Having been part of this evaluation process, I can tell you that Ubuntu is much easier to support, but Novell offers far better enterprise support (including developer resources) for Suse, which is more important for the applications he proposes.
Hmmm. Teah, enterprise support from Canonical is lacking, IMHO. OTOH, Ubuntu has all of the same enterprise and developer features that SuSE has. OTOH, from in terms of systems administration, Ubuntu currently lacks some of the slick tools that are and have been a part of YaST, such as the graphical LVM (logical volume management) tools. Not that Ubuntu doesn't support LVM, and the text-mode installer certainly works great with LVM, but YaST is just a better all-around admin tool than anything in Ubuntu. Plus, Ubuntu doens't have any analogue to Red Hat's Kickstart or SuSE's YaST when it comes to creating standard workstation or server configurations for automatic installation.
OTOH, it probably isn't as good for kiosk workstation applications because of the lack of low end hardware options.
Um, Mac Mini. Admittedly, the price of $599 seems too expensive for 'low-end' hardware, but it's diminuitive 6.5"x6.5"x2" size seems to be tailor-made for kiosk applications.
Animal models of these complex psychiatric diseases are always a bit questionable. This one seems to have bad memory formation, attention problems, and poor social skills. The researchers believe that's enough to call it a model of schizophrenia, but that's very difficult to say for sure.
Right. These are just 'schizotypical' symptomps. Many other disorders feature schizotypical behaviour, including several developmental disorders, such as multiple-complex developmental disorder and other disorders like shizotypical personality disorder, which feature schizotypical behaviour but are not true schizophrenia. I suspect that these mice have more of the latter disorders (which are thought to be genetic) rather than actual schizophrenia (which may or may not be genetic).
The iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, but it is replaceable. This is the same as all iPods for the last several years. And no, the iPhone isn't the first of these devices to have a battery that is soldered. Various iPod models have already had soldered batteries. Also, the battery replacement information was available the day the iPhone shipped. So, nothing new here.
Dave, the iPhone isn't an iPod. Yes, it has iPod functions. But first and foremost -- it's a phone. And people are expecting these things to be able to be used a productive business tool. Instead, they are multimedia toys. Great for consumers, bad for people who need a real tool.
The funniest thing of all is that most iPhone owners won't ever even want or need to replace their batteries. They'll have the same slow degradation everyone experiences with lithium ion batteries over time, and before they'd even care or consider replacing it even if it was user-replaceable, they'll be on their next phone.
No planned obsolescence? Dave, what you just said is the definition of planned obsolescence!
Thankfully, if you still think it needs a user-accessible battery, no one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.
And it's one of reasons behind my decision to choose not to buy one for myself.
Every Apple computer extends the Steve Jobs reality distortion field [folklore.org] to the computer user, ensuring lifelong devotion to the product. I haven't a clue why it doesn't affect you this way.
Maybe we should study him in a lab! I think this 'reality distortion field' is the result of some sort of weird mind-control virus! Good thing I don't have it.
All hail the Great Turtlenecked One! The iPhone is awesome! The iPod is great! Mac OS X just works!
Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API, though it can use Microsoft dlls if you supply them.
Correct. I'm operating under the assumption that Cocoa and Carbon use Unix APIs at some level, since they sit on top of a Unix core. So as Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API, the Win32 API is just a fairly low-level API that lets you make windows and buttons and pull-down menus, access the filesystem, access task and memory management, etc., but if you want any of the niceties of newer Windows applications, like toolbars, reconfigurable menus, fancy controls, Windows media, etc., you need Windows/Microsoft DLLs that aren't a core part of the Win32 API proper. Sure, Wine provides open source implementations of some of these, but in most cases you need them provided from the application or from a copy of Windows. The analogy is not quite the same, with Cocoa and Carbon, but I think you get my point.
Why would you want to replace OS/X with Linux? Thats like replacing a shiny new Mercedez-Benz with a rebuilt Chevy.
Mods: Why did you mod him down? He has a point!
