Wow... I must read Slashdot too much. For a second there, I thought you typed "Need more Cowboyneal!" I don't think *any* of us really want THAT on our cellphones!
Umm.... it has definitely happened in the past on Windows-based boxes with dual or multi-boot configurations set up on them! I remember struggles and research to recover "dead" systems that came about when trying to set up dual-boot configurations with things like IBM OS/2 and Windows, for example. One OS would perform an upgrade over the old one, and in the process clobber the boot record info that was formerly allowing a dual-boot.
And although this is an unfortunate situation, it's hardly a case of Apple "completely fucking up and making a mockery of their own catchphrases".
Apple basically told people all along that using BootCamp on an OS X 10.4 Tiger based Mac was a beta test thing. The final version would be included with Leopard. If Tiger updates end up breaking this feature after the beta period has already expired - I'd almost assume Apple did it on purpose, so people would be more compelled to pay up for the new OS version that actually includes that functionality as a legitimate part of it.
The ability of Macs to dual-boot into Windows isn't some "amazing new thing" in and of itself... The main reason BootCamp was important was because they provided device drivers for all the Apple hardware that Windows couldn't auto-detect and use otherwise (such as the iSight cameras, backlit keyboards on their notebooks, keyboard function keys for volume up/down and screen brightness, etc.)
I've been using a Mac Pro in a dual-boot Windows XP and OS X configuration since I first bought it, and never installed BootCamp on it at all. I simply placed XP on a separate hard drive, rather than trying to partition it out on the same drive.
I don't think this is nearly the issue you're making it out to be. The iPod touch could offer e-book reading capabilities just like the iPhone, and you need no monthly contract for it. The books could be purchased (or free ones offered online for download) from iTunes on a PC or Mac, and sync'd into the memory of the iPod touch or iPhone to read later - regardless of connectivity during the time you're viewing the book.
Battery life becomes sort of a non-issue too when you think about it practically. Who is going to read a Kindle for anywhere near the 30 hours of promised battery life, non-stop? If you just recharge your device each night before going to bed, either Kindle or iPod touch/iPhone will get you through hours of reading during the day with no problem.
The Apple alternatives win out in size/portability too. Sure, the screen is smaller - but it's bright and easily readable. I have the iPhone (currently hacked with 3rd. party apps), and I've already read a book on it using a free e-reader application on it. It's quite usable, and nice because it's always with me. (I'm already going to carry my cellphone all day long, on my belt-clip, so I don't miss calls. It's nice to be able to grab it and read a few pages of a book I'm working on reading whenever I get a few free minutes here and there. I doubt I'd be lugging a book-sized, $400 Kindle with me everywhere I went too, just to accomplish the same thing.)
I do agree the Kindle could find a great niche market in colleges/universities. It'd sure beat a book-bag full of textbooks. But how durable is it going to be? Can you trust it to work reliably and not develop stuck buttons, a cracked screen, etc. etc. ?
The Win2K to XP migration was a totally different thing than what we're seeing here. I remember working in corporate I.T. when XP was released, and like many other companies in our area, our company was still largely running Windows NT 4.0 on the workstations at that time. NT 4, after all, had 6 service packs by that time, and was considered pretty "mature" and "stable". All our machines came with it when they were new, were certified to work with it, and we had drive images with our full application set already made up for NT.
Everyone liked what they saw with Win2K, but the thought was "Well, we'll wind up with it eventually, as our old machines break down or reach "end of life" for whatever reason. The new ones will start coming pre-loaded with Win2K and we'll work that into a mixed environment for a while." The laptops (having a shorter life-span than desktops) were our first Win2K systems in use.
XP came along, mid-transition, for us - and so we started testing it, and making disk images with both XP and Win2K, to see how they both worked out for us. Ultimately, we decided to pass over Win2K and move straight to XP (but that's around the time I quit working for them too, so can't tell you definitively how it all went down after that).
The thing is, back then, XP was attractive even to "hesitant upgraders" like our company, because it was possible to set a few GUI options to give it a Windows 2000 "look and feel". Most of XP's impact came with improvements in things like "zero-configuration" wireless ethernet support, and better handling of PCMCIA cards on portables. The "eye candy" was un-necessary, but could largely be disabled. (Make fun of their "teletubbies" looking wallpaper default all you want, but that's just a lousy.BMP image file you can delete or change. Not a big issue.)
The XP to Vista migration is asking all your users to go through training, learning about completely new interface elements. Administrators have to re-learn where all the configuration options have been moved to (usually for no good reason other than Microsoft wanting it to feel "new and different"). Yeah, they promise more "security" in the OS, but that's a double-edge sword the way it was implemented. (It's likely a big factor in causing incompatibility with older software that was written assuming the user has more "administrator-like" rights in the OS than they do under Vista.) Migrations from 2000 to XP usually demanded you upgrade your PC's RAM, but XP to Vista seems to demand not only another similar bump in RAM, but also a potential bump in hard drive space, a newer video card, and in some cases, even a faster CPU. After all that, it has problems copying files over networks, and problems with file copies being SLOWER than they are under XP. (At least, that was the case last I checked. Obviously, update patches and the forthcoming SP1 for Vista may change some of that.)
Considering the relatively high cost of Vista licenses too, it's just a lot harder to cost-justify than a switch to XP (especially in a world where some people pretty much skipped over Win2K anyway).
If "money talks", the problem here is, the recording industry isn't intelligent or patient enough to listen to it. The "massively popular" indie bands circulating the p2p networks and Usenet groups aren't *only* popular because people are downloading the content from these Internet-based sources! They're popular in those sectors because lots of people are enjoying their music. That means, the POTENTIAL to profit is right there, staring them in the face (if they bother to look).
The problem is, they've probably alienated these potential customers with their insistence on only selling the products THEIR way... on physical CDs that cost too much and often have anti-copying measures in place on them. Alternately, they MAY opt to sell SOME of the material via heavily DRM protected file formats, on specific "online music stores".
The people who least care about these limitations or restrictions are often the ones with less "taste" in music to begin with. I'm talking about the younger kids, just discovering the joys of music for the first time, and the very casual buyer who doesn't have more than a dozen albums in his/her collection, total. That would be your typical Backstreet Boys, Brittney Spears type listener.....
