Quantity without quality is meaningless. If you have no understanding how something works you have no business coding it. Or are you reduced to a copy and paste "coder" who simply copies snippets they find on the web? Don't wonder why you get replaced or downsized, surely the problem isn't your careless attitude.
WordPerfect had many utility libraries and custom key functions for the law and medical professions. Text-based WordPerfect was still in wide use long after Word came out because it was significantly faster. As a "regular" user you might have missed those differences.
As for the "IE 6 was better", wow what were/are you smoking? I used Netscape browsers in this timeframe and they worked pretty well. Not only did IE6 get even further away from established standards, but it added a host of new problems for web developers. It greatly reduced security for anyone who used it and it was directly responsible or contributed to some of the largest mass outages and virus outbreaks in history -- fails including drive-by downloads, ActiveX controls, lack of confirmation for actions, and a tight coupling with the kernel were nasty nasty for everyone in the business to deal with.
Microsoft still hasn't done much to solve the additional amount of code necessary to render standards-based pages properly even in IE8. Try taking the ACID tests, which reveal just a small inkling of the many many Internet Explorer browsers' issues. Try using "IE7 compatibility mode" in IE8 and you will see it's not the same. Now we have to code for how many different browsers? It's called a standard for a reason, something that MS doesn't see value in following.
I totally agree with the GP in that MS has only been successful through brute force, not in the quality of its products. MS products tend to be cheap and cheaply made, and many people and companies don't look past the "cheap" and ignore the significant costs of "cheaply made" in the long term.
The obvious conclusion that you seem to have missed is that at least for some amount of people, Apple provides value worth the cost. This has been discussed many many many times before so I'm shocked you don't understand.
Or perhaps you're just a troll, I couldn't be bothered to look at your posting history.
On your #4, you might try OpenOffice. I have a license for Office XP and 2003 but I only use it for Visio. I was forced to find other options when trying to manipulate relatively large documents (tens of thousands of pages) and Word kept puking. I haven't switched back; I save all my docs in Word format and also provide PDF's in cases where I don't want to allow edits. I am not the only employee who uses OO -- all our CSR's on the terminal servers use an old version (and as soon as I can figure out how to prevent the user prompting / license crap on upgrade they're getting migrated from 2.2 to 3.1). We set their defaults to "save as Word, Excel" and most of them don't know the difference; a few people require MS Office for custom macros.
Some of the functions in OO work easier (for me) -- styles seem to be simpler, TOC's and field entries on long documentation seem to work better, and of course you have the built-in PDF export.
OO seems more responsive in the way that previous versions of MS Office seemed to be more responsive than others. In some ways it's not as far apart from Office XP as MS Office 2007 is.
I use OO Calc exclusively except for the small number of times I need to insert a special trendline -- OO has only basic trendlines in its GUI and requires a bit of programming for anything more complex. I especially use the text import "wizard" many times a day since I create SQL result worksheets as mock-ups before placing them in Crystal for distribution to everyone (because of the broken Windows clipboard which freezes with large copy & pastes over the WAN, I paste to a pipe-delimited text file instead). When importing this data into OO Calc, I don't get the dropped leading zeros that can make you tear your hair out in Excel, and I don't get unexpected text conversions because a field is "sort-of" formatted as a date or whatever.
Of course the features you find important may not even be present in OO (or that need work, such as their "database" application interface, their "gallery" for pictures / backgrounds, and their very limited set of templates), but in my experience and for my needs I could justify paying an amount equal to the MS Office suite for it.
Have you considered using an aircard as an alternative to dialup? Mine is like $60 a month (company pays for it since I need access at all times for emergencies), it connects everywhere Nextel has service (which in my continental-US travels is pretty much everywhere I go). Connect speed varies significantly though based on reception, from 128K or so up to > 2Mbps. I'm at the 2 extremes having moved 2 miles and am now at the edge of an "uncovered" spot in my area. Supposedly it's "unlimited" service -- I don't pay the bill and have been told to use it anytime I want and no one has ever mentioned any extra fees. I have the Merlin EX720.
When people start having problems with zombie Mac systems you can start worrying about those Apple patches. In the meantime we're getting flooded with security issues in Windows. Still.
OS X vs Ubuntu have not only entirely different target audiences but are entirely different experiences. I use XP, OSX Tiger, RHEL 5 and Fedora 8 daily but switching my laptop from OSX Tiger to Fedora or RHEL would be a huge difference in capabilities and would greatly reduce my performance -- until I found replacements for all the things I do, assuming that's possible.