That depends. Maybe the poster believes in the ideals of the Free software movement. If you really do believe in Free software, then you just have to say "no" to a non-free operating system. Or, maybe the poster wants to take advantage of the features or lower memory/CPU requirements of a desktop Linux distro. Maybe OS X doesn't meet his needs in other ways.
An operating system is a tool like anything else. Owning a Mac isn't a religion. Not everyone bows to the Great Turtlenecked One. It's up to each person to pick an OS, platform and application suite that meets their needs and fits in with their world view.
Duh. The Cocoa and Carbon libraries aren't open source. Wine doesn't really emulate Windows libraries, it runs them directly. I suppose there might be some way of getting Carbon and Cocoa onto Linux, but I'm guessing that it's no easy task. And even then, you'd be subject to the same thing you are in Windows -- undocumented APIs, less-than-fully documented APIs, etc.
Wine has taken years to get as far as it has. I suspect that an 'OS X Wine' would take as long.
I'd like to thank Bill Gates, for giving OSS an easy target to shoot at. Hey, ESR: put that gun away...no, you can't shoot him!
Also to Guido van Rossum for giving us a fantastic language to play with.
And to Miguel de Icaza for getting the GNOME project started
And finally, to legendaries such as Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, (the missing and presumed dead) Jim Gray, Brian Kernighan, and so many others -- you are the ones who inspired us to do this!
Absolutely. People can make themselves sick by believing that something is making them sick. Like, if I told you that in studies, reading Slashdot everyday gave people severe headaches, and if you really believed me, you'd start getting headaches. If the brain believes the body is sick, the body will be sick. After all, the brain controls everything in the body, right?
I disagree. I live in area with some of the best beaches in the world, the Tampa Bay Area in Florida. Let me tell you, having wifi on the beach would be awesome. Most of you are thinking things like "why I would I want to get sand in my laptop?" but there are lots of areas on the municipal beaches here, like for example Clearwater Beach, where wifi is absolutely apropos. Check out the photo gallery if you don't live in a beach community and have no idea what I'm talking about.
I was wondering if someone would remember the Copy ][ Plus and Copy II PC bit-copiers. Old copy protection schemes relied on a 'key floppy' that had some sort of invalid format. Central Point's bit copiers would copy these disks bit-by-bit... the Apple II version was very fast...the PC version was lacking in speed, IIRC.
Of course, those typical "if this block is readable, refuse to run" copy protection schemes were also dead nuts simple to crack. On the PC, you just searched for an INT 0x13 (a 'CD 13' in hex opcodes) in a debugger (debug.exe worked very well, thank you very much), look for the check.... and then insert JMP to branch around the code.
Can't tell you how many times I used that technique...:)
How is it any different than a drug raid uncovering a major drug ring...?
It isn't. And there are people who would use that exact point to argue that illicit drugs should be legalized. After all, we're spending billions and billions of dollars going after these drug rings and it's all for naught.
The difference with software, however, staying on topic, is that Microsoft knows that it's pointless to try to stop all piracy and, in fact, they count on it. As Bill Gates once said (paraphrasing): "We don't want people to pirate our software, but if they're going to do it, we'd like them to pirate ours because we hope that they'll get sort of addicted to it."
Sure, Microsoft works with the BSA on a few major busts every year to make examples out of some particularly bad pirates, but they know darned well that they aren't going to stop piracy any time soon.
Really. You can run applications in their own protected space, sealed off from the 'real' computer. I do this a lot -- I have QEMU-virtualized Windows XP and Linux machines that I can try all kinds of garbage in. I just back up the image file, and when/if I totally mess the thing up -- 'cp winxp-qemu.img.old winxp-qemu.img', for instance. Nice and simple.
However, I thought that the compiler took care of destroying pointers when variables went out of scope? Aren't destructors implicit clean up calls? I'm fairly sure that Borland 16-bit Turbo C++ did this, back in the day.
Um, no. AFAIK, C++ has no implicit garbage collection. There are plenty of libraries that do garbage collection...most are essentially replacements for malloc.
But anyway, this is about dangling pointers -- pointers that point to essentially nothing (really, to some 'random' address), either before or after use, not necessarily pointers that haven't been destroyed.
And how many web applications are run as cron jobs? I don't know a single one...
