Busy, but not sure why....
A visiting friend has somewhat re-kindled my interest in
the Macintosh. I even started using my trusty
PowerBook as my main machine again, going as far as
to wipe YDL off the spare disk to make space for Mac
things. The Mac is a nice thing to use with it's high level
of UI integration and consistency. I look forward to KDE
(or gnome) becoming as tightly integrated. Who fills the
role of the HCI police in open collaborative projects
though ?
The details of the MacOS X beta release, however, are
not such good news. Charging for a beta with a time-
expiry ? What kind of business sense is that ? Recover
development costs with the product, not with the Beta
release.
Apple ships machines with CD-R devices - so why do
they not
offer a raw iso download and save on manufacturing
and shipping costs ?
Exchanged emails with partain
about Arusha last week.
Looks like
our
opinions on systems administration (more correctly
meta-administration) are closer than I had thought. I
was also wrong about the project being "rooted in
Academic installations" - turns out that just the opposite
is
the case.
On the subject of sysadmin, I was thinking about the
recurring cycles in corporate technology in general and
in sysadmin in particular. partain
suggested that with a team of "crack
administrators" in an organization, infrastructure like Arusha was not really
necessary. I
thought otherwise, because the "crack administrators"
will generally move on to new things when they get
bored. Having some structure imposed on on the
machine infrastructure can help slow the decay that
occurs after those "crack administrators" are gone. I
need
to think about how to express this accurately, coming
soon to a
diary entry near you ....
PS: While I do have some experience of being a
sysadmin, I would not consider myself an expert and,
besides, I have probably forgotten what it was really like
since I stopped doing it.
PPS: raph, is there a tag for
projects like the tag for person ?