Bingo! He's really NOT a musician anymore. A buddy of mine used to work for a large financial firm, and he flew out to New York a few years ago to some kind of convention. Of course, this included mingling with many from the Wall Street community. (He did QA testing and support for one of their stock market ticker type applications.) He actually ran into Gene Simmons at this thing, and was a little taken aback. He was dressed in a business suit and talking stock options and trading... *nothing* like you'd picture a member of KISS looking.
The man can tell you much more about investment advice than he can which new models of electric guitars are any good. That's for sure.
KISS hasn't been anything but a "franchise" to make money off the older crowd's past memories, for at least the last 20 years now.
I don't disagree that just going in places like the DMV gives you that "evil, big brother is here" feeling. But ultimately, what's the "end goal" of your anarchist stance? Once the current system of government is overthrown by force, what do you foresee replacing it that will be so much better than people trying to fix the current system?
Anarchy doesn't really strike me as being a "political position" as much as it's a temporary state that usually exists during the transition of government from one form to another.
It seems to me, the Libertarian party is exactly who you want to get out and cast a vote for, since they're generally working under the premise of dismantling anything in federal government that's unnecessary, and valuing individual rights and freedoms above all else. If you simply want "anarchy, because anything has to be better than this!", I'd say you're taking a HUGE risk that you'll actually end up with a worse outcome than before your revolution happened. That's usually what's happened in other countries of the world, if you ask me.
In my opinion, voting for either a Democrat or Republican in a national election, at this point in time, is equivalent to a vote for the "status quo" of corruption in our "democratic system".
On the OTHER hand, rather than abstaining from voting (and having your "voice" be completely ignored), you could vote for an independent candidate. I know I'm casting a vote for Ron Paul, this election year, if at all possible. It's obvious he's not a candidate who advocates leaving the current systems in place and functional "the way we've always done it". Does he have a chance of actually winning? Well, probably not.... but the more votes are cast for folks like him, the more of a "wake up call" is sent to whoever DOES win that some people out there are really unhappy with the current state of affairs. They're going to start asking "How can *I* win those people over when I'm up for re-election?" and it might cause some useful change.
Pretending for a moment that I have no other problems with something like this being passed into law (and that's FAR from the case!), I'm wondering what other unintended ramifications this could have?
For example, I'm a member of a local group on www.meetup.com, a social networking type web site. This group occasionally holds poker playing get-togethers at one member's apartment on the weekends. (Nothing "high stakes", but some money does change hands.) Could this get caught up in "online gambling", simply because it was organized over the Internet?
I, too, was thinking this sort of study would best be done by hand, but for a different reason.
In real life, I know I'd be far more annoyed by a robot of some sort entering my "personal space", pretending to be a real human, and striking up a somewhat stilted conversation with me than a REAL human talking to me.
I've never seen the A.I. in these "bots" advance to a point where you can't tell they're not really another human. They typically ask a good "introductory" question or two, but can't keep up the illusion once it advances to a full conversation.
Ok, I stand corrected... but I was thinking of products of theirs like Soundbooth (Intel Mac only) as I was writing my initial post.
I still believe it's a correct assumption to say Adobe was not building any of their applications using Apple's xcode as their development tool. They may, however, be re-writing many of the "Design/Web collection" apps from the ground up, or at least re-coding them completely using new tools, so they can indeed offer both PPC and Intel support for them. It appears to be something Adobe is doing on a "case by case" basis.
Well, this was *probably* done as a retaliatory move on Apple's part, as much as anything. Apple traditionally had a good foothold in the MIDI music, sequencing, and hard disk recording sectors - but Windows-only products were eating away at their market share. (Think products like Cakewalk Sonar, for example, or ACID Pro, or Gigastudio.)
Furthermore, some of the music gear out there was starting to only include Windows software for the purpose of editing or cataloging sound patches. (I remember buying a Yamaha Motif synthesizer a few years ago, and the only Mac software tools it included were for Mac OS 9.x only. OS X support was "coming soon" for pretty much the whole time I owned it.)
Apple wanted to create at least one more good reason to choose a Mac as a musician.
With Adobe, it's a whole different situation. For starters, Adobe uses their own methods of software development, which appear to be Windows-centric. (All of their new apps for OS X are supporting Intel Mac only, as opposed to "Universal binaries" that work with PPC Macs too. That would indicate they're not writing this stuff with Apple's xcode tools at all, but rather, doing some kind of ports directly over from their Windows versions.) I don't think Apple would want to buy out an entire product line that they'd have to re-code using xcode, before it would even be up to the standards they endorse of supporting both architectures.
I think modding a post down as "overrated" would be well within the definition of what the term means, if I use it to mod down yet another "I'm against Google because they've got so much info, it makes them EVIL!" type of post.
Look, Google got ALL of the info they have today VOLUNTARILY. Again, what happened to personal responsibility here? If you're that worried/paranoid/whatever about a big corporation having the ability to search and read your email, don't sign up for a free account with them! Or alternately, only use your gmail account for unimportant information you're not concerned with them having. Or hey, maybe use it as a "throw-away" address for all your spam to go to?
Activism is great, when it targets a real, existing problem. Activism loses its credibility and potential usefulness when it's used as a bullying or scare tactic. (EG. Greenpeace's fixation on making Apple look bad for environmental issues, despite them contributing FAR less to the problem that manufacturers selling FAR more products with similar or worse environmental "footprints".)
For the record, I rarely mod *anything* down, because I prefer using my mod points in a positive way (as encouraged by Slashdot themselves).
First and foremost, if you haven't seen it already, check out the mod someone did to the dock to make it "rainbow glass". (The rainbow effect might not be your thing, but you can use slight variations of what they did to change it to any color of "tinted glass" you like, making it much easier to see.)
I agree on Time Machine.... It's very cool, overall, but needs a little more work. (For example, Apple's solution to incompatibilities with their Aperture application is to exclude Aperture's photo database from your backups. Great... so if I'm a pro photographer, Time Machine can't even back up the most important data on my whole system for me?) It also needs a fix (supposedly coming soon) to allow using a shared disk off an Apple Airport Extreme router.
No, I don't have a "dim view" of you at all. I appreciate the reply.
Perhaps I wasn't totally clear though. My stance is this. ALL companies are going to make their share of mistakes. Given enough time, yes, they'll even do some "slippery slope" things that leave you jittery about your privacy rights and such. I don't like it, but I accept it as reality. From there, I look at the pros and the cons, and decide overall which companies are worthy of praise, and which aren't.