Mod parent up, informative! Apple has as much to gain here as Microsoft does -- after all, Office runs on the Macintosh, and Apple has a vested interest in seeing it say dominate, as that it was one of the major draws of their platform.
Unfortunately, SSH and Kerberos won't save you. Pretty much nothing will. In order for the script to authenticate itself as you without user intervention, the script needs your credentials. And if the script can read your credentials, then anyone who can run the script can read your credentials as well.
Huh? Maybe you haven't heard, but they have this wonderful, brand-spanking-new, cutting-ege technology called multi-user cron. It was released with Unix System V in 1983 -- talk about the ink not drying yet! In multiuser cron, cron jobs run as you, but guess what? You don't even have to be there! Amazing technology! It's available in two separate implementations for Linux -- Vixie Cron and Anacron.
LUG over the net makes sense as having a community to rely on for troubleshooting is what makes or breaks a distro.
You don't get out much, do you? Now, I've never been part of a LUG, but I can tell you that meeting people face-to-face is oftentimes a lot more productive than exchanging e-mails or even in IRC or IM. Plus, it's about the networking. I've met many people in my life who have became good friends, and some have given me excellent job leads, through other groups I've been involved with (other than LUGs). It's how I met my wife (this was a religious group, rather than an geek group, though).
Agreed. Buttons on the right side wouldn't do it for me, personally, because I am also left-handed. Then again, maybe I could do what I've always done -- learn to use the thing right-handed... after all, I mouse right-handed mostly because most people keep their mouse on the right side of their keyboard, and as a sysadmin/deskside support personnel, I don't have a choice.
Dictionary words with letters replaced by numbers: not enough entropy. In this case however, not even a completely random password would have saved them.
Bingo! Never, ever, ever! NEVER store a password in plaintext in a script. Not ever. That's always a huge security issue, because you never know who is going to read the file. If you need unattended logins, there's SSH, Kerberos/GSSAPI, whatever.
Agreed. MDs were notorious for being highly flaky. I've used these suckers, and the people who love these things were are always apologetic about MDs that go bad, saying stuff like "Well, we can just send it back to Sony who can recreate the TOC."
That's the only thing you can do? Sheesh. Plus, these things are locked down in a way that the only way you can get audio off of them is to use the 'analog loophole'. Which sucks, because when you want to do post-processing on the raw audio you just recorded, you want it to be as clean as possible. And of course you always lose something in the D/A->A/D conversion process. *sigh*
Gimme a good hard disk recording system and a CD burner any day over that crap.
No, seriously, though, who knows what Apple would have done if it had bought Be or BeOS? And stating that the Atari ST is better than the Amiga -- well, that claim is specious at best. The Amiga was wayyyy ahead of its time -- it had separate graphics, sound and I/O processors and made use of DSPs years before the equivalent began showing up in 'IBM-compatibles' and Macs.
But then again, these arguments are old and tired. What's next? An article on Editor Wars? vi! No, Emacs! Ha! Real men use ed!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. Teah, enterprise support from Canonical is lacking, IMHO. OTOH, Ubuntu has all of the same enterprise and developer features that SuSE has. OTOH, from in terms of systems administration, Ubuntu currently lacks some of the slick tools that are and have been a part of YaST, such as the graphical LVM (logical volume management) tools. Not that Ubuntu doesn't support LVM, and the text-mode installer certainly works great with LVM, but YaST is just a better all-around admin tool than anything in Ubuntu. Plus, Ubuntu doens't have any analogue to Red Hat's Kickstart or SuSE's YaST when it comes to creating standard workstation or server configurations for automatic installation.
Um, Mac Mini. Admittedly, the price of $599 seems too expensive for 'low-end' hardware, but it's diminuitive 6.5"x6.5"x2" size seems to be tailor-made for kiosk applications.
Right. These are just 'schizotypical' symptomps. Many other disorders feature schizotypical behaviour, including several developmental disorders, such as multiple-complex developmental disorder and other disorders like shizotypical personality disorder, which feature schizotypical behaviour but are not true schizophrenia. I suspect that these mice have more of the latter disorders (which are thought to be genetic) rather than actual schizophrenia (which may or may not be genetic).
