I noticed the other day that you cannot access TechNet downloads from a Mac OS machine. This is an example of planned non-compatibility with Apple. Has anyone else noticed this? The cross platform compatibility is getting worse. I guess they are not happy unless you are running their latest OS, their latest browser, and their latest GUI enhancement. What a bunch of pricks. VMWare notwithstanding, I just cannot bring myself to load ANY microsoft modules on my Mac. Not even IE, and certainly not a virtualized OS. I admit I am not quite sure what todays benefit from SL is. I am saying NO to microsoft about the.NET runtime, IE, SL, and Microsoft Office for the Mac. Gee they sure are pushy. There seems to be more and more situations where the Microsoft site is not browser neutral.
For those of us that have been paying attention, none of this comes as a surprise. As the cheap Linksys (and others) wireless routers started appearing everywhere, I started asking about the safety of infrastructure elements manufactured in China. Whether it is counterfeit Cisco hardware, or mainstream commercial items from Best Buy, our domestic Internet is constructed using cheap imported elements. In some cases encryption can help on the data leakage, but nothing would help if a carefully crafted packet of death" shut down every linksys router in America. We have only seen the beginning of "Network Hardware Terror Attacks".
I could suggest that we start building our routers using inexpensive computers running open source *nix operating systems, but the firmware in the nic cards might be infected. The fine line between software and hardware means that malware can exist at any level. I would think that for engineers with no ethics, there is a wide open world of opportunity creating infected hardware for the future. I think we are on the brink of a "Warm War" where the weapons are computers and communications.
A friend at Microsoft told me that he was responsible for keeping development machines running for his department. He said that developer's machines crashed all the time and he had a shopping cart full of imaged drives to plop into troubled machines. Data is kept on servers and if a local operating system gets trashed, its too much trouble to diagnose or fix it. Just pop in a new drive and away you go. This is one of the reasons I quit doing Windows development. I got tired of reloading my development machines. If you want to be ready with your product for the window of opportunity, you need to run on beta os, with beta tools, and beta applications/services. It is too easy for the system to become unstable. Things are almost as bad for the public end-users. This is one reason I don't fix people's Windows machines. Boredom.
I want to walk in your shoes. Just what are the rest of you putting up with that I haven't while I waited to do better? Should I be ashamed to have set my professional priorities high enough to afford quality tools. When your day comes and you put hard earned money into the tools for your work, you may not want to hear that you are an idiot. I just know you have to pay for quality.
I recently tried out an AT&T/Cingular 3G adapter (usb) for my father at the hospital and couldn't get enough signal to do email, much less moving video. If they can't get their 3G data network running well enough for the normal wireless customers, how do they expect to satisfy loads of video watchers. Aren't they selling out there business customers who have been suffering and waiting for things to get better. Aren't they also selling out Apple who will have to suffer also due to their exclusive iPhone / AT&T contract.
I knew in my heart AT&T would do something to mess this up.
All kids know about, "buildings that were modified with passive acoustic channels". We used to listen at the heater grates to hear our parent have their confidential discussions
I guess if someone was looking at the sliderule, their brains would emit waves that could be interpreted. I worked on a government project similar to this in 1971.
Since these emi runn oft into space and keep on going, the aliens can find out just about anything they want to and we can't get these waves back ever.
There were openly shared programs for playing music on an am radio placed near the ibm 1620 cpu. Decks of music were passed around and anyone with a smattering of musical talent could play with it.
I waited thirty years to buy a workstation that would make me happy. I wanted lots of pure horsepower, huge amounts of ram, gobs of hard disk, harware raid, lots of I/O, real Unix, X, a friendly GUI.
Lets talk about horsepower. On the day the 8-core 3.0Gz Xeon Mac Pro became available, Intel was only shipping those cpu chips to Apple and nowhere else. 8 cores was exactly what I wanted.
Ram that worked efficiently with the processors in this configuration had to have extra heat sinks and I wanted thoroughly tested ram that would not make errors when things got warm. Just because other sources of ram seem ok doesn't mean they meet the timing spec under all circumstances when viewed with logic analysers under load. Too many years of hearing, "Dos boots, the cpu board must be ok", left me feeling there were a lot of idiots in the world.