Currently, yes, I'd mod someone down for making anti-Google comments, because right now, they all center around the same old issues. (EG. Gmail keeps SO much of people's info, they're getting too powerful!) Until something actually happens that indicates Google is, indeed, doing something bad with all this info, it's just hypothetical fiction. If the story actually covered Google changing corporate policy and reselling the contents of people's emails - THEN I would of course give that due consideration!
A "fanboy" treats a business like a religion, and claims it is "perfect in every way", basically. I don't treat Apple, Google, or any other business like that.
Claiming it's a contradiction to like OSS but like Apple is an over-simplification too. Apple computers have a really good OS today because they were able to build on the strengths of open source. Apple's wish to dominate their market and eliminate possible competition defines business in a capitalist society. The idea is always that others will also be just as driven to "push back" with alternatives, and that vying for dominance creates a win-win situation for consumers. Right now, Apple is in transition from a "computer company" to a "media company". They have to juggle a lot of things to make that happen, including making some deals they probably don't really like (with DRM on music, restrictions on the iPhone, etc.). I can see where they're trying to go, long-term, with all of it - and unlike some people, I'm pretty ok with the "grand plan". They wouldn't HAVE an online music store today if they stubbornly insisted on idealistic ideas about music having NO restrictions on it, period. (Apple wasn't able to just buy the entire recording industry and make it a sub-set of their business, after all.)
Yep! I've always done system administration from the viewpoint that the computers are there as TOOLS for everyone to use. By the very nature of computing, you can't expect to make almost any specific, hard and fast rules that cover all scenarios. It's a constantly moving, evolving target.
You block a range of ports on the firewall because "bad app X uses them, and we don't want bad app X running!"? Next thing you know, it breaks 3 other legitimate apps people need to be more efficient in the workplace.
You THINK you understand when, where and how people need to do printing? I guarantee you missed something.
I think the best compromise between "security" and "usability" is to deploy the common sense measures everyone can agree offer benefits. Install a good anti-virus solution, centrally managed if possible. Set up some sensible security restrictions on some of the shared folders on the network. Run a decent web filtering solution that blocks known "not work safe/related" sites - but generally err on the side of accessibility, rather than locking it down TOO tightly. (If an employee is constantly surfing sites they shouldn't be on, that's a MANAGEMENT issue - not a technical one, ultimately.) In a Windows network, group policies are very useful too. Again, don't go crazy locking things down - but enforce a few things, like a reasonable default cache size for Internet Explorer and a screen saver that kicks off after, say, 10-15 minutes, password-protected. And lastly, I've had great luck using 3rd. party spam filtering services for email. (Why struggle and spend valuable system resources trying to do that yourself? Many ISPs and other services will offer it, site-wide, for maybe $40 a month or so.)
I hear this complaint often. (One of my best friends subscribes to the "Slashdot makes me sick with all the group-think and one-sidedness" theories, in fact.)
I guess I look at it differently. I think one of Slashdot's strengths is its bias. Right now, I can visit any number of commercial web sites, purportedly about "computers and technology", and get a very Microsoft-centric view of things. Problem is, just because 90%+ of the systems out there run Microsoft products doesn't mean I want to read about those products 90%+ of the time! (That would be like a gourmet settling for reading stories about fast food chains 90% of the time, just because fast food operations are that much more prevalent than gourmet restaurants.)
I really think the *truth* is, there are "best", "good" and "not so good" choices out there in the world of technology and computing. Skashdot takes the stance that OSS is either in the "best" or "good" category (and some stories directly address arguing over which of those 2 labels best applies). Slashdot takes the stance that Apple is doing good, interesting things right now too. Considering I went 10+ years using nothing but PC compatible Wintel boxes, and now I'm almost all converted to Macintosh, I'd say I agree with THAT bias too. And Google? I think anyone bashing them, yet claiming to be into technology, is foolish, bordering on hypocritical. So yes, I'd mod down an "anti Google" post myself, too! (Are they "too big", becoming "evil", or anything else? Nobody seems to be bringing any solid evidence to the table on any of that, right now. All I see is a company that's been giving out an awful lot of really useful, really cool stuff for FREE, and seems poised to put downwards price pressures on the cellphone industry next. Works for me!)
No... those points aren't rubbish at all, in my estimation.
I work as a sysadmin and yes, I have Linux servers here too.
The fact is, though, many things in Linux involve not only a "RTFM" - but "FTFMS" (as in find the f'ing manuals), scattered all over the net. Because Linux is free and developed by "anyone, anywhere" - you run into the classic problem of developers who aren't very good technical writers. In a commercial business, this is handled by having their writers do the writing. With open-source, it often means the job either doesn't get done at all, or gets done poorly by the developer him/herself. Then, users try to patch up the missing documentation with wikki's, message forums, and other online resources, where you can get piecemeal suggestions and fixes for your issues (with hours of digging).
As just one example, I have a Linux web proxy server set up here. I wanted to add "dansguardian" to it, so it would do filtering of sites people have no business visiting while working. Sure, dansguardian has a "manual" for it, but it goes on and on with minutia about how changing various integer values in the config files increases or decreases the likelihood of it flagging a site for too much "bad content". In reality, all I wanted were some good, real-world "starting values" appropriate for a business environment full of adults. (We're not a school, so we can handle some curse words on our web pages. BUT, we don't want people browsing porn sites either. Blocking as many malicious script type sites as possible would be a big plus too.) To do this (plus downloading the latest blacklists of sites on a regular basis) required a lot more reading, and my best info came from a blog some guy wrote in his spare time.
Time is money, and if I can reconfigure some rarely-modified server setting in a few seconds, rather than hours of poring over manuals and/or configuration files, the GUI wins out. Meanwhile, the overhead of having some GUI menus is really not significant for a server these days.... Maybe back when a 286 processor was "state of the art", that was a valid point. But currently? You don't even need to stay logged in on the server 90% of the time when it's sitting there serving up data, so how can the GUI be affecting much of anything at that point? Even when you do sign on to the server locally, look at your CPU usage. The fact the GUI is there isn't much of a performance hit at all. Moving your mouse around is likely to use more CPU than anything else (sometimes as much as 8% or so in spikes). But you're not playing a mouse-based video game here... You're just clicking through a few screens. It's a brief usage spike, which users shouldn't even notice.
Well, going by THIS description of what happened, I'd say Woz doesn't *really* have a big grudge in the first place....