Dave, the iPhone isn't an iPod. Yes, it has iPod functions. But first and foremost -- it's a phone. And people are expecting these things to be able to be used a productive business tool. Instead, they are multimedia toys. Great for consumers, bad for people who need a real tool.
No planned obsolescence? Dave, what you just said is the definition of planned obsolescence!
And it's one of reasons behind my decision to choose not to buy one for myself.
Maybe we should study him in a lab! I think this 'reality distortion field' is the result of some sort of weird mind-control virus! Good thing I don't have it.
All hail the Great Turtlenecked One! The iPhone is awesome! The iPod is great! Mac OS X just works!
Correct. I'm operating under the assumption that Cocoa and Carbon use Unix APIs at some level, since they sit on top of a Unix core. So as Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API, the Win32 API is just a fairly low-level API that lets you make windows and buttons and pull-down menus, access the filesystem, access task and memory management, etc., but if you want any of the niceties of newer Windows applications, like toolbars, reconfigurable menus, fancy controls, Windows media, etc., you need Windows/Microsoft DLLs that aren't a core part of the Win32 API proper. Sure, Wine provides open source implementations of some of these, but in most cases you need them provided from the application or from a copy of Windows. The analogy is not quite the same, with Cocoa and Carbon, but I think you get my point.
Mods: Why did you mod him down? He has a point!
That depends. Maybe the poster believes in the ideals of the Free software movement. If you really do believe in Free software, then you just have to say "no" to a non-free operating system. Or, maybe the poster wants to take advantage of the features or lower memory/CPU requirements of a desktop Linux distro. Maybe OS X doesn't meet his needs in other ways.
An operating system is a tool like anything else. Owning a Mac isn't a religion. Not everyone bows to the Great Turtlenecked One. It's up to each person to pick an OS, platform and application suite that meets their needs and fits in with their world view.
That's because it never happened. It's an urban legend, based probably on this writing.
Duh. The Cocoa and Carbon libraries aren't open source. Wine doesn't really emulate Windows libraries, it runs them directly. I suppose there might be some way of getting Carbon and Cocoa onto Linux, but I'm guessing that it's no easy task. And even then, you'd be subject to the same thing you are in Windows -- undocumented APIs, less-than-fully documented APIs, etc.
Wine has taken years to get as far as it has. I suspect that an 'OS X Wine' would take as long.
I'd like to thank Bill Gates, for giving OSS an easy target to shoot at. Hey, ESR: put that gun away...no, you can't shoot him!
Also to Guido van Rossum for giving us a fantastic language to play with.
And to Miguel de Icaza for getting the GNOME project started
And finally, to legendaries such as Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, (the missing and presumed dead) Jim Gray, Brian Kernighan, and so many others -- you are the ones who inspired us to do this!
Absolutely. People can make themselves sick by believing that something is making them sick. Like, if I told you that in studies, reading Slashdot everyday gave people severe headaches, and if you really believed me, you'd start getting headaches. If the brain believes the body is sick, the body will be sick. After all, the brain controls everything in the body, right?
I disagree. I live in area with some of the best beaches in the world, the Tampa Bay Area in Florida. Let me tell you, having wifi on the beach would be awesome. Most of you are thinking things like "why I would I want to get sand in my laptop?" but there are lots of areas on the municipal beaches here, like for example Clearwater Beach, where wifi is absolutely apropos. Check out the photo gallery if you don't live in a beach community and have no idea what I'm talking about.
I was wondering if someone would remember the Copy ][ Plus and Copy II PC bit-copiers. Old copy protection schemes relied on a 'key floppy' that had some sort of invalid format. Central Point's bit copiers would copy these disks bit-by-bit ... the Apple II version was very fast...the PC version was lacking in speed, IIRC.
.... and then insert JMP to branch around the code.
:)
Of course, those typical "if this block is readable, refuse to run" copy protection schemes were also dead nuts simple to crack. On the PC, you just searched for an INT 0x13 (a 'CD 13' in hex opcodes) in a debugger (debug.exe worked very well, thank you very much), look for the check
Can't tell you how many times I used that technique...
