I think that one thing that people miss in the "Linux machines should be cheaper b/c Linux is free" arguments, is that Dell (presumably) already has well defined processes to manufacture machines w/ Windows on them. They may not have to pay for Linux, but they do need to develop manufacturing processes to get them on their machines (as well as all of the associated QA, legal, etc... infrastucture). Manufacturing lines of machines with entirely new operating systems is not as simple as you or me downloading an iso, burning it to CD and booting it. These things, to do efficiently and with high quality, do take some time / money / resources.
Over time, once the manufacturing processes mature and they have recouped the cost of development of said processes, at that point one would think that the marginal cost of buying the software should make a difference in the final cost to consumers. It just doesn't make sense to me that the time for buyers to see those savings is now.
I have re-discovered my old iPaq, and am finding it to be great! With MythTV + mencoder + TCPMP + 1GB CF I can take recorded TV with me to watch on the train (+ listen to Podcasts). I can read all of my Palm DOCs and Avantgo content. It still can sync Calendar fine w/ Outlook/Exchange. I upgraded to a high capacity Lithium Polymer battery for ~$20 on Ebay and get good battery life. I can put in PCMCIA sleeve, connect w/ WiFi and play MP3s off of the slimserver at home. With all the hoopla over PMPs etc... my 5 (?) year old PDA still has plenty of life in it and in many ways is more useful than many of the gadgets people are spending bundles on today.
I recently saw a presentation on nanoshells being used to identify and destroy breast cancer tumors. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen...
What's really funny is today we are finally retiring an NT4 SQL Server (we have been planning to do it for a while now, but finally have some time to do it). As I'm in the middle of backing up the data, I scan/. and see that NT4 is getting retired. I feel like a frickin' genius.
I was recently faced w/ this possibility when I found out that blastwave had ported GNOME 2.6 to Solaris. I actually prefer GNOME for various reasons, one thing in particular is that I like Evolution. I had previously ditched my Ultra 60 for a G3 tower running OSX.
So I wiped clean my Ultra, installed Solaris 9, installed GNOME 2.6. Unfortunately, GNOME on the sun box was DOG slow, and Evolution would crash as soon as I opened up a mail folder. Going back to the OSX machine (similar specs in terms of CPU speed and both have 512MB RAM, the Ultra has SCSI, G3 IDE) there was a quantam leap in speed and app stability.
Its too bad - the "last 5%" - app stability and performance was what kept me from migrating back.
I want to be clear that this isn't a slam at all on the great work that the blastwave folks have done - I am ever so grateful for their efforts.
If I want, I can burn my songs to a CD. And play them in my car. Or in my house. Or at work. Or in a portable CD player.
Thats good that you can do all the things you want to do. But there are other examples of legal fair use. Like playing your purchased music on a Linux or OS/2 machine. Or suppose you have 5 macs in your house, iTunes only lets you play them on three machines!
Ummm, why don't you just listen to the CD or rip it to some lossless (FLAC, e.g.) format - should not be much worse than the original AAC. Granted the disk-space usage for FLAC can be a problem, but if disk space and/or convenience is too big a problem and you are willing to take a hit on sound quality, re-rip to 192 kbs OGG/MP3/Whatever.
Not ideal for sure, but far from draconian. If that is the price to have the relatively wide content of iTMS available at $0.99 / song, it REALLY doesn't seem like that big of a deal. More importantly, if you STILL don't like the DRM terms, THEN VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS DON'T BUY ANY FREAKING MUSIC FROM THE ITUNES MUSIC STORE AND STOP WHINING.
You should try R. Free as in beer + speech, high level scripting, can link in compiled low level code (C, FORTRAN, maybe even Java), good graphics output, good matrix handling, lots of 3rd party extensions (most GPL'd). Not good for symbolic mathematics, though. Used heavily in the statistical community and actively developed by some very smart people.
I can, however, imagine that there are technological luminaries (Tim O'Reilly comes to mind initially) and / or prominent p2p developers that would fairly represent the user's perspective.
