Interesting idea - but I have to disagree. Very few Internet technologies have actually "died" over the years. The ones that come to mind that have died were all "lesser versions" of the same basic functions the web provides (Veronica or WAIS for example, or even Archie servers).
By comparison, ftp is still used by millions of people daily (even though it's insecure and technically speaking, quite outdated). Same goes for telnet. Usenet news and email still work the same way they always have since the dawm of the Internet.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the web is still alive and kicking 5 years from now - whether or not "new and better" Internet technologies come along. The web is quite extendable with browsers having the ability to run plug-ins and vbscript/javascript, launch Active-X or Java applets, and so on.
Actually, your statement to "bug your upgrade company" may not really be fair either.
Relatively small vendors such as Sonnet have plenty of work to do, just figuring out ways to cram faster G3 and G4 processors into all the older makes and models of Macs. Not only that, but they've already provided all the software tools needed to make them perform 100% in MacOS 9.x. In a few cases, they've sold optional utilities to make them work with OS X 10.2.x -- but ensuring support of the latest Apple OS's was never really anyhing they are "required" to do.
I bought a 550Mhz G3 upgrade card for an old PowerMac 7300 a while ago. Really sped it up and works just as advertised. Will it run Panther? No. Will it ever? Maybe, but who cares. I built this thing for one reason only.... to have a box that runs MacOS 9.1 efficiently - so I can remain compatible with any older software I might wish to run.
Speaking as someone who never really learned a lot of HTML, yet who has built quite a few web sites using WYSIWYG tools (plus some editing of the generated code to clean it up or fix little things, a bit of "cut and paste" javascript, and so on) -- I have to say I always *liked* FrontPage.
Granted, the extensions are a big problem - but I think mostly because of their poor implementation, as opposed to in concept. (It seems to me that "WebDav" is trying to be a standardized version of the same basic idea, these days.)
The biggest reason I think FrontPage is so widely disliked is the tendency for people to use the built-in "themes", which were generally rather gaudy, and always immediately obvious when they're used. (By contrast, Adobe GoLive comes with 5 or 6 sample sites that people often build new pages from as templates, but they're more "professional" looking and tasteful - so the results are better.)
IMHO, there's really no reason, nowdays, why it shouldn't be pretty much "point and click" to add such common elements as a response form to email or even online checkout via PayPal, and even features like text inside graphical buttons should be generated "on the fly", if needed.
It amazes me that even today, some people have 4 or 5 programs they go between to get a basic site put together - and they *still* usually have to tie it all together with some handwritten HTML in a text editor. (Perhaps even more amazing, some of these same people will tell you it's somehow better and more efficient than having all of these features rolled up into a user-friendly tool. Go figure....)
No matter what the motivation, it's (to an extent, at least), an incorrectly placed concern, IMHO.
Why do we rely so heavily on oil to power our vehicles and heat our homes? Because it's relatively convenient and cheap/plentiful. When it gets to the point where that's no longer true, alternatives will take hold. Nobody's going to drive around a car that costs $10 or $15 per gallon to fuel up.... Long before that happens, it will be more cost-effective to use a different fuel!
The extreme wealth found in Saudi Arabia was attained because their country was willing to drill for as much oil as they could. Right here in the United States, right now, we probably have as much (if not more) oil we could pump out of the ground as they do. Only thing is, our country has had an attitude of "Don't tap into it until the other guys start running out and can't sell to us anymore!", plus environmentalists prohibiting drilling left and right, because of concerns it will damage the wildlife/environment.
The current situation is very much created artificially by politics.
Absolutely true statements, all worthy of their +5 moderation points, IMHO!
There's another, ugly, side to this dot-com to dot-bomb story though.
Quite a few unqualified individuals who blatantly lied and scammed their way into high-paying tech. jobs were able to crash-course learn what they needed to know, on the job - and are now actually "not too bad" at what they do.
I have an aquaintance, for example, who moved from the St. Louis, Missouri area out to Silicon Valley when he managed to B.S. his way into a job with Excite.com doing web development. Mind you, the guy *is* intelligent - but he had no experience using any of the programming tools he claimed to know on his resume and in his interviews. He told me he simply "ran out and bought some books, and pulled a few all-nighters studying" as soon as he found out he got the job - and kept learning how the stuff worked each day, after his job started. (As long as you talked intelligently, reported to work on time each day, and appeared to be busy in front of your computer - nobody was the wiser.)
I used to know another guy who got a nice paying job as a Unix system admin. for a newspaper publisher, despite having no clue about Unix at all! He knew PCs and Windows fairly well - but never touched a Unix box in his life. After he got hired, he was on the phone almost daily to all of his computer buddies who did know a little Unix, asking them how to do this or that... Somehow, he must have kept things running ok though, because he not only kept that job for years, but gor a couple promotions.
To tell you the truth, I'm still not even quite sure how I feel about all of this. On one hand, I went unemployed for nearly a year, despite having 12+ years of experience in what I do. It hurts a little bit when you watch these other people pulling down paychecks double what I've *ever* seen, in that situation. On the other hand, I suppose if you're a quick enough learner and confident enough to B.S. your way into a job like that and keep it - maybe that's worth something too?
Umm.... I would hardly describe the current Mac game situartion as "a small, random, usually not terribly good selection"!
Let's see.... Unreal Tournament 2003, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 3 Arena, Kelly Slater Pro Surfer, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf from EA Sports, Warcraft 3 + Frozen Throne expansion set, Warrior Kings, Stronghold, Dungeon Seige, Age of Mythology, Age of Empires 2, Halo (due out before Xmas), James Bond: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way, Medal of Honor + expansion pack, Jedi Knight II, Soldier of Fortune II..... not to mention some really teriffic stuff put out by the little guys/shareware authors, like Enigmo.
I'd say things in the Mac gaming world are looking better now than they have in years - and it damn sure looks better than my Linux gaming selection. No, they still don't have anywhere near the number of titles available for the PC, but so many PC titles are a waste of money. It seems to me they only take the time to port the "cream of the crop" of what's already out for PC, and that's fine with me. Unless you pirate everything, you're not really going to be able to buy all the new game titles they crank out for the PC, anyway.