Can you imagine a Beowu....
oh, never mind.
It isn't. And there are people who would use that exact point to argue that illicit drugs should be legalized. After all, we're spending billions and billions of dollars going after these drug rings and it's all for naught.
The difference with software, however, staying on topic, is that Microsoft knows that it's pointless to try to stop all piracy and, in fact, they count on it. As Bill Gates once said (paraphrasing): "We don't want people to pirate our software, but if they're going to do it, we'd like them to pirate ours because we hope that they'll get sort of addicted to it."
Sure, Microsoft works with the BSA on a few major busts every year to make examples out of some particularly bad pirates, but they know darned well that they aren't going to stop piracy any time soon.
Really. You can run applications in their own protected space, sealed off from the 'real' computer. I do this a lot -- I have QEMU-virtualized Windows XP and Linux machines that I can try all kinds of garbage in. I just back up the image file, and when/if I totally mess the thing up -- 'cp winxp-qemu.img.old winxp-qemu.img', for instance. Nice and simple.
Um, no. AFAIK, C++ has no implicit garbage collection. There are plenty of libraries that do garbage collection...most are essentially replacements for malloc.
But anyway, this is about dangling pointers -- pointers that point to essentially nothing (really, to some 'random' address), either before or after use, not necessarily pointers that haven't been destroyed.
Grrr...wrong quote. Ignore the quote.
Mod parent up, informative! Apple has as much to gain here as Microsoft does -- after all, Office runs on the Macintosh, and Apple has a vested interest in seeing it say dominate, as that it was one of the major draws of their platform.
If you're aggregating content like Fox News does with ZDNet material, you probably don't grab it on the fly, but at scheduled intervals.
Huh? Maybe you haven't heard, but they have this wonderful, brand-spanking-new, cutting-ege technology called multi-user cron. It was released with Unix System V in 1983 -- talk about the ink not drying yet! In multiuser cron, cron jobs run as you, but guess what? You don't even have to be there! Amazing technology! It's available in two separate implementations for Linux -- Vixie Cron and Anacron.
You don't get out much, do you? Now, I've never been part of a LUG, but I can tell you that meeting people face-to-face is oftentimes a lot more productive than exchanging e-mails or even in IRC or IM. Plus, it's about the networking. I've met many people in my life who have became good friends, and some have given me excellent job leads, through other groups I've been involved with (other than LUGs). It's how I met my wife (this was a religious group, rather than an geek group, though).
Agreed. Buttons on the right side wouldn't do it for me, personally, because I am also left-handed. Then again, maybe I could do what I've always done -- learn to use the thing right-handed... after all, I mouse right-handed mostly because most people keep their mouse on the right side of their keyboard, and as a sysadmin/deskside support personnel, I don't have a choice.
Bingo! Never, ever, ever! NEVER store a password in plaintext in a script. Not ever. That's always a huge security issue, because you never know who is going to read the file. If you need unattended logins, there's SSH, Kerberos/GSSAPI, whatever.
Agreed. MDs were notorious for being highly flaky. I've used these suckers, and the people who love these things were are always apologetic about MDs that go bad, saying stuff like "Well, we can just send it back to Sony who can recreate the TOC."
That's the only thing you can do? Sheesh. Plus, these things are locked down in a way that the only way you can get audio off of them is to use the 'analog loophole'. Which sucks, because when you want to do post-processing on the raw audio you just recorded, you want it to be as clean as possible. And of course you always lose something in the D/A->A/D conversion process. *sigh*
Gimme a good hard disk recording system and a CD burner any day over that crap.
Mod article troll!
No, seriously, though, who knows what Apple would have done if it had bought Be or BeOS? And stating that the Atari ST is better than the Amiga -- well, that claim is specious at best. The Amiga was wayyyy ahead of its time -- it had separate graphics, sound and I/O processors and made use of DSPs years before the equivalent began showing up in 'IBM-compatibles' and Macs.
But then again, these arguments are old and tired. What's next? An article on Editor Wars? vi! No, Emacs! Ha! Real men use ed!