Fact is, ANY time someone tells me I can do job X for them and they'll pay me "such and such" an amount of money for it, I'm going to decide if it's worth my effort and time or not based on what they quote me.
Sounds to me like Woz was fine with the initial terms of their agreement (he'd receive $375 for the work), or else he would have probably told Jobs "Sorry man, it's just not worth it to me."
The fact that there was more to the agreement than Jobs explained *could* be interpreted as "Jobs is being dishonest", but it's also one of the reasons he makes a better businessman and CEO than someone like Woz. This is the way business gets done -- with a goal of maximizing your profits by leveraging your resources as craftily as possible.
And hey, Jobs had no way of knowing in advance how many chips Woz would manage to remove, right? So the figure he quoted was sort of a "worst case scenario" of what he KNEW he could pay Woz, even if Woz didn't end up reducing the chip count after trying to do it. It wasn't some number fabricated out of thin air.
I don't quite understand the constant argument in favor of consoles, simply because "keeping up with the PC hardware is so expensive"?
I do have a PS3 *and* several computers, but here's the thing. My last PC ran everything I wanted to play (on a 24" LCD monitor), simply using an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro video card, up until about a year ago. Then I upgraded from an Athlon motherboard to an Intel Core Duo with PCI Express video, and went with a mid-range ATI card (X1600 I think?), and once again, it plays all the latest titles just fine for me.
Do I insist on running everything with every last detail mode maxxed out, anti-aliasing set to the max, etc. ? No! That's just too resource-intensive. The games aren't any less enjoyable though. It's rather like the comparisons of Bioshock's new Direct-X 10 support vs. what the same screens looked like under DX9. The differences were SO subtle, nobody would notice 3/4ths. of them without them being pointed out first. The most "relevant" change was minor too, and would really add zilch to the overall gaming experience.
My "state of the art" PS3 isn't capable of any better graphics than what my PCI Express mid-range ATI card puts out anyway. Most of the visual impact of the PS3 comes from running it on an HDTV that's larger than most monitors on computers... but even 1080i resolution isn't as demanding on the video card as the modes something like a 30" LCD panel runs in by default.
I wish I had mod points available! Someone should mod you up! This list of "cool gadgets" was so uninspiring, I didn't even click through all of it before getting bored and irritated with it!
If the only thing we're missing from "cool new tech in Japan" is an egg-shaped music player that gyrates around (obviously eating up the battery charge at a must faster rate than normal players), a bunch of wanna-be "iPhone killer" cellphones with various pluses and minuses, and 1 OLED TV set (a technology we're sure to see here in widespread use, soon enough, anyway) - I'll pass.
The real shame here in the U.S. is that broadband Internet isn't faster, cheaper and more widely available! It's ridiculous that many people I know who live just 50 miles or so outside the major city I live in have to resort to satellite to get "high speed Internet" at all. The huge latency and high cost makes it vastly inferior. Those of us with "better options" are usually stuck with DSL that doesn't go above 6MBPS tops, or cable that may reach 10MBPS (at $99 per month or so, in the case of our cable company!), and be subject to all sorts of possible restrictions on usage (such as Comcast's fiasco killing torrent traffic).
I'd even like to see some sort of unification of wireless hotspots in the U.S. Right now, you have all these individual attempts to offer customers of establishments "free wi-fi" access, as well as businesses trying to sell subscriptions to a relative handful of hotspots they maintain (in airports and so forth). I wonder when we might see this consolidated into "Pay $5 a month extra on your regular ISP bill, and receive access with your same login and password to all wi-fi access points we manage nation-wide?" AT&T half-heartedly sells this now, but it's pretty worthless for 95% of their customer base because they don't control enough access points.
I don't think it's quite like what you're stating? What I think we're actually seeing is simply more segmentation of what encompasses "I.T.".
I think of it as akin to books. You've got your authors and your avid readers. There is certainly some crossover there, but on the whole, a reader may not have any interest or skills at writing a good book. A writer probably doesn't have the TIME to read many of the other good books out there, because he/she is too busy writing their own!
In the past, you often had companies hiring both software developers and systems administration/support staff, and putting it all under the general umbrella of "I.T." But that's almost like being an avid reader who hires his own author to write books for him to read.
Now, you're seeing much more outsourcing of software development and purchasing of "canned" packages that can be heavily customized by consultants who temporarily come in, configure it to suit, and leave.
Obviously, software programmers/developers are still needed! It's just that they're not so often needed in the same environment as those using the software.
Hey! No fair! There was only 1 comment visible, total, when I posted this. Then I refresh the page and 5 other people have the same joke posted. Life, at the speed of Slashdot, I guess....
I got your contact through email business directory and decided to send my proposal to you. I am the chief engineer for a project building helicopters for the Nigerian army, and the first son of the late chief BOLA IGE,the attorney general of the fedeal republic of Nigeria who was killed by hired assasin on the 23rd of December 2001 by an unidentified gun men believed to be link to our government of which it is a daily case going on in my country;s dailies now.
Two months ago he was attempted to be murdered but unfortunately God speared his life for us.It was then he had to reveal some vital informations as regards his life to me before he was finally killed in december. All accounts belonging to my father both local and abroad had been frozen and his investments seized by the government believing in thier false allegation that he made away of $2 billion dollars of (NEPA)national electricity power authority of which i know is just a ploy to eliminate him by the people in power that he is fustrating thier evil intentions through the human right pubic hearing for violation of right and cruelsome killings during the military regime to carry out thier traits to suffer the mases for thier selfish interest instead of the interest of the nation.We are now in a dileman as ou live are in danger till after the investigations.
With all the crime-fighting that's been enabled by technology (think forensics, for example, where people can leave only microscopic amounts of evidence behind at a crime-scene and STILL be tracked down based on it) - I think it all comes out about even, in the end.
Sure, technology makes it easy to steal money from the comfort of one's home, with just a PC, an Internet connection, and some socially-engineered passwords.... But it also means more "casual conversation" is done via email or online chat, where it can be recorded and/or traced back to its source. In the "good old days", it was FAR less likely you could prove who said what if it was just a couple people talking while sitting on a park bench or what-not.
Technology provides additional tools for people which can be used for "good" or for "bad". In fact, they WILL be used by both sides - and it has a "canceling out" effect overall.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... I must read Slashdot too much. For a second there, I thought you typed "Need more Cowboyneal!" I don't think *any* of us really want THAT on our cellphones!