(Well, I could live without that port of Bloodrayne for the Mac, but hey - I've seen worse....)
I think both of you are talking about extremes, honestly. The truth is, there's no way MS bothered to do enough re-writing of the VPC code in this short a time that they've stopped it from safely running a Linux or BSD distro that it ran fine as VPC 6.0 from Connectix.
If you were handed a bunch of emulation code of this magnitude, how long do you think it would take just to sit down and analyze how it does what it does? Now, how much more time would it take you to make the small changes that identify it as your current company's product (look and feel changes to menus, new splash and "about" type screens, updated help screens, etc.)? You really think that the new VPC 2004 (scheduled for release in November of '03 originally) had all sorts of low-level revisions in it that would damage Linux support?
I agree that I could see MS purposely trying to add code to block installation of Linux on future versions of VPC, but even that is a risky move for them. (In the quest to rid the world of a competing OS, is it really worth losing potential sales of your emulation product, and reducing functionality it had previously?) VirtualPC itself seems like it's a conflict of interest for Microsoft - unless they accept that it's better to let people use alternate OS's inside their OS than have the alternate OS loaded in place of their OS.
Most likely, they're just trying to avoid having to deal with phone calls asking for support on a Unix type OS - which they hope you'll find difficult to use and frustrating.
No, it's only a "waste" when it's poorly managed and implemented. That's the real issue right now. Just recently, I read where NASA broke a brand new, expensive satellite, because somebody neglected to follow the proper procedures to secure it to the transport platform. They tried to move it, and it fell off, onto the floor!
These types of mistakes just shouldn't be happening, and they're costing all of us in taxpayer dollars.
That doesn't mean the space program itself is a bad idea. I just think we might be reaching a point where the private sector will be able to do a better job than government-owned and funded NASA. Traditionally, that was unthinkable because of the enormous costs involved, and the lack of motivation for a private business to undertake such a project. Nowdays, I could easily see where large companies (like Boeing?) might want to enter the market of putting satellites in orbit, launching shuttles for experiments and repair missions, etc. A little competition never hurt anyone.....
Yeah, I'm sure Panther will be on Beige G3's by the end of the year, at worst.
The problem is, "unsupported" is still "unsupported" - any way you slice it. Those "old world" Macs running Darwin via patches and helper apps still don't really have everything functional. (Last I checked, things such as sound recording and the volume control for audio output were broken.)
I regularly see reports of Beige G3's that do weird things with OS X - including trash the whole partition on a weekly basis, making it impossible to really use it. Sure, it works on many of them without issues - but just as often, weird glitches happen. I had a Beige G3 with a Sonnet G4 upgrade board in it, and I ran OS X on it. It worked, but I'd occasionally get problems where it wouldn't boot when first powered on. If I hit the reset button, then it was ok on the second try. Not a "show stopper", but still behavior that's frustrating.
You're exactly right - and that's the crux of the problem. You can't expect to get a business environment to change unless the change is bought into from the top level, down.
I used to work for a place that had a very dysfunctional corporate environment. (Basically, their various locations around the country were structured in such a way where it promoted competition between them. This meant that if one plant figured out a more efficient and money-saving process - they'd keep it to themselves and actively try to prevent employees of other plants from figuring out how it worked. Nonetheless, maximizing their profit as a whole was what the company really needed - since they didn't exist as independent businesses.)
Management paid lip service to the idea that changes were needed, and spent considerable money on training materials and an in-house instructor to help improve things. Unfortunately, the policies put in place that caused these problems to begin with were never modified. (Managers were still paid bonuses based on their productivity relative to the other locations' productivity, for example. Documents that should have been openly accessible to all employees were locked down with security permissions based on a plant's physical location. The list goes on, but you get the idea.)
Ultimately, I came to realize that the owners of the business and upper-level managers they appointed really didn't want to change. Sure, they wanted to see improvement - but only within the existing structure, which was flawed.
None of this even touches on yet another issue some Powerbook 15" users are reporting -- latches that stick. So basically, no - I'd rather wait a while before buying a new Powerbook 15". If yours keeps working great, teriffic - but the odds don't seem to be good.
Ehh... I can understand both sides of it, really. On one hand, I'm a big proponent of recycling/refurbishing older hardware and putting it back in use where it makes sense.
Just recently, I sold a number of old Pentiums (75-120Mhz) and even a Dell 486DX2-66 desktop (in like-new condition, mind you - or else I probably wouldn't have bothered with it). I made complete, Internet-capable systems out of these with network card and modem, included a VGA monitor, and sold them for under $100 a pop.
They're just the thing for some people. (For example, a manager of a fast food restaurant was very happy to find that Dell 486 I was selling. He wanted something just like that to run some point-of-sale software he had.)
By the same token, I work for a guy who rebuilds old Apple Macs, loads them up with educational programs, and sells them as "first computers" for kids. Everything we have is under $200, with some complete systems as low as $45 each. People spend more than that on a single Playstation 2 game!
But all of this has it's limits... If you originally shelled out the multiple thousands of dollars it cost for something like a Beige G3 Mac tower when it was new - you obviously had much more than just a "passing interest" in computers. It's always tough for these people to "let go" of their purchase - yet they still have the interest in computing technology that keeps them yearning for the new versions of OS's and software.
Do I think Apple is overcharging for Panther? No.... really, I don't. At least your money is buying a very respected and stable product. People spend more than that every day on buggy, insecure copies of Windows XP.
But people "whining" that their beige G3 or 3rd. party processor-upgraded pre-G3 PowerMac won't run Panther? I'm caught in the middle. Yes, they should probably accept the fact they've got to "pay to play" and upgrade their hardware. But no, I can't say I don't understand their pain, either. Computers are one of the worst "investments" around, as far as their resale value goes. New OS releases are usually an unpleasant reminder of why....
Umm... I've been excited about Linux and what it can offer people for years - but I still can't say that I'm trying to save ignorant Windows users from the developer of their OS of choice.
Yes, Gator developed the shady ad-ware/spy-ware/whatever you prefer to call it, but people who blindly click "Yes" to dialogs offering to install additional (unknown) software on their PC deserve what they get. Personally, I have no real problem with a freeware or shareware author trying to supplement his/her income by letting people *voluntarily* install ad-ware or spy-ware on their machines. I simply have problems with software installs that load such things without one's consent or knowledge.