Four internal SATA II drives are a good fit, especially if you get a raid card and four of the new WD 10000RPM SATA II Raptor drives (to be available this month).
If I am going to use firewire, don't bother me with 400 ports, give me the good stuff. Two gigE ports is nice.
As of Leopard, Mac OS X is Real Unix and the X Window implementation is ok for my uses. The Leopard GUI is a lot nicer than OpenLook in my opinion.
Yes the Mac Pro is made of "server class components". That is what I always wanted and it is what I am happy to pay for.
When I was looking for the workstation of my dreams, I looked all over at the systems available at any price. I looked into what I could buy from Sun, HP, Dell, or build myself. I evaluated whether I would be happy owning a 10K plus dollar Sun Sparc machine with multiple processors. What I discovered is that if I wanted something better than the 8-core Mac Pro, I would have to buy a small mainframe and call it a workstation.
I intend to use this machine and it's peripherals for many years. As time moves on and specs change, I should be able to pick up a spare Mac Pro frame refurbished or used for less down the road. I feel that between Apple Care and having Apple repair my expensive workstation if it needs repair, I can trust that my investment will not be wasted. I expect the machine to last long enough to depreciate. Even with the Apple Tax, if it lasts long enough, the price per year will be within my flinch range. I have bought a dozen two thousand dollars machines in the last few years and they are not doing it for me. HP, Toshiba, Sony, Dell have all taken my money and let me down.
I Bought everything but the hard drives from Apple. I paid extra to assure that they would be 100% and there would not be any mysteries plaguing my system.
A year later, the new model is.2Gz faster and can have more ram added. This doesn't seem to bother me any. I haven't exceeded the need for 16GB of ram yet.for the application I am writing. If a client needs the max config, they can buy a newer Mac Pro.
I have used all the rest, and this time I wanted the best. Call me anything you like, and make fun of me for being ignorant and buying the system and it's ram from Apple. But at the end of the day, I have a kick-ass workstation that is the most reliable machine I have ever owned, and I don't regret a penny of the money that was spent putting it together.
Still smaller is the "gumstix" computer solution. Running Linux and having a usable web server. Not much larger than a pack of gum. I have one I have been playing with. Very cool tech indeed.
When the dot net technology first appeared, my criticism was that there was no control over garbage collection , and when it occurred, the run-time environment would become unreliable for several seconds. For my uses, computer software cannot cannot have latency of seconds when it is used to control hardware, communicate, or support a user interface.
I have read here that languages with garbage collection are becoming more popular than languages without. I can only interpret this to mean that keeping track of your program's allocations is considered too much work.
Real programming is not simple, or effortless. It is necessary to learn, to think, to design, to improve.
People who like to program in BASIC should not be given the task of deciding what is a good programming language. If all the programming left for us to do by Microsoft can be done in BASIC, our job as software engineers is over and we might as well retire.
Is that you Jesus? No people I know claim that level of perfection in the real world. Someone is in denial. I can only hope the programming skill exceeds the skill with the English language since I cannot tell whether the above posting is a joke or a serious remark.
After twenty years of assembler, I found that the compiler I was using had started generating BETTER code than I would have. Tom Rolander convinced me that C was portable assembler. I know now that he was right. For someone like myself who tended towards the register crippled Intel processors, assembler coding had become an execise in remembering what specific registers were good for and doing my best to use them. After computers had more then eight kilobytes of memory, it was less important to hand optimize every line of code. The beneficial use of C came from learning to write portable conservative code that if compiled with warnings turned on, would do what you wanted. When C could generate efficient reliable code faster for me than writing the assembler by hand, I started using it.
You can write bad code in any language. You can also write code that is difficult to maintain in any language. In the long term, C as used in Unix wasn't the cleanest or most reliable,
When Microsoft and Intel decided programmers couldn't be trusted to write native code, it was a sad day indeed, and dot net seems to me to be about keeping the programmer away from the iron. That is especially bad for someone like me who was most comfortable close to the iron. In my experience, the projects I worked on that were complete failures, happened because of changes to underlying software interfaces, and not problems with my understanding of hardware I was trying to control. Take for example my attempt to implement Concurrent DOS 386 on an Altos server. After years of successful implementation of XIOS code controlling hardware, the XIOS for the Altos had to interface with buggy software supplied by a hostile group at Altos. In the middle of the project, Altos lost the source code of their part and redesigned and re-implemented the software layers controlling the hardware, and the basis of my adaptation changed out from under me with no notice.
