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I use the bittorrent card.

Until you get shut off for competing with the cable company.

Radical changes mean retraining, and retraining means wasting money.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations in September '05 for some work at the time about this and came up with $3500 per user for an Office 2007 upgrade and about $750 per user for an Open Office side-grade.

Those numbers might look a bit different today but they're probably similar. And no doubt I'll get responses from the "you can't measure anything by acquisition costs" cabal - I'll just ignore those preemptively here with the "you can do a fuzzy measurement" reasoning quantum physicists have been on the avant garde of for so long. Our renormalization groups aren't quite so well-defined or worked-out, unfortunately.

Some people here have mentioned how people get frustrated with Open Office's similar-but-different features. I've found, studying non-power users, that they don't really know the Office interface well at all, and are basically re-discovering it all the time. For that group of users, the OOOfice interface isn't a drag. For people in the Office Suite all day, either path is going to add some air resistance.

Why do you need FC6 under VMWare if the Mac is such a great replacement for Linux?

Don't raise strawmen. I explicitly said I needed both. And if I come across a random WPA2 or 802.11n access point I can expect to get on without any fuss. Time is money and fiddling with config files at a client site just makes you look inept.

Surely you can do all of your development under MacOS?

No.

Or are you developing Linux apps?

Yes.

If so, just tell the end users to switch to Macs.

Macs make poor servers.

I don't see why they'd object when it's a perfect replacement.

Why do you think that?

Obviously they're not asking you for that kind of advice, but neither did the original poster.

He's a guy stuck on Windows but wants to get to Linux but for the drivers support. That's not a problem that's going to be solved in the short-term. He can achieve his goal of having a unix machine with wireless driver support, with Linux even, by getting a Mac today. If you think he's better off on Windows than on Mac, we'll agree to disagree on that one. If you think he should just get a random laptop, slap linux on it, and give up on Wireless, then you're not meeting his design criteria. As you grow older you'll learn people often ask for one thing but really what they want to do is achieve a goal. By showing them an alternative that better meets their needs you're doing them a service and they're most often appreciative.

1. The virtualisation support in current Intel and AMD chips is actually slower than software virtualisation. Maybe this doesn't apply to Macs because they're so insanely great.

Cite? My first-hand experience shows otherwise. The Xen people and VMWare also like hardware virtualization but I guess they don't know much about those things. I guess they're willing to slow down their products to support the industry conspiracy.

2. The built-in wireless chipset in your Mac may be well supported, but how many external PCMCIA/ExpressCard/USB adapters did you test before stating that the Mac has good driver support?

I haven't had a need for it - 99.987% of the buyers don't either. There's a USB kit that's well-supported by the KisMac crowd if you need more capabilities.

3. "I'm a die-hard linux geek". No, you're a Mac advocate impersonating one.

Sure, that's why I chair a Linux User Group and run a business supporting linux servers and networks. What are your stripes, exactly, since you've decided to go the ad-hominem route? I couldn't even find a link to your website in your profile - why is it that you hide behind anonymity?

The way you can tell is when someone mentions that they want to use a free OS on their PC, you tell them to spend $2000 and up on proprietary hardware and software.

You can have a great Mac laptop for $1300 that should suit most users quite well. If the guy doesn't like MacOS he can then run Windows or Linux directly on it. Now that's proprietary, eh?! The acquisition cost isn't a factor for a great number of buyers - many people can afford to spend $5000 for a computer that will improve their productivity. My MBP was priced in line with a Lenovo laptop, but I prefer the option of running more operating systems and supporting an American company that contributes to Open Source projects.

It's quite easy with a bit of practice.

What, living in a black and white world where nobody has to make engineering decisions? I'll defer to your expertise on that one.

Probably the only real solution for the problem is to redefine Human as self aware creatures from earth, and incorporate this awareness somehow into robots, to some slight degree, so that Robots see Humans as "One of Us". ... A self aware robot could see the hypocrisy without the emotional justification people exhibit. At this point, we could be in trouble.

As you point out, this is a precarious solution. Using Evolution as a model, humans may need to decide if they want to evolve and compete with Engineered Life or not. The upside is we'll be the first species to get to make this decision. I blogged some notes and thoughts from a Dartmouth AI symposium recently on this topic.

@a .+ @b @a :/ @b

OK, I admit I have no idea what that represents. But I'm not afraid to go find out. I was afraid of regex syntax for a while and now I regret being so chickenshit. This might be something that will make my job easier and and improve my understanding of my art, so rather than bellyache about how it's not intutitive to a six year old I'll go learn something (OK, I'll bellyache about partisan programmers too).

Notice how Larry Wall anticipated visual clues.

I've been known to anger pythonistas with this blog entry.

Don't forget, Sony's "advertised" that the PS3 can run Tiger.

I did some digging on the iPod and Microvision the last time this came around. It's still possible. After Christmas.

But Jobs is just blowing smoke with his "noone's making money on this yet" line - the iPod came into a similar marketplace 4 years ago.

I did some digging and there maybe some truth to this.

I was highly skeptical on first read.

That is lunacy

I thought so at first too. Then I did some digging. Here's what I found.

We considered a lot of other OSes. We looked at NT, but it looked like it would never be practical to port to a big-endian processor.

I was reading with great interest 'till I got here. Just to make sure I hadn't gone mad, I grabbed my NT4 cd from the bookshelf. I hadn't. I scanned the CD for this comment.

So, either you're putting us on, had an excusable brain-fart, or we're talking Apples and Oranges. Pick a card any card.

Assuming you're just getting old like the rest of us, perhaps you can shed some light as to whether the mkLinux's Mach microkernel was considered either a proof-of-concept or an enabling technology when it came to porting OpenStep to Macintosh.