If someone can't be bothered to read and understand dialog boxes displayed to them in Windows, then they're just as sure to screw things up under Linux or on a Macintosh, or on any platform/OS.
The 15" Powerbook also features factory defects, such as a poorly designed casing behind the LCD panel, causing pressure on it to form white splotches in the middle of the screen.
Right now, I think anyone would be a fool to buy one. People who just received theirs are having these screen problems in as little as the first few days to 1 week of use. Apple was doing warranty replacements, but so far, the replacements had the same issues as the originals.
(To Apple's credit, though, many of the Apple support people are starting to admit they're aware of the problem - and some new orders for 15" Powerbooks have stopped shipping. It looks like some sort of fix is in the works.)
Point taken. You have to understand though, I'm married with a kid. Most of my "going out" these days consists of trips to WalMart for more diapers and groceries, with the very rare chance to spend a few hours over at a good friend's house.
Sometimes, I think it's better not having too much "fun" stuff to do all around me, because it's too frustrating to keep hearing about it when you have no way to enjoy it anyway.....
I've visited Kansas City, MO before. Personally, I had no big problem with it - except I'd say St. Louis has more in the way of "family" things to do (children's museum, for example, or our Science Center, "The Magic House", and so forth).
There's also some "culture" in St. Louis, but it just requires a little more digging - because it's rarely advertised. I took a poetry writing course in college, for example, and learned about all sorts of open-mic poetry nights and poetry workshops in St. Louis. Had no idea most of them existed before... There's also a bit of a jazz and blues culture here, if you know the right clubs to visit - but again, you won't hear them advertising on the radio.
I may be wrong about this, but it was always my understanding that people in military service overseas were able to purchase items and bring them back to the U.S. at much lower customs fees than what are normally charged.
I had a friend in the Navy, stationed in Japan, who kept telling all of us to be sure to have him purchase any electronics/stereo gear we wanted while we had the chance, because it would be a far better deal than we'd get otherwise.
I also understand, though, there are limits to this. You can't just start massively purchasing products overseas for resale in the states - or else you start paying the normal import duties and fees, instead of the discounted military rates.
I hope that smiley at the end of your comment meant you were commenting in jest?
I have friends in Seattle and they've all told me the I.T. job market out there is horribly bad -- much worse than what I thought was "bad" here in St. Louis.
I've also heard the cost of living is pretty high out there, and I'm generally "not missing much" by avoiding Seattle completely.
I'm not about to claim St. Louis, MO is some kind of cultural mecca, or even a "great place to live!" -- but having traveled all over the U.S. - I'd sure rather be here than many cities I visited. We may be low on the "trendy" scale, but we rate pretty high on the "practical" scale.
It doesn't, ultimately, do anyone much good to put off doing security updates (or any worthwhile system updates, for that matter) - simply out of fear of it breaking things.
I remember when MS first released Internet Explorer 6, a number of people reported problems installing the update from IE 5 or earlier. (Sometimes, it would fail to install completely -- freezing up the computer at 70% or so completion, and force you to reboot. After you did, things were really messed up, and the only good "fix" was a hard drive format and Windows re-install.)
At that time, I remember my boss being hesitant to let us upgrade the systems to IE 6 - fearing these issues. Luckily, we forged ahead anyway and rolled out the update quickly. Yes, we had a few systems that "blew up" doing the update - but it always upgraded fine after a fresh re-install of Windows, which tells me something was simply wrong with that computer's configuration to start with. If it wasn't IE 6 crashing it, it would have eventually been something else....
(Having IE 6 really ended up benefiting us, because we could do much more with setting up inherited permissions/rights from our 2000 servers with it.)
It's the nature of complex operating systems and large applications using shared libraries.... Some patches will inevitably make certain assumptions about your computer's configuration that aren't correct 100% of the time, and those exceptions will cause problems/crashes.
Any patch that really is flawed and breaks perfectly good installations on a regular basis will quickly be recalled and re-released anyway - so I say, patch early, patch often!
I can't speak for VXA personally. I never used it before. It looks like it's another contender to the DLT and LTO technogies though, which aren't "consumer-grade" at all.
(The web site you pointed me to advertises VXA drives starting at $999 - so this obviously isn't some "Circuit City" or "Best Buy" product for the masses.)
The tape technologies that really aren't worth anyone's time or money are the "Travan" drives, and increasingly, DAT drives. (All of the DAT auto-loaders I've used or seen other people use were terrible about having breakdowns, and the tapes themselves often wear out with repeated use, too.)
I'm sure this type of thing is going to be VERY subjective - but in my last few experiences looking up residential addresses on MapQuest, I was given inaccurate maps. I don't live in the middle of nowhere either. (I'm in St. Louis, Missouri.) The big problem I had was with it incorrectly indicating where on a street an address really was. It puts the little star on the map as the indicator, but when you actually drive there - you realize it's much further down (or not nearly as far down) the road as it indicates.
At least one time, it didn't even properly show the way several side streets inter-connected. (Probably due to all the road construction around here, and somebody changing the road since their last update - but still, frustrating.)
By contrast, I've had much better luck using Yahoo Maps.
I still prefer DeLorme's Street Atlas USA software to any of these online map services though. You can see much more of the map one one screen without losing as much detail (such as street names!). The most useful thing I've found with any of the Internet-based map services is the ability to generate the text-only driving directions. I often just print those out and use them, without worrying about any graphical map.
At one time, I believed this - but not anymore. Gone are the days of SCSI drives being huge beasts that occupied 2 5.25" drive bays and came with standard 5 year warranties.
Most of the recent SCSI drives I've seen look like they're manufactured using the same parts as their IDE counterparts, except for different controller circuitry.
(Take a look at the new Western Digital SCSI drives, for example. You'd mistake them for their Caviar EIDE drives if you didn't check the connector or read the label on them.)
Nowdays, the profit margins on hard drives are very small. Manufacturers try to use SCSI drive sales to help "pad" their slim profits made on the EIDE drives. You're not getting "2 or 3 times better quality" components in a SCSI drive.
