Monthly Archives: July 2002

Take a Mac user to lunch…

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This is a great LinuxWorld article on comparing costs between servers based on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. What may be suprising to many of you is, Mac OS X deployments are typically much cheaper overall, while offering excellent performance that is superior to Windows.

Apple has demonstrated that there is a clear and easy to implement solution to the Windows licensing problem by offering products like Xserve and Mac OS X Server by supporting unlimited Windows, Mac, and Unix cliens right out of the box and making their server the most cost-effective hardware choice for volume serving.

What’s more is, Apple has become the number one vendor of Unix hardware in terms of units sold. This provides a huge opportunity for Unix-based projects (and especially those open-source ones) to gain a wider foothold by making their offerings available to the rapidly-expanding Mac OS X market.

But the best part of all is, it’s all so easy.

Click here for the article.

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Should it be legal for a corporation to hack your computer?

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According to this article on C|Net’s News.com, the United States Congress is considering a proposal sponsored by the entertainment industry that would authorize these corporations to hack into a PC and disable it if that said computer was being used for potentially illegal file trading.

This essentially will authorize a corporation to bypass all kinds of due process and legal consumer protections to potentially ruin your computer because they suspect that you have traded one of their copyrighted items online. Does this in turn give the consumer the right to hack into their corporate enterprise system if it is suspected that they are abusing private customer data?

This kind of vigilante justice must not come to pass. There are already plenty of copyright protection laws in existence that protect the copyright holders, and the recording industry lawyers need to learn to work within the existing frameworks that are already in place. We do not need more laws. Especially not this one that can do such far reaching potential damage.

Here’s a link to contact elected officials in the United States.

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Work Smarter

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According to a recent report from Nielsen/NetRatings, Mac users demographically tend to be smarter and wealthier than their Windows counterparts. Now I’m no-one to judge, but I can attest to the fact that after switcing to the Mac platform my levels of productivity and work quality increased dramatically, which in turn led to a dramatic increase in my personal income and job satisfaction. Add to that my feeling that the Mac operating system offers a far more intuitive, open, flexible, and ultimately more powerful platform for computing than what you can scratch out from the Windows platform.

Here’s a link to an article about the report on C|Net. To borrow from the C|Net teaser: ” If you’re reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words.”

A Lack of Perspective

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Today I caught an article on the Christian Science Monitor that talks about the failure of U.S. intelligence prior to the 9/11 attacks. The Monitor has always been a great source of journalism, and I found this article particularly insightful. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“The USA is widely loathed, but our leaders never fully grasped that before last September. Shortly after the attacks, President Bush claimed to be “amazed” that anyone hates America, because “I know how good we are.” This naivete is a failure of “intelligence” not the kind the FBI and CIA specialize in, but a lapsed ability to see the global political landscape from any perspective outside one’s own.”

The full text of this article can be found here.