And please before you tag me as not friendly to open source, I've been using Fedora since it was called Red Hat 5.2. Just make absolutely sure you are willing to put up with the change in scenery... Ubuntu tends to be a rather cutting-edge distro. Hope it works for you.
The article you cited describes Macs getting infected by users installing infected files manually. That's much different from a Windows user becoming infected with drive-by downloads / infection from banner ads. No system can completely secure the machine from a user running as root or with root credentials (which if you're unfamiliar with Macs is usually required to install most OSX software).
The common thread I see is that Windows machines are still getting owned regularly despite attempts to patch it with AV software, and there just doesn't seem to be a good solution available.
What do I use? Other than a Mac (with Windows XP and several other OS's in VMs), I use Trend on the XP VM along with stateful inspection on the Exchange server and firewall, which basically combines both "regular" server software with a monitored service that analyzes content accessed from within the network and people outside the network trying to get in. It's not cheap but it is effective, and the number of viruses / outbreaks are minimized as a result. But they are still nonzero, and time and effort is wasted on reimaging the machines (mostly laptop users). Despite all the protections, I do maintain multiple copies of my XP VM just in case.
Do I ever worry that my Mac will become infected? Never. I consider the chance of infection from driveby's on OSX or Linux laughable, as does most of the industry. I've been in the industry (starting with programming, through PC repair, consulting, later sysadmining, DB, middleware and enterprise app development) for almost 3 decades on a considerable number of different system types -- and Mac viruses just aren't an issue. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.
Depends on how much you value your time. My time is worth more to me than trying to fiddle with an underpowered secondhand PC. If you're just tinkering that's one thing, but vintage hardware is going to disappoint for any "real" use.
The first computer I bought with my own money was a P75. We throw away P3's at work. We're throwing away HP DL320's and moving them all to VM's.
"It's dead, Jim".
I think when an iPod Touch or modern smartphone has more power than your computer, you can't really call what you have a "computer" in the modern sense of the word. Hell I bought a new iPhone 3GS today for $100 -- at that price point it's a disposable item.
I can copy a 30GB VM file in 13 minutes (roughly 39MB/s) via FW 800 on my MacBook Pro. It uses a LaCIE BigDisk with the 3 connections (an older model). The CPU stays nice and low and the machine is perfectly usable while I'm copying it. I do this nightly in OSX 10.4 (Tiger). I'm usually using Transmission to download BitTorrent content while this is going on.
25 MB / second would mean that 30GB file would take 20 minutes or longer -- a 54% increase in time -- and the first time I tried it (using a different external drive, a LaCIE brick which is USB2 only) I was warned it would take an hour. I never had the patience to wait that long.
It actually sounds like you've got electrical problems or something. My experience (in companies having hundreds of PC's) has shown that Windows desktops crash from time to time. It's not unexpected because it's a commodity OS. You reboot the servers every 30-60 days (usually there's a security patch which requires a reboot anyway).
We have one RHEL 3 machine that's gone offline twice in 5 years -- once when it did a controlled thermal shutdown (air conditioner failed) and another when a noob IT guy hot-plugged an external SCSI array (MSA 30) into the box (the drives are hot-pluggable but the enclosure is not). I've been running Red Hat in some form since 5.2 and the box that ran that only stopped once -- we turned it off when the suspended ceiling snapped and fell all around it. I had to vacuum it out.
Now I'm not saying that Debian is the most stable in the world -- it's an end-user, experimental OS that's very aggressive in trying out new features, similar to Fedora and I haven't used Debian in ages -- but the last time I had a bunch of machines failing, we found out it was arcing in the electrical panel. It took 3 electricians to find it and we were wondering why UPS's, fans, and machines kept dying.
I have 3 Fedora 8, 2 RHEL 5.4, and 3 RHEL 3 servers and they're really very boring to maintain. I got some excitement earlier this week when a power outage caused a (different) RHEL3 machine using software RAID to fail 2 arrays (1 drive with 4 partitions in different arrays had 2 of its partitions get out of sync due to the power loss and got automatically kicked from 2 of the arrays). I just added the partitions back to the arrays manually, it's a single command. The server and arrays were online the whole time so nobody noticed / cared.
Apple doesn't supply the low-end market. They don't compete in that area. If you want the cheapest machine without the extras you will not buy an Apple product, you will get [Dell/Presario/Gateway/Toshiba/Emachines] or whatever collection of cheaply made components [Staples/Office Depot/OfficeMax/name your online store here] has on sale this week. End of story.