I will agree that tape drives are a different story, however. If you actualy run your tape backups on a nightly basis, religiously, you have no business buying anything less than a DLT drive. The DAT drives and all the other cheaper solutions are "consumer-grade", meaning they're only intended for the occasional use (such as doing a full backup right before wiping out or upgrading your hard drive). They'll quickly wear out and break down if you do much more than that with them.
But generally, the only real advantage I see to SCSI for servers right now is they tend to be faster on the extreme high-end (15,000 RPM drives are only available in SCSI format, for example - as were 10,000 RPM's and even 7,200 RPM's when they first came out). This, of course, is also because manufacturers are smart enough to put their new/most desirable technologies where they can get the maximum profit margins from them. It would be silly to introduce something like that on IDE first, where you wouldn't even be likely to earn back your R&D money.
I don't know how many of you know any nightclub owners personally, but I've had the dubious "pleasure" of knowing several - and they all seem to fit a common profile.
Usually, they're "has beens" or "wanna-be" rich and famous individuals who came into some money in the past (often via questionable means), and thought owning a nightclub was a great next step to take in their lives.
The average nightclub only turns a decent profit for the first 6 months to a year it operates. Once it's not "new" anymore (and you've collected cover charges for all the "first tme" visitors who just wanted to check the place out), it's really tough to keep it hyped up and popular. Having a really creative niche helps immensely -- but even then, a niche is just that; catering to a small segment of the population who shares a love of whatever you're offering.
There are many things more likely to make you decent money than owning a nightclub. So why do people throw their money at it? Simple.... They're fairly lazy and don't want to actually work at a job that makes them get up early each morning, and they yearn to be "cool". (If you aren't attractive enough to have a good-looking woman of your own, at least you can brag about all the ones surrounding you each night who really don't care if you live or you die.)
I've been saying this for a LONG time already!
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Death of the PDA?
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The PDA was a cool tech "toy" when it came out, and every "geek" wanted to have one. After enough of us techno-geeks were seen roaming around with them, the rest of the public started taking interest in them - wondering what they were missing out on.
Now that most people have had a chance to look at one/use one, they've learned that they're not really as great as they sounded; They're only good if you have them handy to whip out and use when you need one.
Almost all of my co-workers who bought Palms or PocketPC's ended up leaving them in the glovebox of their cars, or on the dressers at home - after only a few months. If you try to put them in your back pants pocket, you end up sitting on them and breaking the screen. They're not bad in a coat pocket, but that doesn't help you in summer months (or warm climates!). Women can put them in their purses, at least - but they still have the hassles of dead batteries and risk of getting stolen or dropped and broken. On top of all that, they're known to crash on occasion, rendering them useless until you can get back to a PC to hotsync your data back into them again.
The Smartphone/PDA combo makes lots of sense to people like me. If I have to enter everyone's name and number into my phone anyway for speed-dial, why not just put that data in the address book portion of the built-in PDA instead? The phone flips closed and becomes smaller than a PDA, making it possible to clip it onto my belt and take it with me without so much hassle. It also solves my need for wireless Internet connectivity in a PDA. (Before I got my first smartphone, I actually shelled out the bucks for a Palm VIIx for that functionality. It was a horribly overpriced and oversized solution though.)
If there's one thing really holding back adoption of smartphone/PDA combos right now, it's probably the price. The Kyocera QCP-7135, for example, doesn't even use the latest version of PalmOS, yet it's nearly impossible to buy one for less than around $500. Then, once you get it, you're still going to want to shell out another $50-80 for a smartmedia card to slide into it - because there's not enough memory storage in the phone itself to use features such as the built-in MP3 music player.
The other, less known, "gotcha" with the smartphones I've used is tendency to crash/freeze-up! On a seperate PDA, this is bad enough - but on a smartphone, crashes can cause the phone to do such nasty things as appear to still function, but stop ringing on incoming calls, or get stuck in "roam" mode until they're hard-reset.
I can't speak for the other people's comments, of course, but I believe the concern of a "lack of an integrated software environment" in Linux refers to the many variations of ways to accomplish a task.
An ideal operating system, from a training standpoint, is one where each task can be performed easily using a single, logical step. Honestly, I doubt such an OS really exists - but Windows (largely because of the lack of choices it offers) comes much closer to making training easier than Linux does.
Most complaints of "lack of integration" I hear with Linux are really just people complaining about not being able to perform a function the same way when they switch from one GUI to another, or from one distro to another.
The people who are "Linux-savvy" enough can poke holes in most of these arguments by offering work-arounds or alternate ways to get the tasks done.... but the real problem is that these ways aren't always immediately obvious to "average users" (or even "average administrators").
Just as one example, take a look at some of the issues that come up with "cut and paste". Can you cut/copy from a command line and paste back into a GUI app? Probably, but you need to make sure the proper daemon is running in the background to make it work on the text-mode side of things. How about between two different X apps? Probably, but people keep finding little quirks in it.
In a Windows environment, cut/copy and paste just plain work, using the same key shortcuts and options from the pull-down menus, on every single app. There's really no "surprises" there, like you can potentially get in Linux.
Microsoft is just grasping at staws to find legitimate complaints to make about iTunes. Their only arguments are so weak, it just illustrates why Windows users need to take a good look at iTunes!
Flexibility in downloading music from a number of providers? Well, for starters - iTunes doesn't prevent any other music download applications from running on your PC. It also happily plays anything in MP3 format that you get elsewhere. All I can assume here is that Microsoft is just miffed that iTunes doesn't work with the.WMA proprietary format?
I'd MUCH rather deal with custom playlists in iTunes than in Windows Media Player - so my "choices" are certainly broader with iTunes in that respect, right now.
As someone who uses both a Mac and a PC on a LAN at home, I find having iTunes cross-compatible with both platforms adds even more "flexibility" I didn't have before.
Lastly, iTunes may not work with any player except the iPod, but the iPod is by far the BEST player out there. If you use something else, you're using an inferior product anyway - and again, you'll still be able to use whatever software came with it. iTunes can just be used along-side as an alternate player/music organizer.
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Interesting idea - but I have to disagree. Very few Internet technologies have actually "died" over the years. The ones that come to mind that have died were all "lesser versions" of the same basic functions the web provides (Veronica or WAIS for example, or even Archie servers).