When youj write code with dot net and it doesn't run right, who is at fault. Is it you, or the compiler, or the runtime implementation. At least with the real hardware, you could use debugging tools, logic analysers, and in-circuit emulators to get to the bottom of problems. When you write programs that are complied into pseudocode that is executed by runtimes implemented by a closed source single source vendor and you have problems, you are screwed.
For me, programming is about writing code that manipulates data and produces results. Someone familiar with the problem domain should be able to read the code.
At the point where Microsoft outlawed real programming, I bought a big Macintosh workstation with lots of cores, a huge amount of memory, lots of hard disk, a Unix compliant operating system with a nice GUI on top. It has an assembler, and a C compiler for classic computing. It has Cocoa and objective-c for Apple specific application work. Vista and all future Microsoft operating systems will not appeal to me as computing platforms, since what they really are, are execution platforms for Microsoft products.
What turned out to be important for me was efficient reliable platforms with efficient reliable language tools to create and run software that solved problems in a way that could be relied upon for business and personal use. Every time I look, Microsoft has broken something I need for business, and in the last ten years, it has most often been the development software and it's interfaces to the operating systems services.
After I recently purchased an advanced firewall router I became aware of the spurious RST packets that will appearing in the COMCAST environment.
I had my firewall router configured to report these packets by email and I received so many of these emails I had to discontinue the reporting. During the time I say the packets, I was not using any p2p protocols but in fact was using a web browser to operate the ebay website. I did notice these packets around the time web content was being provided by akamai servers.
I don't pay COMCAST to insert pirate packets into my communication stream. They don't belong there.
Retries exist to made protocols more robust and not to allow traffic shaping by spurious RST injection to operate a certain way that pleases an ISP.
I am totally laughing about this. You see I am a software engineer and for many years I have written software that conforms to the specification. I prefer specifications that are implementable. But once I agree to implement, a deal is a deal. Now Microsoft will have to show us whether they have what it takes to eat their own dogfood.
The web site is different. The cart doesn't work. The Site has no Copyrights. The domain has two name servers that resolve to only one IP address. The site appears to be the work of Rodolfo Pedraza, whos street address looks like a residence. The phone numbers look very suspicious and are probably not real. The whole site looks like an elaborate joke. But who is laughing?
You can image my surprise when I found a parking page on my www.fairycompany.com site pointing to my competitors. I was flabergasted. I have been in shock about this for about a month and hadn't decided how to pursue it. I just neglected my site for a time after my wife passed away. This wasn't a subdomain either. This was a second level domain that was registered at Network Solutions, and for many years I served it from my back room using an A record set with the Advanced DNS tools at Network Solutions. I am really pissed off about this. I wouldn't be able to explain this to my wife were she still here.
Slashdot Mirror
There are sniffing apps that listen for images and display them as a collage. I friend who owns an ISP was telling me they exist.
I noticed the other day that you cannot access TechNet downloads from a Mac OS machine. This is an example of planned non-compatibility with Apple. Has anyone else noticed this? The cross platform compatibility is getting worse. I guess they are not happy unless you are running their latest OS, their latest browser, and their latest GUI enhancement. What a bunch of pricks. VMWare notwithstanding, I just cannot bring myself to load ANY microsoft modules on my Mac. Not even IE, and certainly not a virtualized OS. I admit I am not quite sure what todays benefit from SL is. I am saying NO to microsoft about the .NET runtime, IE, SL, and Microsoft Office for the Mac. Gee they sure are pushy. There seems to be more and more situations where the Microsoft site is not browser neutral.
I guess film could be called "flash memory" after the flash went off.
I could suggest that we start building our routers using inexpensive computers running open source *nix operating systems, but the firmware in the nic cards might be infected. The fine line between software and hardware means that malware can exist at any level. I would think that for engineers with no ethics, there is a wide open world of opportunity creating infected hardware for the future. I think we are on the brink of a "Warm War" where the weapons are computers and communications.
