In “Return of the Mac,” Paul Graham writes: “All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.”
At the LinuxWorld show in Boston last month, Apple had a small understated booth, with a couple of company reps out front, and a plain table with a Mac Mini, an XServe and an XServe RAID up and running. They were low-key and glad to answer questions. I spoke with one of them and said “The Mac is my favorite unix workstation,” and he replied “I’m glad someone knows why we are here.”
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports “Microsoft’s Grand Plan To Go Vertical. Can Microsoft transform itself from a product-focused company into a solutions-oriented one? Top brass are betting that it can.”
Microsoft is wise to diversify. From consumer products like MSN and Xbox to hardware like mice and keyboards, Microsoft is spreading its bets around. They make operating systems for home users and for big servers. They sell games. They sell development tools. We’ll see if the “plan to go vertical” realigns the OS, servers and desktop products divisions or just becomes yet another diversification.
Ed Foster’s Gripelog points out that ‘Lifetime’ promises by vendors are rarely the good deal that they sound like: Promise of Lifetime Service Isn’t Sirius. “We already know how some manufacturers think a lifetime warranty is one that’s only good…”
FLOSSPro: Free/Libre Open Source Software for the Professional Developer
FLOSSPro™ is the name for a series of essays I’ll be developing, eventually leading to publication, either online or in dead-tree format or both. They are both an autobiographical journal of travels from there to here, and a set of tutorials and pointers to people following a similar path: starting in Windows, learning Linux and the associated technologies to generate web-based and rich-client applications using Open Source Software.
From the Bash Reference Manual, available online for Free, of course:
A Unix shell is both a command interpreter and a programming language…
While executing commands is essential, most of the power (and complexity) of shells is due to their embedded programming languages. Like any high-level language, the shell provides variables, flow control constructs, quoting, and functions.
These are not your forefather’s DOS batch files.
A security update 2005-003 for Mac OS X 10.3.8 is available for download from the Apple site, or from the automated software update. Details can be read at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301061. Updated packages include: AFP Server, Bluetooth Setup Assistance, Core Foundation, Cyrus IMAP, Cyrus SASL, Folder permissions, Mailman, Safari (addresses the IDN exploits), Samba and SquirrelMail.
Dan Bricklin’s Log: A theory about extreme fear of the GPL. “I’m putting my material that is legalistic and narrowly related to Open Source and copyright that comes out of my work on my video on the Software Garden Training Video Blog. I’ll try to also mention here some of the more general interest stuff I put there. I just posted an observation I made after attending a conference on best practices in standards setting… Read “A theory about extreme fear of the GPL“.“
Scripting News points out a funny Britt Blaser post: Why FedEx calls it 2 Day Service.
CompuServe is running a survey. You don’t need to be a member:
http://go.compuserve.com/MSDevApps?LOC=us
John Koziol of Microsoft responds, “Excuse me for saying so, but that’s a dumb-ass survey.”
I couldn’t say it better myself. Let’s put VFP over the top!
OSNews reports “Microsoft funding of security report decried. Two researchers surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along.”
I heard about the report and I was really pleased that Microsoft may have finally started catching on with Windows Server 2003 in shipping a product that’s reasonably secure out of the box. To say it is about time is a vast understatement. To claim that redeems Microsoft, or has any effect on the 500 million insecure Windows installations out there is wrong. From my limited experience with W2K3, it’s a lot more difficult to work with, since lots of features are disabled by default, and turning them on is far from intuitive. It’s pretty much too late for me. I’ve taken my business elsewhere.