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Comment Re:Great a new boom. (Score 1) 253

Amen.

And: Excellent developers require excellent leadership to perform well! Without excellent leadership (that understand what system development is, how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how to organize system development), the effort of developers will go to waste.

The magic happens only when excellent developers are managed well.

Comment Re:He's always had my respect (Score 1) 287

Jobs wasn't a very nice person. Not only do I understand peoples' dislike of the guy, I share it.

Oh please. Of course, I've never met Steve Jobs, but still: Sure he was a very demanding boss and unscrupulous strategist, but that would not automatically make him a bad person in all aspects of life (unless you consider moneymaking and bossing all there is to life)

Comment Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score 1) 1452

Oh bullcrap. There are plenty of us slashdotters who use Apple, and we vary from pleased users to Apple fanatics.

Anyhow, you are completely missing the main point: However much you may or may not choose to dislike Steve Jobs, his company has always been pushing towards making computing grandma-friendly.

On the other hand, FOSS software sadly focuses too much on the feedback from the already-clued-in people. That way, we've created a separate reality in which we thrive - but only until we encounter that other reality. The dreaded user who just don't get it!

Comment Offsite! (Score 1) 499

Automatic offsite backup services like Crashplan, Mozy, Carbonite etc ensures your data will survive both media failure, theft and fire. You may also choose to keep a local copy of your media, because downloading hundreds of gigs over the net takes a while. But: I'd first put my money into one of these providers, and if I felt I still have too much money then I'd consider a NAS/Time Capsule kinda solution as a supplement.

And never, ever, ever exclusively store data you care about on DVDs and external hard drives.

For the first time in history, our pictures and videos can live forever - completely without quality degradation. It's amazing. And it's disappointing how few people take opportunity of this.

(Of course, you should take care to double-check your new computer can play back whatever media formats you have used - and convert if necessary. )

Science

Researcher Builds Life-Like Cells Made of Metal 259

Sven-Erik writes "Could living things that evolved from metals be clunking about somewhere in the universe? In a lab in Glasgow, UK, one man is intent on proving that metal-based life is possible. He has managed to build cell-like bubbles from giant metal-containing molecules and has given them some life-like properties. He now hopes to induce them to evolve into fully inorganic self-replicating entities. 'I am 100 per cent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology,' says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow. His building blocks are large 'polyoxometalates' made of a range of metal atoms — most recently tungsten — linked to oxygen and phosphorus. By simply mixing them in solution, he can get them to self-assemble into cell-like spheres."

Comment Re:In other news... (Score 1) 173

Adrenaline is not about stress. Adrenaline is more about panic.

But yes, your statement is correct: Stress is debilitating to the body. Being in a permanent state of stress means your body tries to put on weight, your state of mind is not easy-going like it when you're not stressed, your immune system is affected etc etc. (Also, there is good stress and bad stress. The stress you impose on yourself is not too harmful, which is why many highly driven people enjoy excellent health)

Comment Re:Not impossible (Score 1) 583

There really should be no problem

  1. Performing a backup
  2. Wiping the machine
  3. Installing a clean OS
  4. Updating the OS
  5. Installing proper security software
  6. Re-importing data and applications from backup, and have the security software handle any nasty stuff in what you're importing.

That there is a problem wiping a machine is a serious security issue. There are a myriad ways which different kinds of malware use to hide themselves and bounce back up after surviving a round of security scanning. The malware itself is continuously self-updating.

If I were to engineer a package system, all files within a package (program) would be checksummed, and the list of checksummed would be PKI-signed in order to prevent the malware from hiding its misdeeds by altering the checksums. Of course, this has been done several times in Linux-land. Microsoft has Windows 8 coming up. Let's hope they finally fix their design.

Comment Re:Corporate sales? (Score 1) 494

FW is indeed a niche product, primarily used for disks for Macs and upper-end audio hardware. Meanwhile, USB2 is used for pretty much everything. TB - while cool - does not seem poised to challenge USB3 which offers sufficient performance for most uses and back-compatibility with previous products. And there is no good reason why sjobs would not include USB3 - it's relatively inexpensive by now. Why not have both?

Comment Re:Corporate sales? (Score 3, Interesting) 494

The base config is pretty OK priced. There are some gotchas, though:

  1. You can't replace the harddrive (link).
  2. You can't upgrade the graphics card after you've purchased your unit.
  3. You can't upgrade the CPU after you've purchased your unit.
  4. You don't keep your glorious monitor when your machine becomes too slow after a few years

Yes, I sorta regret getting that iMac a few years ago.

Back on topic:

I see a good business model in becoming a certified Mac shop and offering corporate service deals (tech support + physical service). Slowly but surely, the walls are being torn down as applications are becoming web applications. HTML5 may make the OS completely irrelevant in a few year's time.

Comment Re:Why do people underthink memory usage? (Score 1) 258

Well - there is another vector here: Developer productivity. Libraries use extra memory, but they enable a developer to do more in less time. Imagine coding firefox entirely in assembler. The process would likely use much less memory, but how many coders would be required to maintain and extend it?

That being said, I agree wasting memory for the purpose of wasting memory is bad: Inefficient data structures, caching with low hit ratio etc etc. There are no excuses for inherently bad design.

Comment Re:We're sorry (Score 1) 179

Nokia gains nothing. But Nokia started to lose a few years ago when they simply refused to realize how the iPhone was going to change everything. They should in fact have been the one developing the iPhone- they have been distributing phones capable of running apps since .. I dunno, 2004-2005? Somewhere in the S60-series. Of course, they were too inept to realize how apps must be distributed: Easily installable.

It is not accidental that Nokia created something great but failed to capitalize upon what they created: Nokia is an engineering-oriented company with a poor understanding of business and usability. They created a good start, but failed to realize what they had created. Allegedly the Symbian development kit was also rather complex, unfriendly and complex. So, a complete lack of imagination and focus has ensured Google and Apple has killed Nokia's dominance by extending Nokia's ideas with a solid development kit and usability improvements. Solid engineering alone is not enough when you interact with "real" people.

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