A friend at Microsoft told me that he was responsible for keeping development machines running for his department. He said that developer's machines crashed all the time and he had a shopping cart full of imaged drives to plop into troubled machines. Data is kept on servers and if a local operating system gets trashed, its too much trouble to diagnose or fix it. Just pop in a new drive and away you go. This is one of the reasons I quit doing Windows development. I got tired of reloading my development machines. If you want to be ready with your product for the window of opportunity, you need to run on beta os, with beta tools, and beta applications/services. It is too easy for the system to become unstable. Things are almost as bad for the public end-users. This is one reason I don't fix people's Windows machines. Boredom.
Did you mean, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of nine-track tapes barreling down the interstate...?
I don;t have a clue whether it was the core memory of the cpu. You are probably correct. :-)
I want to walk in your shoes. Just what are the rest of you putting up with that I haven't while I waited to do better? Should I be ashamed to have set my professional priorities high enough to afford quality tools. When your day comes and you put hard earned money into the tools for your work, you may not want to hear that you are an idiot. I just know you have to pay for quality.
Would that be color, or black and white?
I knew in my heart AT&T would do something to mess this up.
All kids know about, "buildings that were modified with passive acoustic channels". We used to listen at the heater grates to hear our parent have their confidential discussions
I guess if someone was looking at the sliderule, their brains would emit waves that could be interpreted. I worked on a government project similar to this in 1971.
Since these emi runn oft into space and keep on going, the aliens can find out just about anything they want to and we can't get these waves back ever.
There were openly shared programs for playing music on an am radio placed near the ibm 1620 cpu. Decks of music were passed around and anyone with a smattering of musical talent could play with it.
Lets talk about horsepower. On the day the 8-core 3.0Gz Xeon Mac Pro became available, Intel was only shipping those cpu chips to Apple and nowhere else. 8 cores was exactly what I wanted.
Ram that worked efficiently with the processors in this configuration had to have extra heat sinks and I wanted thoroughly tested ram that would not make errors when things got warm. Just because other sources of ram seem ok doesn't mean they meet the timing spec under all circumstances when viewed with logic analysers under load. Too many years of hearing, "Dos boots, the cpu board must be ok", left me feeling there were a lot of idiots in the world.
Four internal SATA II drives are a good fit, especially if you get a raid card and four of the new WD 10000RPM SATA II Raptor drives (to be available this month).
If I am going to use firewire, don't bother me with 400 ports, give me the good stuff. Two gigE ports is nice.
As of Leopard, Mac OS X is Real Unix and the X Window implementation is ok for my uses. The Leopard GUI is a lot nicer than OpenLook in my opinion.
Yes the Mac Pro is made of "server class components". That is what I always wanted and it is what I am happy to pay for.
When I was looking for the workstation of my dreams, I looked all over at the systems available at any price. I looked into what I could buy from Sun, HP, Dell, or build myself. I evaluated whether I would be happy owning a 10K plus dollar Sun Sparc machine with multiple processors. What I discovered is that if I wanted something better than the 8-core Mac Pro, I would have to buy a small mainframe and call it a workstation.
I intend to use this machine and it's peripherals for many years. As time moves on and specs change, I should be able to pick up a spare Mac Pro frame refurbished or used for less down the road. I feel that between Apple Care and having Apple repair my expensive workstation if it needs repair, I can trust that my investment will not be wasted. I expect the machine to last long enough to depreciate. Even with the Apple Tax, if it lasts long enough, the price per year will be within my flinch range. I have bought a dozen two thousand dollars machines in the last few years and they are not doing it for me. HP, Toshiba, Sony, Dell have all taken my money and let me down.
I Bought everything but the hard drives from Apple. I paid extra to assure that they would be 100% and there would not be any mysteries plaguing my system.
A year later, the new model is .2Gz faster and can have more ram added. This doesn't seem to bother me any. I haven't exceeded the need for 16GB of ram yet.for the application I am writing. If a client needs the max config, they can buy a newer Mac Pro.
I have used all the rest, and this time I wanted the best. Call me anything you like, and make fun of me for being ignorant and buying the system and it's ram from Apple. But at the end of the day, I have a kick-ass workstation that is the most reliable machine I have ever owned, and I don't regret a penny of the money that was spent putting it together.
http://www.gumstix.com/waysmalls.html
I have read here that languages with garbage collection are becoming more popular than languages without. I can only interpret this to mean that keeping track of your program's allocations is considered too much work.