Umm.... it has definitely happened in the past on Windows-based boxes with dual or multi-boot configurations set up on them! I remember struggles and research to recover "dead" systems that came about when trying to set up dual-boot configurations with things like IBM OS/2 and Windows, for example. One OS would perform an upgrade over the old one, and in the process clobber the boot record info that was formerly allowing a dual-boot.
And although this is an unfortunate situation, it's hardly a case of Apple "completely fucking up and making a mockery of their own catchphrases".
Apple basically told people all along that using BootCamp on an OS X 10.4 Tiger based Mac was a beta test thing. The final version would be included with Leopard. If Tiger updates end up breaking this feature after the beta period has already expired - I'd almost assume Apple did it on purpose, so people would be more compelled to pay up for the new OS version that actually includes that functionality as a legitimate part of it.
The ability of Macs to dual-boot into Windows isn't some "amazing new thing" in and of itself... The main reason BootCamp was important was because they provided device drivers for all the Apple hardware that Windows couldn't auto-detect and use otherwise (such as the iSight cameras, backlit keyboards on their notebooks, keyboard function keys for volume up/down and screen brightness, etc.)
I've been using a Mac Pro in a dual-boot Windows XP and OS X configuration since I first bought it, and never installed BootCamp on it at all. I simply placed XP on a separate hard drive, rather than trying to partition it out on the same drive.
I don't think this is nearly the issue you're making it out to be. The iPod touch could offer e-book reading capabilities just like the iPhone, and you need no monthly contract for it. The books could be purchased (or free ones offered online for download) from iTunes on a PC or Mac, and sync'd into the memory of the iPod touch or iPhone to read later - regardless of connectivity during the time you're viewing the book.
Battery life becomes sort of a non-issue too when you think about it practically. Who is going to read a Kindle for anywhere near the 30 hours of promised battery life, non-stop? If you just recharge your device each night before going to bed, either Kindle or iPod touch/iPhone will get you through hours of reading during the day with no problem.
The Apple alternatives win out in size/portability too. Sure, the screen is smaller - but it's bright and easily readable. I have the iPhone (currently hacked with 3rd. party apps), and I've already read a book on it using a free e-reader application on it. It's quite usable, and nice because it's always with me. (I'm already going to carry my cellphone all day long, on my belt-clip, so I don't miss calls. It's nice to be able to grab it and read a few pages of a book I'm working on reading whenever I get a few free minutes here and there. I doubt I'd be lugging a book-sized, $400 Kindle with me everywhere I went too, just to accomplish the same thing.)
I do agree the Kindle could find a great niche market in colleges/universities. It'd sure beat a book-bag full of textbooks. But how durable is it going to be? Can you trust it to work reliably and not develop stuck buttons, a cracked screen, etc. etc. ?
The Win2K to XP migration was a totally different thing than what we're seeing here. I remember working in corporate I.T. when XP was released, and like many other companies in our area, our company was still largely running Windows NT 4.0 on the workstations at that time. NT 4, after all, had 6 service packs by that time, and was considered pretty "mature" and "stable". All our machines came with it when they were new, were certified to work with it, and we had drive images with our full application set already made up for NT.
.BMP image file you can delete or change. Not a big issue.)
Everyone liked what they saw with Win2K, but the thought was "Well, we'll wind up with it eventually, as our old machines break down or reach "end of life" for whatever reason. The new ones will start coming pre-loaded with Win2K and we'll work that into a mixed environment for a while." The laptops (having a shorter life-span than desktops) were our first Win2K systems in use.
XP came along, mid-transition, for us - and so we started testing it, and making disk images with both XP and Win2K, to see how they both worked out for us. Ultimately, we decided to pass over Win2K and move straight to XP (but that's around the time I quit working for them too, so can't tell you definitively how it all went down after that).
The thing is, back then, XP was attractive even to "hesitant upgraders" like our company, because it was possible to set a few GUI options to give it a Windows 2000 "look and feel". Most of XP's impact came with improvements in things like "zero-configuration" wireless ethernet support, and better handling of PCMCIA cards on portables. The "eye candy" was un-necessary, but could largely be disabled. (Make fun of their "teletubbies" looking wallpaper default all you want, but that's just a lousy
The XP to Vista migration is asking all your users to go through training, learning about completely new interface elements. Administrators have to re-learn where all the configuration options have been moved to (usually for no good reason other than Microsoft wanting it to feel "new and different"). Yeah, they promise more "security" in the OS, but that's a double-edge sword the way it was implemented. (It's likely a big factor in causing incompatibility with older software that was written assuming the user has more "administrator-like" rights in the OS than they do under Vista.) Migrations from 2000 to XP usually demanded you upgrade your PC's RAM, but XP to Vista seems to demand not only another similar bump in RAM, but also a potential bump in hard drive space, a newer video card, and in some cases, even a faster CPU. After all that, it has problems copying files over networks, and problems with file copies being SLOWER than they are under XP. (At least, that was the case last I checked. Obviously, update patches and the forthcoming SP1 for Vista may change some of that.)
Considering the relatively high cost of Vista licenses too, it's just a lot harder to cost-justify than a switch to XP (especially in a world where some people pretty much skipped over Win2K anyway).
If "money talks", the problem here is, the recording industry isn't intelligent or patient enough to listen to it. The "massively popular" indie bands circulating the p2p networks and Usenet groups aren't *only* popular because people are downloading the content from these Internet-based sources! They're popular in those sectors because lots of people are enjoying their music. That means, the POTENTIAL to profit is right there, staring them in the face (if they bother to look).
The problem is, they've probably alienated these potential customers with their insistence on only selling the products THEIR way... on physical CDs that cost too much and often have anti-copying measures in place on them. Alternately, they MAY opt to sell SOME of the material via heavily DRM protected file formats, on specific "online music stores".
The people who least care about these limitations or restrictions are often the ones with less "taste" in music to begin with. I'm talking about the younger kids, just discovering the joys of music for the first time, and the very casual buyer who doesn't have more than a dozen albums in his/her collection, total. That would be your typical Backstreet Boys, Brittney Spears type listener.....
Bingo! He's really NOT a musician anymore. A buddy of mine used to work for a large financial firm, and he flew out to New York a few years ago to some kind of convention. Of course, this included mingling with many from the Wall Street community. (He did QA testing and support for one of their stock market ticker type applications.) He actually ran into Gene Simmons at this thing, and was a little taken aback. He was dressed in a business suit and talking stock options and trading ... *nothing* like you'd picture a member of KISS looking.