By comparison, ftp is still used by millions of people daily (even though it's insecure and technically speaking, quite outdated). Same goes for telnet. Usenet news and email still work the same way they always have since the dawm of the Internet.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the web is still alive and kicking 5 years from now - whether or not "new and better" Internet technologies come along. The web is quite extendable with browsers having the ability to run plug-ins and vbscript/javascript, launch Active-X or Java applets, and so on.
Actually, your statement to "bug your upgrade company" may not really be fair either.
Relatively small vendors such as Sonnet have plenty of work to do, just figuring out ways to cram faster G3 and G4 processors into all the older makes and models of Macs. Not only that, but they've already provided all the software tools needed to make them perform 100% in MacOS 9.x. In a few cases, they've sold optional utilities to make them work with OS X 10.2.x -- but ensuring support of the latest Apple OS's was never really anyhing they are "required" to do.
I bought a 550Mhz G3 upgrade card for an old PowerMac 7300 a while ago. Really sped it up and works just as advertised. Will it run Panther? No. Will it ever? Maybe, but who cares. I built this thing for one reason only.... to have a box that runs MacOS 9.1 efficiently - so I can remain compatible with any older software I might wish to run.
Speaking as someone who never really learned a lot of HTML, yet who has built quite a few web sites using WYSIWYG tools (plus some editing of the generated code to clean it up or fix little things, a bit of "cut and paste" javascript, and so on) -- I have to say I always *liked* FrontPage.
Granted, the extensions are a big problem - but I think mostly because of their poor implementation, as opposed to in concept. (It seems to me that "WebDav" is trying to be a standardized version of the same basic idea, these days.)
The biggest reason I think FrontPage is so widely disliked is the tendency for people to use the built-in "themes", which were generally rather gaudy, and always immediately obvious when they're used. (By contrast, Adobe GoLive comes with 5 or 6 sample sites that people often build new pages from as templates, but they're more "professional" looking and tasteful - so the results are better.)
IMHO, there's really no reason, nowdays, why it shouldn't be pretty much "point and click" to add such common elements as a response form to email or even online checkout via PayPal, and even features like text inside graphical buttons should be generated "on the fly", if needed.
It amazes me that even today, some people have 4 or 5 programs they go between to get a basic site put together - and they *still* usually have to tie it all together with some handwritten HTML in a text editor. (Perhaps even more amazing, some of these same people will tell you it's somehow better and more efficient than having all of these features rolled up into a user-friendly tool. Go figure....)
No matter what the motivation, it's (to an extent, at least), an incorrectly placed concern, IMHO.
Why do we rely so heavily on oil to power our vehicles and heat our homes? Because it's relatively convenient and cheap/plentiful. When it gets to the point where that's no longer true, alternatives will take hold. Nobody's going to drive around a car that costs $10 or $15 per gallon to fuel up.... Long before that happens, it will be more cost-effective to use a different fuel!
The extreme wealth found in Saudi Arabia was attained because their country was willing to drill for as much oil as they could. Right here in the United States, right now, we probably have as much (if not more) oil we could pump out of the ground as they do. Only thing is, our country has had an attitude of "Don't tap into it until the other guys start running out and can't sell to us anymore!", plus environmentalists prohibiting drilling left and right, because of concerns it will damage the wildlife/environment.
The current situation is very much created artificially by politics.
Absolutely true statements, all worthy of their +5 moderation points, IMHO!
There's another, ugly, side to this dot-com to dot-bomb story though.
Quite a few unqualified individuals who blatantly lied and scammed their way into high-paying tech. jobs were able to crash-course learn what they needed to know, on the job - and are now actually "not too bad" at what they do.
I have an aquaintance, for example, who moved from the St. Louis, Missouri area out to Silicon Valley when he managed to B.S. his way into a job with Excite.com doing web development. Mind you, the guy *is* intelligent - but he had no experience using any of the programming tools he claimed to know on his resume and in his interviews. He told me he simply "ran out and bought some books, and pulled a few all-nighters studying" as soon as he found out he got the job - and kept learning how the stuff worked each day, after his job started. (As long as you talked intelligently, reported to work on time each day, and appeared to be busy in front of your computer - nobody was the wiser.)
I used to know another guy who got a nice paying job as a Unix system admin. for a newspaper publisher, despite having no clue about Unix at all! He knew PCs and Windows fairly well - but never touched a Unix box in his life. After he got hired, he was on the phone almost daily to all of his computer buddies who did know a little Unix, asking them how to do this or that... Somehow, he must have kept things running ok though, because he not only kept that job for years, but gor a couple promotions.
To tell you the truth, I'm still not even quite sure how I feel about all of this. On one hand, I went unemployed for nearly a year, despite having 12+ years of experience in what I do. It hurts a little bit when you watch these other people pulling down paychecks double what I've *ever* seen, in that situation. On the other hand, I suppose if you're a quick enough learner and confident enough to B.S. your way into a job like that and keep it - maybe that's worth something too?
Umm.... I would hardly describe the current Mac game situartion as "a small, random, usually not terribly good selection"!
Let's see.... Unreal Tournament 2003, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 3 Arena, Kelly Slater Pro Surfer, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf from EA Sports, Warcraft 3 + Frozen Throne expansion set, Warrior Kings, Stronghold, Dungeon Seige, Age of Mythology, Age of Empires 2, Halo (due out before Xmas), James Bond: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way, Medal of Honor + expansion pack, Jedi Knight II, Soldier of Fortune II..... not to mention some really teriffic stuff put out by the little guys/shareware authors, like Enigmo.
I'd say things in the Mac gaming world are looking better now than they have in years - and it damn sure looks better than my Linux gaming selection. No, they still don't have anywhere near the number of titles available for the PC, but so many PC titles are a waste of money. It seems to me they only take the time to port the "cream of the crop" of what's already out for PC, and that's fine with me. Unless you pirate everything, you're not really going to be able to buy all the new game titles they crank out for the PC, anyway.
(Well, I could live without that port of Bloodrayne for the Mac, but hey - I've seen worse....)
I think both of you are talking about extremes, honestly.