Real programming is not simple, or effortless. It is necessary to learn, to think, to design, to improve.
People who like to program in BASIC should not be given the task of deciding what is a good programming language. If all the programming left for us to do by Microsoft can be done in BASIC, our job as software engineers is over and we might as well retire.
Is that you Jesus? No people I know claim that level of perfection in the real world. Someone is in denial. I can only hope the programming skill exceeds the skill with the English language since I cannot tell whether the above posting is a joke or a serious remark.
You can write bad code in any language. You can also write code that is difficult to maintain in any language. In the long term, C as used in Unix wasn't the cleanest or most reliable,
When Microsoft and Intel decided programmers couldn't be trusted to write native code, it was a sad day indeed, and dot net seems to me to be about keeping the programmer away from the iron. That is especially bad for someone like me who was most comfortable close to the iron. In my experience, the projects I worked on that were complete failures, happened because of changes to underlying software interfaces, and not problems with my understanding of hardware I was trying to control. Take for example my attempt to implement Concurrent DOS 386 on an Altos server. After years of successful implementation of XIOS code controlling hardware, the XIOS for the Altos had to interface with buggy software supplied by a hostile group at Altos. In the middle of the project, Altos lost the source code of their part and redesigned and re-implemented the software layers controlling the hardware, and the basis of my adaptation changed out from under me with no notice.
When youj write code with dot net and it doesn't run right, who is at fault. Is it you, or the compiler, or the runtime implementation. At least with the real hardware, you could use debugging tools, logic analysers, and in-circuit emulators to get to the bottom of problems. When you write programs that are complied into pseudocode that is executed by runtimes implemented by a closed source single source vendor and you have problems, you are screwed.
For me, programming is about writing code that manipulates data and produces results. Someone familiar with the problem domain should be able to read the code.
At the point where Microsoft outlawed real programming, I bought a big Macintosh workstation with lots of cores, a huge amount of memory, lots of hard disk, a Unix compliant operating system with a nice GUI on top. It has an assembler, and a C compiler for classic computing. It has Cocoa and objective-c for Apple specific application work. Vista and all future Microsoft operating systems will not appeal to me as computing platforms, since what they really are, are execution platforms for Microsoft products.
What turned out to be important for me was efficient reliable platforms with efficient reliable language tools to create and run software that solved problems in a way that could be relied upon for business and personal use. Every time I look, Microsoft has broken something I need for business, and in the last ten years, it has most often been the development software and it's interfaces to the operating systems services.
After I recently purchased an advanced firewall router I became aware of the spurious RST packets that will appearing in the COMCAST environment. I had my firewall router configured to report these packets by email and I received so many of these emails I had to discontinue the reporting. During the time I say the packets, I was not using any p2p protocols but in fact was using a web browser to operate the ebay website. I did notice these packets around the time web content was being provided by akamai servers. I don't pay COMCAST to insert pirate packets into my communication stream. They don't belong there. Retries exist to made protocols more robust and not to allow traffic shaping by spurious RST injection to operate a certain way that pleases an ISP.
I am totally laughing about this. You see I am a software engineer and for many years I have written software that conforms to the specification. I prefer specifications that are implementable. But once I agree to implement, a deal is a deal. Now Microsoft will have to show us whether they have what it takes to eat their own dogfood.
How about 12345
Add a number to the end...
The web site is different. The cart doesn't work. The Site has no Copyrights. The domain has two name servers that resolve to only one IP address. The site appears to be the work of Rodolfo Pedraza, whos street address looks like a residence. The phone numbers look very suspicious and are probably not real. The whole site looks like an elaborate joke. But who is laughing?
You can image my surprise when I found a parking page on my www.fairycompany.com site pointing to my competitors. I was flabergasted. I have been in shock about this for about a month and hadn't decided how to pursue it. I just neglected my site for a time after my wife passed away. This wasn't a subdomain either. This was a second level domain that was registered at Network Solutions, and for many years I served it from my back room using an A record set with the Advanced DNS tools at Network Solutions. I am really pissed off about this. I wouldn't be able to explain this to my wife were she still here.