The man can tell you much more about investment advice than he can which new models of electric guitars are any good. That's for sure.
KISS hasn't been anything but a "franchise" to make money off the older crowd's past memories, for at least the last 20 years now.
I don't disagree that just going in places like the DMV gives you that "evil, big brother is here" feeling. But ultimately, what's the "end goal" of your anarchist stance? Once the current system of government is overthrown by force, what do you foresee replacing it that will be so much better than people trying to fix the current system?
Anarchy doesn't really strike me as being a "political position" as much as it's a temporary state that usually exists during the transition of government from one form to another.
It seems to me, the Libertarian party is exactly who you want to get out and cast a vote for, since they're generally working under the premise of dismantling anything in federal government that's unnecessary, and valuing individual rights and freedoms above all else. If you simply want "anarchy, because anything has to be better than this!", I'd say you're taking a HUGE risk that you'll actually end up with a worse outcome than before your revolution happened. That's usually what's happened in other countries of the world, if you ask me.
In my opinion, voting for either a Democrat or Republican in a national election, at this point in time, is equivalent to a vote for the "status quo" of corruption in our "democratic system".
.... but the more votes are cast for folks like him, the more of a "wake up call" is sent to whoever DOES win that some people out there are really unhappy with the current state of affairs. They're going to start asking "How can *I* win those people over when I'm up for re-election?" and it might cause some useful change.
On the OTHER hand, rather than abstaining from voting (and having your "voice" be completely ignored), you could vote for an independent candidate. I know I'm casting a vote for Ron Paul, this election year, if at all possible. It's obvious he's not a candidate who advocates leaving the current systems in place and functional "the way we've always done it". Does he have a chance of actually winning? Well, probably not
Pretending for a moment that I have no other problems with something like this being passed into law (and that's FAR from the case!), I'm wondering what other unintended ramifications this could have?
For example, I'm a member of a local group on www.meetup.com, a social networking type web site. This group occasionally holds poker playing get-togethers at one member's apartment on the weekends. (Nothing "high stakes", but some money does change hands.) Could this get caught up in "online gambling", simply because it was organized over the Internet?
I, too, was thinking this sort of study would best be done by hand, but for a different reason.
In real life, I know I'd be far more annoyed by a robot of some sort entering my "personal space", pretending to be a real human, and striking up a somewhat stilted conversation with me than a REAL human talking to me.
I've never seen the A.I. in these "bots" advance to a point where you can't tell they're not really another human. They typically ask a good "introductory" question or two, but can't keep up the illusion once it advances to a full conversation.
Ok, I stand corrected ... but I was thinking of products of theirs like Soundbooth (Intel Mac only) as I was writing my initial post.
I still believe it's a correct assumption to say Adobe was not building any of their applications using Apple's xcode as their development tool. They may, however, be re-writing many of the "Design/Web collection" apps from the ground up, or at least re-coding them completely using new tools, so they can indeed offer both PPC and Intel support for them. It appears to be something Adobe is doing on a "case by case" basis.
Well, this was *probably* done as a retaliatory move on Apple's part, as much as anything. Apple traditionally had a good foothold in the MIDI music, sequencing, and hard disk recording sectors - but Windows-only products were eating away at their market share. (Think products like Cakewalk Sonar, for example, or ACID Pro, or Gigastudio.)
Furthermore, some of the music gear out there was starting to only include Windows software for the purpose of editing or cataloging sound patches. (I remember buying a Yamaha Motif synthesizer a few years ago, and the only Mac software tools it included were for Mac OS 9.x only. OS X support was "coming soon" for pretty much the whole time I owned it.)
Apple wanted to create at least one more good reason to choose a Mac as a musician.
With Adobe, it's a whole different situation. For starters, Adobe uses their own methods of software development, which appear to be Windows-centric. (All of their new apps for OS X are supporting Intel Mac only, as opposed to "Universal binaries" that work with PPC Macs too. That would indicate they're not writing this stuff with Apple's xcode tools at all, but rather, doing some kind of ports directly over from their Windows versions.) I don't think Apple would want to buy out an entire product line that they'd have to re-code using xcode, before it would even be up to the standards they endorse of supporting both architectures.
I think modding a post down as "overrated" would be well within the definition of what the term means, if I use it to mod down yet another "I'm against Google because they've got so much info, it makes them EVIL!" type of post.
Look, Google got ALL of the info they have today VOLUNTARILY. Again, what happened to personal responsibility here? If you're that worried/paranoid/whatever about a big corporation having the ability to search and read your email, don't sign up for a free account with them! Or alternately, only use your gmail account for unimportant information you're not concerned with them having. Or hey, maybe use it as a "throw-away" address for all your spam to go to?
Activism is great, when it targets a real, existing problem. Activism loses its credibility and potential usefulness when it's used as a bullying or scare tactic. (EG. Greenpeace's fixation on making Apple look bad for environmental issues, despite them contributing FAR less to the problem that manufacturers selling FAR more products with similar or worse environmental "footprints".)
For the record, I rarely mod *anything* down, because I prefer using my mod points in a positive way (as encouraged by Slashdot themselves).
A few comments:
First and foremost, if you haven't seen it already, check out the mod someone did to the dock to make it "rainbow glass". (The rainbow effect might not be your thing, but you can use slight variations of what they did to change it to any color of "tinted glass" you like, making it much easier to see.)
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=516253&posted=1
If you want a non-transparent top menu bar, see here:
http://www.manytricks.com/blog/?id=10
I agree on Time Machine.... It's very cool, overall, but needs a little more work. (For example, Apple's solution to incompatibilities with their Aperture application is to exclude Aperture's photo database from your backups. Great... so if I'm a pro photographer, Time Machine can't even back up the most important data on my whole system for me?) It also needs a fix (supposedly coming soon) to allow using a shared disk off an Apple Airport Extreme router.
No, I don't have a "dim view" of you at all. I appreciate the reply.
Perhaps I wasn't totally clear though. My stance is this. ALL companies are going to make their share of mistakes. Given enough time, yes, they'll even do some "slippery slope" things that leave you jittery about your privacy rights and such. I don't like it, but I accept it as reality. From there, I look at the pros and the cons, and decide overall which companies are worthy of praise, and which aren't.