To get a comparable machine (ie the same equipment), Apple's prices are well within $200 of the Wintel prices, and you don't need the Antivirus, firewall or other software which puts you ahead in the long run money- and performance-wise. $200 is a half-day of my salary and I need something that just works -- being cheap with my machine would be stupid for the company. Put another way, $200 covers only half a day of me out of commission. I am still working on my MBP 2.4 we got 2 years ago, and the only upgrade has been to go from 2GB to 4GB of memory ($50 through Crucial). I had one problem -- the battery -- and when it quit 14 months after purchase (turning my laptop into a desktop) Apple sent me a new one with a prepaid label to send them the old, no problems and no money out of my pocket. 2 days later it arrived.
The "Apple premium" story has been debunked so many times it's just ignorant to repeat it anymore, the components are very good. The other MIS laptops after 2 years have their plastic cases looking all beat to hell, the keyboard characters have worn off, and the trackpads have problems. Mine looks almost new, no scratches. Worth $200 more? You betcha.
Why is this marked flamebait? It seems like parent is trying to determine the issue GP experienced. Only way to solve it is if people can see what's causing the issue.
Depends on your distro. Ubuntu is fairly aggressive, so is Fedora. Try RHEL if you want supported, never-breaks-stuff results. Keep in mind you sacrifice cutting-edge for reliability (which in my world is king anyway). I've heard that SuSE also has fairly stable release cycles, but I've never tried it.
I used to carefully record every patch update on RHEL, but after 5 years with no need to revert to a previous version I've stopped. Fedora stuff gets upgraded with care, but so long as you don't blindly accept every update (and maybe I'm just lucky) I haven't had any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us use Fedora for fileservers in places where RHEL is overkill. We use Fedora 8, RHEL3 and RHEL5.
Also works in OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger). CTRL-scroll.
Quantity without quality is meaningless. If you have no understanding how something works you have no business coding it. Or are you reduced to a copy and paste "coder" who simply copies snippets they find on the web? Don't wonder why you get replaced or downsized, surely the problem isn't your careless attitude.
You've given me a lot to think about. I'll have to think about your comments over a cheeseburger and shake.
Veggies aren't really food -- they're what food eats. You guys will be delicious when we run out of cows.
WordPerfect had many utility libraries and custom key functions for the law and medical professions. Text-based WordPerfect was still in wide use long after Word came out because it was significantly faster. As a "regular" user you might have missed those differences.
As for the "IE 6 was better", wow what were/are you smoking? I used Netscape browsers in this timeframe and they worked pretty well. Not only did IE6 get even further away from established standards, but it added a host of new problems for web developers. It greatly reduced security for anyone who used it and it was directly responsible or contributed to some of the largest mass outages and virus outbreaks in history -- fails including drive-by downloads, ActiveX controls, lack of confirmation for actions, and a tight coupling with the kernel were nasty nasty for everyone in the business to deal with.
Microsoft still hasn't done much to solve the additional amount of code necessary to render standards-based pages properly even in IE8. Try taking the ACID tests, which reveal just a small inkling of the many many Internet Explorer browsers' issues. Try using "IE7 compatibility mode" in IE8 and you will see it's not the same. Now we have to code for how many different browsers? It's called a standard for a reason, something that MS doesn't see value in following.
Wow that's some revisionist history.
I totally agree with the GP in that MS has only been successful through brute force, not in the quality of its products. MS products tend to be cheap and cheaply made, and many people and companies don't look past the "cheap" and ignore the significant costs of "cheaply made" in the long term.
It's way past time for something different.
Mod parent up. It isn't a troll, it's an insightful explanation of why the GP's amazement is just because he/she's uninformed.
Really, Bertok, you brought machines online in an automated fashion? What rock have you been under that this is news?
Try accessing many sites from an iPhone or iPod Touch to see just how bad the problem really is.
Mod parent up. The only machines that give me problems nowadays are Windows machines.
The obvious conclusion that you seem to have missed is that at least for some amount of people, Apple provides value worth the cost. This has been discussed many many many times before so I'm shocked you don't understand.
Or perhaps you're just a troll, I couldn't be bothered to look at your posting history.
On your #4, you might try OpenOffice. I have a license for Office XP and 2003 but I only use it for Visio. I was forced to find other options when trying to manipulate relatively large documents (tens of thousands of pages) and Word kept puking. I haven't switched back; I save all my docs in Word format and also provide PDF's in cases where I don't want to allow edits. I am not the only employee who uses OO -- all our CSR's on the terminal servers use an old version (and as soon as I can figure out how to prevent the user prompting / license crap on upgrade they're getting migrated from 2.2 to 3.1). We set their defaults to "save as Word, Excel" and most of them don't know the difference; a few people require MS Office for custom macros.