The truth is, there's no way MS bothered to do enough re-writing of the VPC code in this short a time that they've stopped it from safely running a Linux or BSD distro that it ran fine as VPC 6.0 from Connectix.
If you were handed a bunch of emulation code of this magnitude, how long do you think it would take just to sit down and analyze how it does what it does? Now, how much more time would it take you to make the small changes that identify it as your current company's product (look and feel changes to menus, new splash and "about" type screens, updated help screens, etc.)? You really think that the new VPC 2004 (scheduled for release in November of '03 originally) had all sorts of low-level revisions in it that would damage Linux support?
I agree that I could see MS purposely trying to add code to block installation of Linux on future versions of VPC, but even that is a risky move for them. (In the quest to rid the world of a competing OS, is it really worth losing potential sales of your emulation product, and reducing functionality it had previously?) VirtualPC itself seems like it's a conflict of interest for Microsoft - unless they accept that it's better to let people use alternate OS's inside their OS than have the alternate OS loaded in place of their OS.
Most likely, they're just trying to avoid having to deal with phone calls asking for support on a Unix type OS - which they hope you'll find difficult to use and frustrating.
No, it's only a "waste" when it's poorly managed and implemented. That's the real issue right now. Just recently, I read where NASA broke a brand new, expensive satellite, because somebody neglected to follow the proper procedures to secure it to the transport platform. They tried to move it, and it fell off, onto the floor!
These types of mistakes just shouldn't be happening, and they're costing all of us in taxpayer dollars.
That doesn't mean the space program itself is a bad idea. I just think we might be reaching a point where the private sector will be able to do a better job than government-owned and funded NASA. Traditionally, that was unthinkable because of the enormous costs involved, and the lack of motivation for a private business to undertake such a project. Nowdays, I could easily see where large companies (like Boeing?) might want to enter the market of putting satellites in orbit, launching shuttles for experiments and repair missions, etc. A little competition never hurt anyone.....
Yeah, I'm sure Panther will be on Beige G3's by the end of the year, at worst.
The problem is, "unsupported" is still "unsupported" - any way you slice it. Those "old world" Macs running Darwin via patches and helper apps still don't really have everything functional. (Last I checked, things such as sound recording and the volume control for audio output were broken.)
I regularly see reports of Beige G3's that do weird things with OS X - including trash the whole partition on a weekly basis, making it impossible to really use it. Sure, it works on many of them without issues - but just as often, weird glitches happen. I had a Beige G3 with a Sonnet G4 upgrade board in it, and I ran OS X on it. It worked, but I'd occasionally get problems where it wouldn't boot when first powered on. If I hit the reset button, then it was ok on the second try. Not a "show stopper", but still behavior that's frustrating.
You're exactly right - and that's the crux of the problem. You can't expect to get a business environment to change unless the change is bought into from the top level, down.
I used to work for a place that had a very dysfunctional corporate environment. (Basically, their various locations around the country were structured in such a way where it promoted competition between them. This meant that if one plant figured out a more efficient and money-saving process - they'd keep it to themselves and actively try to prevent employees of other plants from figuring out how it worked. Nonetheless, maximizing their profit as a whole was what the company really needed - since they didn't exist as independent businesses.)
Management paid lip service to the idea that changes were needed, and spent considerable money on training materials and an in-house instructor to help improve things. Unfortunately, the policies put in place that caused these problems to begin with were never modified. (Managers were still paid bonuses based on their productivity relative to the other locations' productivity, for example. Documents that should have been openly accessible to all employees were locked down with security permissions based on a plant's physical location. The list goes on, but you get the idea.)
Ultimately, I came to realize that the owners of the business and upper-level managers they appointed really didn't want to change. Sure, they wanted to see improvement - but only within the existing structure, which was flawed.
Well, there's a whole message thread discussing it here:
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http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threa
Someone posted a picture of the problem here:
http://homepage.mac.com/filmmaker2002/PhotoAlbu
A petition to recall the Powerbook 15" for this issue has been posted here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/applelcd/petition
And here's an article on MacFixIt regarding the issue (plus some talk of problems people had with lots of bad RAM shipping in Powerbook 15" models):
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20031
None of this even touches on yet another issue some Powerbook 15" users are reporting -- latches that stick. So basically, no - I'd rather wait a while before buying a new Powerbook 15". If yours keeps working great, teriffic - but the odds don't seem to be good.
Ehh... I can understand both sides of it, really. On one hand, I'm a big proponent of recycling/refurbishing older hardware and putting it back in use where it makes sense.
Just recently, I sold a number of old Pentiums (75-120Mhz) and even a Dell 486DX2-66 desktop (in like-new condition, mind you - or else I probably wouldn't have bothered with it). I made complete, Internet-capable systems out of these with network card and modem, included a VGA monitor, and sold them for under $100 a pop.
They're just the thing for some people. (For example, a manager of a fast food restaurant was very happy to find that Dell 486 I was selling. He wanted something just like that to run some point-of-sale software he had.)
By the same token, I work for a guy who rebuilds old Apple Macs, loads them up with educational programs, and sells them as "first computers" for kids. Everything we have is under $200, with some complete systems as low as $45 each. People spend more than that on a single Playstation 2 game!
But all of this has it's limits... If you originally shelled out the multiple thousands of dollars it cost for something like a Beige G3 Mac tower when it was new - you obviously had much more than just a "passing interest" in computers. It's always tough for these people to "let go" of their purchase - yet they still have the interest in computing technology that keeps them yearning for the new versions of OS's and software.
Do I think Apple is overcharging for Panther? No.... really, I don't. At least your money is buying a very respected and stable product. People spend more than that every day on buggy, insecure copies of Windows XP.
But people "whining" that their beige G3 or 3rd. party processor-upgraded pre-G3 PowerMac won't run Panther? I'm caught in the middle. Yes, they should probably accept the fact they've got to "pay to play" and upgrade their hardware. But no, I can't say I don't understand their pain, either. Computers are one of the worst "investments" around, as far as their resale value goes. New OS releases are usually an unpleasant reminder of why....
Umm... I've been excited about Linux and what it can offer people for years - but I still can't say that I'm trying to save ignorant Windows users from the developer of their OS of choice.