Currently, yes, I'd mod someone down for making anti-Google comments, because right now, they all center around the same old issues. (EG. Gmail keeps SO much of people's info, they're getting too powerful!) Until something actually happens that indicates Google is, indeed, doing something bad with all this info, it's just hypothetical fiction. If the story actually covered Google changing corporate policy and reselling the contents of people's emails - THEN I would of course give that due consideration!
A "fanboy" treats a business like a religion, and claims it is "perfect in every way", basically. I don't treat Apple, Google, or any other business like that.
Claiming it's a contradiction to like OSS but like Apple is an over-simplification too. Apple computers have a really good OS today because they were able to build on the strengths of open source. Apple's wish to dominate their market and eliminate possible competition defines business in a capitalist society. The idea is always that others will also be just as driven to "push back" with alternatives, and that vying for dominance creates a win-win situation for consumers. Right now, Apple is in transition from a "computer company" to a "media company". They have to juggle a lot of things to make that happen, including making some deals they probably don't really like (with DRM on music, restrictions on the iPhone, etc.). I can see where they're trying to go, long-term, with all of it - and unlike some people, I'm pretty ok with the "grand plan". They wouldn't HAVE an online music store today if they stubbornly insisted on idealistic ideas about music having NO restrictions on it, period. (Apple wasn't able to just buy the entire recording industry and make it a sub-set of their business, after all.)
Yep! I've always done system administration from the viewpoint that the computers are there as TOOLS for everyone to use. By the very nature of computing, you can't expect to make almost any specific, hard and fast rules that cover all scenarios. It's a constantly moving, evolving target.
You block a range of ports on the firewall because "bad app X uses them, and we don't want bad app X running!"? Next thing you know, it breaks 3 other legitimate apps people need to be more efficient in the workplace.
You THINK you understand when, where and how people need to do printing? I guarantee you missed something.
I think the best compromise between "security" and "usability" is to deploy the common sense measures everyone can agree offer benefits. Install a good anti-virus solution, centrally managed if possible. Set up some sensible security restrictions on some of the shared folders on the network. Run a decent web filtering solution that blocks known "not work safe/related" sites - but generally err on the side of accessibility, rather than locking it down TOO tightly. (If an employee is constantly surfing sites they shouldn't be on, that's a MANAGEMENT issue - not a technical one, ultimately.) In a Windows network, group policies are very useful too. Again, don't go crazy locking things down - but enforce a few things, like a reasonable default cache size for Internet Explorer and a screen saver that kicks off after, say, 10-15 minutes, password-protected. And lastly, I've had great luck using 3rd. party spam filtering services for email. (Why struggle and spend valuable system resources trying to do that yourself? Many ISPs and other services will offer it, site-wide, for maybe $40 a month or so.)
I hear this complaint often. (One of my best friends subscribes to the "Slashdot makes me sick with all the group-think and one-sidedness" theories, in fact.)
I guess I look at it differently. I think one of Slashdot's strengths is its bias. Right now, I can visit any number of commercial web sites, purportedly about "computers and technology", and get a very Microsoft-centric view of things. Problem is, just because 90%+ of the systems out there run Microsoft products doesn't mean I want to read about those products 90%+ of the time! (That would be like a gourmet settling for reading stories about fast food chains 90% of the time, just because fast food operations are that much more prevalent than gourmet restaurants.)
I really think the *truth* is, there are "best", "good" and "not so good" choices out there in the world of technology and computing. Skashdot takes the stance that OSS is either in the "best" or "good" category (and some stories directly address arguing over which of those 2 labels best applies). Slashdot takes the stance that Apple is doing good, interesting things right now too. Considering I went 10+ years using nothing but PC compatible Wintel boxes, and now I'm almost all converted to Macintosh, I'd say I agree with THAT bias too. And Google? I think anyone bashing them, yet claiming to be into technology, is foolish, bordering on hypocritical. So yes, I'd mod down an "anti Google" post myself, too! (Are they "too big", becoming "evil", or anything else? Nobody seems to be bringing any solid evidence to the table on any of that, right now. All I see is a company that's been giving out an awful lot of really useful, really cool stuff for FREE, and seems poised to put downwards price pressures on the cellphone industry next. Works for me!)
No... those points aren't rubbish at all, in my estimation.
I work as a sysadmin and yes, I have Linux servers here too.
The fact is, though, many things in Linux involve not only a "RTFM" - but "FTFMS" (as in find the f'ing manuals), scattered all over the net. Because Linux is free and developed by "anyone, anywhere" - you run into the classic problem of developers who aren't very good technical writers. In a commercial business, this is handled by having their writers do the writing. With open-source, it often means the job either doesn't get done at all, or gets done poorly by the developer him/herself. Then, users try to patch up the missing documentation with wikki's, message forums, and other online resources, where you can get piecemeal suggestions and fixes for your issues (with hours of digging).
As just one example, I have a Linux web proxy server set up here. I wanted to add "dansguardian" to it, so it would do filtering of sites people have no business visiting while working. Sure, dansguardian has a "manual" for it, but it goes on and on with minutia about how changing various integer values in the config files increases or decreases the likelihood of it flagging a site for too much "bad content". In reality, all I wanted were some good, real-world "starting values" appropriate for a business environment full of adults. (We're not a school, so we can handle some curse words on our web pages. BUT, we don't want people browsing porn sites either. Blocking as many malicious script type sites as possible would be a big plus too.) To do this (plus downloading the latest blacklists of sites on a regular basis) required a lot more reading, and my best info came from a blog some guy wrote in his spare time.
Time is money, and if I can reconfigure some rarely-modified server setting in a few seconds, rather than hours of poring over manuals and/or configuration files, the GUI wins out. Meanwhile, the overhead of having some GUI menus is really not significant for a server these days.... Maybe back when a 286 processor was "state of the art", that was a valid point. But currently? You don't even need to stay logged in on the server 90% of the time when it's sitting there serving up data, so how can the GUI be affecting much of anything at that point? Even when you do sign on to the server locally, look at your CPU usage. The fact the GUI is there isn't much of a performance hit at all. Moving your mouse around is likely to use more CPU than anything else (sometimes as much as 8% or so in spikes). But you're not playing a mouse-based video game here... You're just clicking through a few screens. It's a brief usage spike, which users shouldn't even notice.
Well, going by THIS description of what happened, I'd say Woz doesn't *really* have a big grudge in the first place....