Some of the functions in OO work easier (for me) -- styles seem to be simpler, TOC's and field entries on long documentation seem to work better, and of course you have the built-in PDF export.
OO seems more responsive in the way that previous versions of MS Office seemed to be more responsive than others. In some ways it's not as far apart from Office XP as MS Office 2007 is.
I use OO Calc exclusively except for the small number of times I need to insert a special trendline -- OO has only basic trendlines in its GUI and requires a bit of programming for anything more complex. I especially use the text import "wizard" many times a day since I create SQL result worksheets as mock-ups before placing them in Crystal for distribution to everyone (because of the broken Windows clipboard which freezes with large copy & pastes over the WAN, I paste to a pipe-delimited text file instead). When importing this data into OO Calc, I don't get the dropped leading zeros that can make you tear your hair out in Excel, and I don't get unexpected text conversions because a field is "sort-of" formatted as a date or whatever.
Of course the features you find important may not even be present in OO (or that need work, such as their "database" application interface, their "gallery" for pictures / backgrounds, and their very limited set of templates), but in my experience and for my needs I could justify paying an amount equal to the MS Office suite for it.
Have you considered using an aircard as an alternative to dialup? Mine is like $60 a month (company pays for it since I need access at all times for emergencies), it connects everywhere Nextel has service (which in my continental-US travels is pretty much everywhere I go). Connect speed varies significantly though based on reception, from 128K or so up to > 2Mbps. I'm at the 2 extremes having moved 2 miles and am now at the edge of an "uncovered" spot in my area. Supposedly it's "unlimited" service -- I don't pay the bill and have been told to use it anytime I want and no one has ever mentioned any extra fees. I have the Merlin EX720.
When people start having problems with zombie Mac systems you can start worrying about those Apple patches. In the meantime we're getting flooded with security issues in Windows. Still.
It was funny the first time I saw this, and a little less the next time I saw it.
That was many moons ago. Time for something fresh?
OS X vs Ubuntu have not only entirely different target audiences but are entirely different experiences. I use XP, OSX Tiger, RHEL 5 and Fedora 8 daily but switching my laptop from OSX Tiger to Fedora or RHEL would be a huge difference in capabilities and would greatly reduce my performance -- until I found replacements for all the things I do, assuming that's possible.
And please before you tag me as not friendly to open source, I've been using Fedora since it was called Red Hat 5.2. Just make absolutely sure you are willing to put up with the change in scenery... Ubuntu tends to be a rather cutting-edge distro. Hope it works for you.
One of the more uninformed posts I've read today.
Apple owns or participates in a HUGE number of open-source projects.
The article you cited describes Macs getting infected by users installing infected files manually. That's much different from a Windows user becoming infected with drive-by downloads / infection from banner ads. No system can completely secure the machine from a user running as root or with root credentials (which if you're unfamiliar with Macs is usually required to install most OSX software).
The common thread I see is that Windows machines are still getting owned regularly despite attempts to patch it with AV software, and there just doesn't seem to be a good solution available.
What do I use? Other than a Mac (with Windows XP and several other OS's in VMs), I use Trend on the XP VM along with stateful inspection on the Exchange server and firewall, which basically combines both "regular" server software with a monitored service that analyzes content accessed from within the network and people outside the network trying to get in. It's not cheap but it is effective, and the number of viruses / outbreaks are minimized as a result. But they are still nonzero, and time and effort is wasted on reimaging the machines (mostly laptop users). Despite all the protections, I do maintain multiple copies of my XP VM just in case.
Do I ever worry that my Mac will become infected? Never. I consider the chance of infection from driveby's on OSX or Linux laughable, as does most of the industry. I've been in the industry (starting with programming, through PC repair, consulting, later sysadmining, DB, middleware and enterprise app development) for almost 3 decades on a considerable number of different system types -- and Mac viruses just aren't an issue. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.
Depends on how much you value your time. My time is worth more to me than trying to fiddle with an underpowered secondhand PC. If you're just tinkering that's one thing, but vintage hardware is going to disappoint for any "real" use.
The first computer I bought with my own money was a P75. We throw away P3's at work. We're throwing away HP DL320's and moving them all to VM's.
"It's dead, Jim".