Yes, Gator developed the shady ad-ware/spy-ware/whatever you prefer to call it, but people who blindly click "Yes" to dialogs offering to install additional (unknown) software on their PC deserve what they get. Personally, I have no real problem with a freeware or shareware author trying to supplement his/her income by letting people *voluntarily* install ad-ware or spy-ware on their machines. I simply have problems with software installs that load such things without one's consent or knowledge.
If someone can't be bothered to read and understand dialog boxes displayed to them in Windows, then they're just as sure to screw things up under Linux or on a Macintosh, or on any platform/OS.
The 15" Powerbook also features factory defects, such as a poorly designed casing behind the LCD panel, causing pressure on it to form white splotches in the middle of the screen.
Right now, I think anyone would be a fool to buy one. People who just received theirs are having these screen problems in as little as the first few days to 1 week of use. Apple was doing warranty replacements, but so far, the replacements had the same issues as the originals.
(To Apple's credit, though, many of the Apple support people are starting to admit they're aware of the problem - and some new orders for 15" Powerbooks have stopped shipping. It looks like some sort of fix is in the works.)
Point taken. You have to understand though, I'm married with a kid. Most of my "going out" these days consists of trips to WalMart for more diapers and groceries, with the very rare chance to spend a few hours over at a good friend's house.
Sometimes, I think it's better not having too much "fun" stuff to do all around me, because it's too frustrating to keep hearing about it when you have no way to enjoy it anyway.....
I've visited Kansas City, MO before. Personally, I had no big problem with it - except I'd say St. Louis has more in the way of "family" things to do (children's museum, for example, or our Science Center, "The Magic House", and so forth).
There's also some "culture" in St. Louis, but it just requires a little more digging - because it's rarely advertised. I took a poetry writing course in college, for example, and learned about all sorts of open-mic poetry nights and poetry workshops in St. Louis. Had no idea most of them existed before... There's also a bit of a jazz and blues culture here, if you know the right clubs to visit - but again, you won't hear them advertising on the radio.
I may be wrong about this, but it was always my understanding that people in military service overseas were able to purchase items and bring them back to the U.S. at much lower customs fees than what are normally charged.
I had a friend in the Navy, stationed in Japan, who kept telling all of us to be sure to have him purchase any electronics/stereo gear we wanted while we had the chance, because it would be a far better deal than we'd get otherwise.
I also understand, though, there are limits to this. You can't just start massively purchasing products overseas for resale in the states - or else you start paying the normal import duties and fees, instead of the discounted military rates.
I hope that smiley at the end of your comment meant you were commenting in jest?
I have friends in Seattle and they've all told me the I.T. job market out there is horribly bad -- much worse than what I thought was "bad" here in St. Louis.
I've also heard the cost of living is pretty high out there, and I'm generally "not missing much" by avoiding Seattle completely.
I'm not about to claim St. Louis, MO is some kind of cultural mecca, or even a "great place to live!" -- but having traveled all over the U.S. - I'd sure rather be here than many cities I visited. We may be low on the "trendy" scale, but we rate pretty high on the "practical" scale.
It doesn't, ultimately, do anyone much good to put off doing security updates (or any worthwhile system updates, for that matter) - simply out of fear of it breaking things.
I remember when MS first released Internet Explorer 6, a number of people reported problems installing the update from IE 5 or earlier. (Sometimes, it would fail to install completely -- freezing up the computer at 70% or so completion, and force you to reboot. After you did, things were really messed up, and the only good "fix" was a hard drive format and Windows re-install.)
At that time, I remember my boss being hesitant to let us upgrade the systems to IE 6 - fearing these issues. Luckily, we forged ahead anyway and rolled out the update quickly. Yes, we had a few systems that "blew up" doing the update - but it always upgraded fine after a fresh re-install of Windows, which tells me something was simply wrong with that computer's configuration to start with. If it wasn't IE 6 crashing it, it would have eventually been something else....
(Having IE 6 really ended up benefiting us, because we could do much more with setting up inherited permissions/rights from our 2000 servers with it.)
It's the nature of complex operating systems and large applications using shared libraries.... Some patches will inevitably make certain assumptions about your computer's configuration that aren't correct 100% of the time, and those exceptions will cause problems/crashes.
Any patch that really is flawed and breaks perfectly good installations on a regular basis will quickly be recalled and re-released anyway - so I say, patch early, patch often!
I can't speak for VXA personally. I never used it before. It looks like it's another contender to the DLT and LTO technogies though, which aren't "consumer-grade" at all.
(The web site you pointed me to advertises VXA drives starting at $999 - so this obviously isn't some "Circuit City" or "Best Buy" product for the masses.)
The tape technologies that really aren't worth anyone's time or money are the "Travan" drives, and increasingly, DAT drives. (All of the DAT auto-loaders I've used or seen other people use were terrible about having breakdowns, and the tapes themselves often wear out with repeated use, too.)
I'm sure this type of thing is going to be VERY subjective - but in my last few experiences looking up residential addresses on MapQuest, I was given inaccurate maps. I don't live in the middle of nowhere either. (I'm in St. Louis, Missouri.) The big problem I had was with it incorrectly indicating where on a street an address really was. It puts the little star on the map as the indicator, but when you actually drive there - you realize it's much further down (or not nearly as far down) the road as it indicates.
At least one time, it didn't even properly show the way several side streets inter-connected. (Probably due to all the road construction around here, and somebody changing the road since their last update - but still, frustrating.)
By contrast, I've had much better luck using Yahoo Maps.
I still prefer DeLorme's Street Atlas USA software to any of these online map services though. You can see much more of the map one one screen without losing as much detail (such as street names!). The most useful thing I've found with any of the Internet-based map services is the ability to generate the text-only driving directions. I often just print those out and use them, without worrying about any graphical map.
At one time, I believed this - but not anymore. Gone are the days of SCSI drives being huge beasts that occupied 2 5.25" drive bays and came with standard 5 year warranties.
Most of the recent SCSI drives I've seen look like they're manufactured using the same parts as their IDE counterparts, except for different controller circuitry.
(Take a look at the new Western Digital SCSI drives, for example. You'd mistake them for their Caviar EIDE drives if you didn't check the connector or read the label on them.)