Fact is, ANY time someone tells me I can do job X for them and they'll pay me "such and such" an amount of money for it, I'm going to decide if it's worth my effort and time or not based on what they quote me.
Sounds to me like Woz was fine with the initial terms of their agreement (he'd receive $375 for the work), or else he would have probably told Jobs "Sorry man, it's just not worth it to me."
The fact that there was more to the agreement than Jobs explained *could* be interpreted as "Jobs is being dishonest", but it's also one of the reasons he makes a better businessman and CEO than someone like Woz. This is the way business gets done -- with a goal of maximizing your profits by leveraging your resources as craftily as possible.
And hey, Jobs had no way of knowing in advance how many chips Woz would manage to remove, right? So the figure he quoted was sort of a "worst case scenario" of what he KNEW he could pay Woz, even if Woz didn't end up reducing the chip count after trying to do it. It wasn't some number fabricated out of thin air.
I don't quite understand the constant argument in favor of consoles, simply because "keeping up with the PC hardware is so expensive"?
... but even 1080i resolution isn't as demanding on the video card as the modes something like a 30" LCD panel runs in by default.
I do have a PS3 *and* several computers, but here's the thing. My last PC ran everything I wanted to play (on a 24" LCD monitor), simply using an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro video card, up until about a year ago. Then I upgraded from an Athlon motherboard to an Intel Core Duo with PCI Express video, and went with a mid-range ATI card (X1600 I think?), and once again, it plays all the latest titles just fine for me.
Do I insist on running everything with every last detail mode maxxed out, anti-aliasing set to the max, etc. ? No! That's just too resource-intensive. The games aren't any less enjoyable though. It's rather like the comparisons of Bioshock's new Direct-X 10 support vs. what the same screens looked like under DX9. The differences were SO subtle, nobody would notice 3/4ths. of them without them being pointed out first. The most "relevant" change was minor too, and would really add zilch to the overall gaming experience.
My "state of the art" PS3 isn't capable of any better graphics than what my PCI Express mid-range ATI card puts out anyway. Most of the visual impact of the PS3 comes from running it on an HDTV that's larger than most monitors on computers
I wish I had mod points available! Someone should mod you up! This list of "cool gadgets" was so uninspiring, I didn't even click through all of it before getting bored and irritated with it!
If the only thing we're missing from "cool new tech in Japan" is an egg-shaped music player that gyrates around (obviously eating up the battery charge at a must faster rate than normal players), a bunch of wanna-be "iPhone killer" cellphones with various pluses and minuses, and 1 OLED TV set (a technology we're sure to see here in widespread use, soon enough, anyway) - I'll pass.
The real shame here in the U.S. is that broadband Internet isn't faster, cheaper and more widely available! It's ridiculous that many people I know who live just 50 miles or so outside the major city I live in have to resort to satellite to get "high speed Internet" at all. The huge latency and high cost makes it vastly inferior. Those of us with "better options" are usually stuck with DSL that doesn't go above 6MBPS tops, or cable that may reach 10MBPS (at $99 per month or so, in the case of our cable company!), and be subject to all sorts of possible restrictions on usage (such as Comcast's fiasco killing torrent traffic).
I'd even like to see some sort of unification of wireless hotspots in the U.S. Right now, you have all these individual attempts to offer customers of establishments "free wi-fi" access, as well as businesses trying to sell subscriptions to a relative handful of hotspots they maintain (in airports and so forth). I wonder when we might see this consolidated into "Pay $5 a month extra on your regular ISP bill, and receive access with your same login and password to all wi-fi access points we manage nation-wide?" AT&T half-heartedly sells this now, but it's pretty worthless for 95% of their customer base because they don't control enough access points.
I don't think it's quite like what you're stating? What I think we're actually seeing is simply more segmentation of what encompasses "I.T.".
I think of it as akin to books. You've got your authors and your avid readers. There is certainly some crossover there, but on the whole, a reader may not have any interest or skills at writing a good book. A writer probably doesn't have the TIME to read many of the other good books out there, because he/she is too busy writing their own!
In the past, you often had companies hiring both software developers and systems administration/support staff, and putting it all under the general umbrella of "I.T." But that's almost like being an avid reader who hires his own author to write books for him to read.
Now, you're seeing much more outsourcing of software development and purchasing of "canned" packages that can be heavily customized by consultants who temporarily come in, configure it to suit, and leave.
Obviously, software programmers/developers are still needed! It's just that they're not so often needed in the same environment as those using the software.
Hey! No fair! There was only 1 comment visible, total, when I posted this. Then I refresh the page and 5 other people have the same joke posted.
Life, at the speed of Slashdot, I guess....
I got your contact through email business directory
and decided to send my proposal to you. I am the chief
engineer for a project building helicopters for the Nigerian
army, and the first son of the late chief BOLA IGE,the
attorney general of the fedeal republic of Nigeria who
was killed by hired assasin on the 23rd of December
2001 by an unidentified gun men believed to be link to
our government of which it is a daily case going on in
my country;s dailies now.
Two months ago he was attempted to be murdered but
unfortunately God speared his life for us.It was then
he had to reveal some vital informations as regards
his life to me before he was finally killed in
december. All accounts belonging to my father both
local and abroad had been frozen and his investments
seized by the government believing in thier false
allegation that he made away of $2 billion dollars of
(NEPA)national electricity power authority of which i
know is just a ploy to eliminate him by the people in
power that he is fustrating thier evil intentions
through the human right pubic hearing for violation of
right and cruelsome killings during the military
regime to carry out thier traits to suffer the mases
for thier selfish interest instead of the interest of
the nation.We are now in a dileman as ou live are in
danger till after the investigations.
With all the crime-fighting that's been enabled by technology (think forensics, for example, where people can leave only microscopic amounts of evidence behind at a crime-scene and STILL be tracked down based on it) - I think it all comes out about even, in the end.
Sure, technology makes it easy to steal money from the comfort of one's home, with just a PC, an Internet connection, and some socially-engineered passwords.... But it also means more "casual conversation" is done via email or online chat, where it can be recorded and/or traced back to its source. In the "good old days", it was FAR less likely you could prove who said what if it was just a couple people talking while sitting on a park bench or what-not.
Technology provides additional tools for people which can be used for "good" or for "bad". In fact, they WILL be used by both sides - and it has a "canceling out" effect overall.