I think when an iPod Touch or modern smartphone has more power than your computer, you can't really call what you have a "computer" in the modern sense of the word. Hell I bought a new iPhone 3GS today for $100 -- at that price point it's a disposable item.
I can copy a 30GB VM file in 13 minutes (roughly 39MB/s) via FW 800 on my MacBook Pro. It uses a LaCIE BigDisk with the 3 connections (an older model). The CPU stays nice and low and the machine is perfectly usable while I'm copying it. I do this nightly in OSX 10.4 (Tiger). I'm usually using Transmission to download BitTorrent content while this is going on.
25 MB / second would mean that 30GB file would take 20 minutes or longer -- a 54% increase in time -- and the first time I tried it (using a different external drive, a LaCIE brick which is USB2 only) I was warned it would take an hour. I never had the patience to wait that long.
I would think "allknowingfrog" would, you know, be all-knowing.
Or at least know how to Google.
It actually sounds like you've got electrical problems or something. My experience (in companies having hundreds of PC's) has shown that Windows desktops crash from time to time. It's not unexpected because it's a commodity OS. You reboot the servers every 30-60 days (usually there's a security patch which requires a reboot anyway).
We have one RHEL 3 machine that's gone offline twice in 5 years -- once when it did a controlled thermal shutdown (air conditioner failed) and another when a noob IT guy hot-plugged an external SCSI array (MSA 30) into the box (the drives are hot-pluggable but the enclosure is not). I've been running Red Hat in some form since 5.2 and the box that ran that only stopped once -- we turned it off when the suspended ceiling snapped and fell all around it. I had to vacuum it out.
Now I'm not saying that Debian is the most stable in the world -- it's an end-user, experimental OS that's very aggressive in trying out new features, similar to Fedora and I haven't used Debian in ages -- but the last time I had a bunch of machines failing, we found out it was arcing in the electrical panel. It took 3 electricians to find it and we were wondering why UPS's, fans, and machines kept dying.
I have 3 Fedora 8, 2 RHEL 5.4, and 3 RHEL 3 servers and they're really very boring to maintain. I got some excitement earlier this week when a power outage caused a (different) RHEL3 machine using software RAID to fail 2 arrays (1 drive with 4 partitions in different arrays had 2 of its partitions get out of sync due to the power loss and got automatically kicked from 2 of the arrays). I just added the partitions back to the arrays manually, it's a single command. The server and arrays were online the whole time so nobody noticed / cared.
Mod parent up.
Apple doesn't supply the low-end market. They don't compete in that area. If you want the cheapest machine without the extras you will not buy an Apple product, you will get [Dell/Presario/Gateway/Toshiba/Emachines] or whatever collection of cheaply made components [Staples/Office Depot/OfficeMax/name your online store here] has on sale this week. End of story.
To get a comparable machine (ie the same equipment), Apple's prices are well within $200 of the Wintel prices, and you don't need the Antivirus, firewall or other software which puts you ahead in the long run money- and performance-wise. $200 is a half-day of my salary and I need something that just works -- being cheap with my machine would be stupid for the company. Put another way, $200 covers only half a day of me out of commission. I am still working on my MBP 2.4 we got 2 years ago, and the only upgrade has been to go from 2GB to 4GB of memory ($50 through Crucial). I had one problem -- the battery -- and when it quit 14 months after purchase (turning my laptop into a desktop) Apple sent me a new one with a prepaid label to send them the old, no problems and no money out of my pocket. 2 days later it arrived.
The "Apple premium" story has been debunked so many times it's just ignorant to repeat it anymore, the components are very good. The other MIS laptops after 2 years have their plastic cases looking all beat to hell, the keyboard characters have worn off, and the trackpads have problems. Mine looks almost new, no scratches. Worth $200 more? You betcha.
Why is this marked flamebait? It seems like parent is trying to determine the issue GP experienced. Only way to solve it is if people can see what's causing the issue.
Depends on your distro. Ubuntu is fairly aggressive, so is Fedora. Try RHEL if you want supported, never-breaks-stuff results. Keep in mind you sacrifice cutting-edge for reliability (which in my world is king anyway). I've heard that SuSE also has fairly stable release cycles, but I've never tried it.
I used to carefully record every patch update on RHEL, but after 5 years with no need to revert to a previous version I've stopped. Fedora stuff gets upgraded with care, but so long as you don't blindly accept every update (and maybe I'm just lucky) I haven't had any problems.
Surely you're not comparing 8 individual servers with a single server with 8 cores?
And it's a Dell? Wow. Just wow.