Nowdays, the profit margins on hard drives are very small. Manufacturers try to use SCSI drive sales to help "pad" their slim profits made on the EIDE drives. You're not getting "2 or 3 times better quality" components in a SCSI drive.
I will agree that tape drives are a different story, however. If you actualy run your tape backups on a nightly basis, religiously, you have no business buying anything less than a DLT drive. The DAT drives and all the other cheaper solutions are "consumer-grade", meaning they're only intended for the occasional use (such as doing a full backup right before wiping out or upgrading your hard drive). They'll quickly wear out and break down if you do much more than that with them.
But generally, the only real advantage I see to SCSI for servers right now is they tend to be faster on the extreme high-end (15,000 RPM drives are only available in SCSI format, for example - as were 10,000 RPM's and even 7,200 RPM's when they first came out). This, of course, is also because manufacturers are smart enough to put their new/most desirable technologies where they can get the maximum profit margins from them. It would be silly to introduce something like that on IDE first, where you wouldn't even be likely to earn back your R&D money.
I don't know how many of you know any nightclub owners personally, but I've had the dubious "pleasure" of knowing several - and they all seem to fit a common profile.
Usually, they're "has beens" or "wanna-be" rich and famous individuals who came into some money in the past (often via questionable means), and thought owning a nightclub was a great next step to take in their lives.
The average nightclub only turns a decent profit for the first 6 months to a year it operates. Once it's not "new" anymore (and you've collected cover charges for all the "first tme" visitors who just wanted to check the place out), it's really tough to keep it hyped up and popular. Having a really creative niche helps immensely -- but even then, a niche is just that; catering to a small segment of the population who shares a love of whatever you're offering.
There are many things more likely to make you decent money than owning a nightclub. So why do people throw their money at it? Simple.... They're fairly lazy and don't want to actually work at a job that makes them get up early each morning, and they yearn to be "cool". (If you aren't attractive enough to have a good-looking woman of your own, at least you can brag about all the ones surrounding you each night who really don't care if you live or you die.)
The PDA was a cool tech "toy" when it came out, and every "geek" wanted to have one. After enough of us techno-geeks were seen roaming around with them, the rest of the public started taking interest in them - wondering what they were missing out on.
Now that most people have had a chance to look at one/use one, they've learned that they're not really as great as they sounded; They're only good if you have them handy to whip out and use when you need one.
Almost all of my co-workers who bought Palms or PocketPC's ended up leaving them in the glovebox of their cars, or on the dressers at home - after only a few months. If you try to put them in your back pants pocket, you end up sitting on them and breaking the screen. They're not bad in a coat pocket, but that doesn't help you in summer months (or warm climates!). Women can put them in their purses, at least - but they still have the hassles of dead batteries and risk of getting stolen or dropped and broken. On top of all that, they're known to crash on occasion, rendering them useless until you can get back to a PC to hotsync your data back into them again.
The Smartphone/PDA combo makes lots of sense to people like me. If I have to enter everyone's name and number into my phone anyway for speed-dial, why not just put that data in the address book portion of the built-in PDA instead? The phone flips closed and becomes smaller than a PDA, making it possible to clip it onto my belt and take it with me without so much hassle. It also solves my need for wireless Internet connectivity in a PDA. (Before I got my first smartphone, I actually shelled out the bucks for a Palm VIIx for that functionality. It was a horribly overpriced and oversized solution though.)
If there's one thing really holding back adoption of smartphone/PDA combos right now, it's probably the price. The Kyocera QCP-7135, for example, doesn't even use the latest version of PalmOS, yet it's nearly impossible to buy one for less than around $500. Then, once you get it, you're still going to want to shell out another $50-80 for a smartmedia card to slide into it - because there's not enough memory storage in the phone itself to use features such as the built-in MP3 music player.
The other, less known, "gotcha" with the smartphones I've used is tendency to crash/freeze-up! On a seperate PDA, this is bad enough - but on a smartphone, crashes can cause the phone to do such nasty things as appear to still function, but stop ringing on incoming calls, or get stuck in "roam" mode until they're hard-reset.
I can't speak for the other people's comments, of course, but I believe the concern of a "lack of an integrated software environment" in Linux refers to the many variations of ways to accomplish a task.
An ideal operating system, from a training standpoint, is one where each task can be performed easily using a single, logical step. Honestly, I doubt such an OS really exists - but Windows (largely because of the lack of choices it offers) comes much closer to making training easier than Linux does.
Most complaints of "lack of integration" I hear with Linux are really just people complaining about not being able to perform a function the same way when they switch from one GUI to another, or from one distro to another.
The people who are "Linux-savvy" enough can poke holes in most of these arguments by offering work-arounds or alternate ways to get the tasks done.... but the real problem is that these ways aren't always immediately obvious to "average users" (or even "average administrators").
Just as one example, take a look at some of the issues that come up with "cut and paste". Can you cut/copy from a command line and paste back into a GUI app? Probably, but you need to make sure the proper daemon is running in the background to make it work on the text-mode side of things. How about between two different X apps? Probably, but people keep finding little quirks in it.
In a Windows environment, cut/copy and paste just plain work, using the same key shortcuts and options from the pull-down menus, on every single app. There's really no "surprises" there, like you can potentially get in Linux.
Microsoft is just grasping at staws to find legitimate complaints to make about iTunes. Their only arguments are so weak, it just illustrates why Windows users need to take a good look at iTunes!
.WMA proprietary format?
Flexibility in downloading music from a number of providers? Well, for starters - iTunes doesn't prevent any other music download applications from running on your PC. It also happily plays anything in MP3 format that you get elsewhere. All I can assume here is that Microsoft is just miffed that iTunes doesn't work with the
I'd MUCH rather deal with custom playlists in iTunes than in Windows Media Player - so my "choices" are certainly broader with iTunes in that respect, right now.
As someone who uses both a Mac and a PC on a LAN at home, I find having iTunes cross-compatible with both platforms adds even more "flexibility" I didn't have before.
Lastly, iTunes may not work with any player except the iPod, but the iPod is by far the BEST player out there. If you use something else, you're using an inferior product anyway - and again, you'll still be able to use whatever software came with it. iTunes can just be used along-side as an alternate player/music organizer.