I'm hoping this article and posts will save me some research!). I'm assured by the CTO that he's open minded about it, but just thinks it's really "odd" and wants to know why. I hope that's the case.
It's not always the IT folks that're "ignorant". I know more Macs mean lower admin costs and greater reliability. And I know what having Unix workstations means to the R&D work. But some of the upper management has doubts... mostly, I suspect, because they'll need to explain it to the board, who's likely to be even more conservative.
Oh... and all our internally-developed software is Windows-only as well. The new CTO has already agreed that we're changing that. And we've got budget to ditch the few IE dependancies on our web site.
Sometimes we get to move in the right direction.
like the concept of a backing store for windowing systems. AT&T never enforced it, but they held a patent on it until it expired a year or two ago. and that certainly remains useful.
oh, and that's a lousy workaround.
for everyone running around yelling "Apple + Sun would be so cool!" i want to suggest that maybe you're looking at the wrong company. sure Solaris is my personal favorite of the "Big Iron" unix systems who're still even remotely relevant (Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP-UX). but can anyone see one of the others in that list being a better fit?
Apple just anounced their G5 chip, based very strongly on IBM's Power 4 architecture. like Sun, IBM makes some damn serious hardware for the high-end market.
imagine: no issues of anyone converting architectures or emulating old ones. one architecture from entry level (future iMacs or eMacs) to workstation (PowerMac G5) through workgroup server (xServe) through IBM's offerings up to the ASCI Purple project. Sun's a good company and all, and Solaris has way more to offer than AIX, but where's Sun on the Top 500 supercomputer list? their first offering comes in at 211. IMB's got 9 of the top 20 spots already. i want Mac OS X on those.
that's even leaving aside the fact that this comment is more of a "gee, that'd be cool" than "it's something we're persuing" (as has been noted).
wow... the Apple Developer Connection web site seems to either developing extra-sensory perception, or doing some information gathering behind our collective backs. the bit that gave them away was this, on the first page i saw after logging in:
You currently have no assets.
well, damn! it's not bad enough that they're checking up on my financial status, but do they have to rub it in?
then, in the very next sentance:and, just to close it up:man! i've got mod points, and i almost moderated this funny, but i wanted to make sure people got it. you don't want extra complexity, but you prefer the GNU tools to the BSD tools? y'er kiddin', right? how on earth can anyone make sense of that? the GNU tools are, on average, dramatically more complicated than the BSD tools. i used to build Linux boxes that dumped the GNU tools in favor of the BSD tools. then i got annoyed with the GNU C library and tried swapping that out. halfway through the project of rebuilding everything so that it didn't have the stupid glibc dependancies, i got fed up and went back to a BSD system - because the tools were so much simpler. Apple made a great decision in using the BSD tools rather than the GNU tools (license questions aside).
oh, and as a parting kick:right. yup. unless you want it to be a good desktop system.
maybe by the time the IPN sats get up, we'll start seeing IPv6 around?
nah, who'm i kidding. we'll hvae to come up with something else.
// What college is this that you can play games 14 hours a day and still pass?
who said they're passing?
personally, i'm more worried about the recently unemployed techie armies out there.
the internet was hardly the driving force in '93 it is today. had using IP cost Microsoft much money, or caused them to open their source, i'm pretty confident they would've done somethign propriatary (as they've done several times since). Microsoft really likes propriatary stuff, and the internet wasn't a money-making enterprise for them until about 1996.
your point on the entrenchment of IPv4 is true, but i'm confused as to how it's related.
this all doesn't even get into the question of whether a block-level network storage system is a good thing. can someone explain to me why it's an improvement over a good network file system? and please don't talk about problems with specific network file systems. we all know NFS sucks.
and, not incidently, i've still yet to have it explained to me why a block level network storage system is a good thing as compared to a network file system (although not NFS particularly), other than for developers who can't wrap their minds around any model that doesn't involve every PC having a "disk".
so, in this case as in many others, the GPL would have been detrimental to the adoption of cross-platform standards. it also, of course, assumes that Microsoft would take back any of the changes people came up with. GPL makes no requirement that they do so. sorry, Richie.
um... well, /. is indeed HTML, and the original question may well have come from a nimrod, but you're not actually providing any useful information. you can do html in ascii, y'know? an earlier reply to the same question managed to answer the question (suggesting that the phrase was meant to imply the lack of html-like formating) without getting overly nasty. /. in fact isn't based on ascii, but can use international characters as well.
of course, a more useful - and more correct - observation would have been that
you nimrod.
i have EZ-pass. i like the fact that it speeds things up for me, but more than that, i like the fact that i no longer have to worry about keeping a ash tray full of change sitting around. i'm not really concerned with people knowing where i went when. sure, i'd rather people didn't keep that sort of tabs on me, but y'know what? i really don't care so much. wanna know where i drive? fine, whatever.
similarly with credit cards. if my credit card company want to keep tabs on what i buy, fine. as long as they don't spam me with "promotional offers" (nicely worded spam), i don't care.
as long as the person on the other end doesn't care, i'm happy to tell anyone who wants to know who i call on the phone, who i give money too, who i send email to.
i agree it'd be a problem if this sort of stuff was unavoidable. but you don't like EZpass tracking where you drive? don't use it. pay cash for things.
the obvious counter-argument is that, in things like credit cards, you often don't have a choice. but if enough people "defect", somebody'll come along to fill that market demand. it's just that most people don't think about it. and many who do (like me) simply don't care that much about keeping their lives a secret.
this is just plain stupid.
ever been to the UK? they've got really tight gun control laws - tighter than Taiwan. and y'know what? in most of the country, no bars on windows. by contrast, ever been to Harlem? or DC? or Newark? there's lots of cities in the United States - where we've got pretty loose gun control laws, by contrast, and where there's a fair rate of gun ownership - where most every house has bars over the windows - or the whole front of the house.
i can't believe this tripe got mod'ed up.
uh, MS - and every other OS vendor, and every other systems vendor - does do this, and it's entirely reasonable. when was the last time you think Dell sold a system with Win95 pre-installed? or Sun sold a Solaris 2 system? when a new version comes out, there's a transition period, and then you stop supporting the old stuff. standard fare.
unless you're Caldera/SCO, in which case you've got a half dozen OSs to keep selling...