I have an iPaq w/ 802.11b and there is at least one PPC program (Pocket MVP) that can connect to an icecast / shoutcast server. So I just run an icecast server to my local net, plug my wifi enabled iPaq into the stereo and there you go.
Of course, you can't change songs from the player nor do you have a remote, but if you already have a wifi PDA, might as well use what's already there.
Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. Got them on my linux box, got them on W2k (via my Nvidia card). Never use them on either, because they're shit. They simply spread the problem over multiple desktops.
Really? If you have a bunch of windows / apps open, expose doesn't seem to scale well. I have used both, and I much prefer multiple desktops vs. expose. The difference is that you can organize things much better with multiple desktops. I have desktop 1 for web browser, desktop 2 for email, desktop 3 for work related xterms, desktop 4 for spreadsheets / wordprocessors, etc...
Benefit 1: I can drill down much faster to what I am looking for. Benefit 2: Much easier keyboard navigation to get the window I want Benefit 3: Apps like photoshop / gimp that really require their own desktop can have their own desktop without closing everything else down
The expose thing is certainly cool and handy when the # of windows is relatively small, but squinting at 10-15 (or more) thumbnailed windows does not seem to be ideal.
If you have a Pocket PC, you can get many of the project Gutenberg E-Texts in.lit (MS Reader) format from blackmask. I have found that the ipaq with MS Reader makes for an excellent E-Book reader (not to mention that you can listen to some nice background music at the same time).
... on Solaris. I managed to get KDE 3.0 working pretty well, but I must say that the current GNOME 2 desktop from Sun blows. The desktop feels slow in general, but in particular Nautilus is extremely sluggish and unstable. I generally prefer GNOME, so hopefully Sun got it right this time 'round.
I have a Samsung Palm phone, and all you need is to connect, then use the Top Gun SSH client (free!) to log in to your machine. Granted, using grafitti or the mini keyboard is a PITA, but could be great if you have a mini-keyboard. As it is, it is pretty useful.
The title of the article is "Pure Math, Pure Joy" and it's about MSRI. While it is a phenomenal place, it is no picnic for young mathematicians for sure and is often referred to as "misery", as in "yeah, I spent a year in misery (MSRI)".
Breathe on the glass sensor to get the outline of the last person's print. Will fool many systems if the previous print was authorized. (Read this in the economist a couple of weeks ago...)
A bit OT, but thought others might find this interesting. Please don't let the DMCA dogs loose on me.
Maybe even 6 months ago I would agree on most of these points, but using Mandrake, it seems like many of these issues are addressed.
1) The X font management sucks... Adding fonts under Mandrake is quite easy, and it takes some doing, but the fonts look fine (GNOME 2.2) to me. 2) DLL hell... urpmi solves most of this; I can't speak to whether or not it causes more bloat than OSX. I must say that on my wife's iMac (600 MhZ) OSX is certainly no speed demon, though. 3) Commercial software... Crossover covers the major one (Office). Can't speak from personal experience about how well it runs photoshop. Also, the latest OpenOffice is getting quite good. There are great scientific tools, and the UNIX philosophy is soooo much nicer than commercial software in some cases (XEmacs + Latex + DVIPS + gv + shell scripts). The one piece of commercial software that I use regularly (SAS) runs like a champ. This is getting better quickly. 4) Hardware Support... Given that there is so much more HW choice on x86 and that Linux does a pretty darned good job (and modern distros like Mandrake make it pretty easy) I would hardly call this a slam dunk for Apple... 5) Better Integration... OS X definitely kicks butt here 6) Appearance... Maybe I just have simpler needs, but after using OS X for a while, the eye candy eventually got a little bit boring. Linux (GNOME) provides me with a pleasant enough looking desktop that is ergonomic, easy enough to configure and allows me to work very efficiently.
I don't know if it is simply the anti-establishment coolness + BSD under-the-hood thing that OS X has going for it, but when Windows was "prettier" than linux, on/. it was all about CLIs, and xterms, etc... Pragmatically, I really just haven't found much in OS X that gives it a usability quantam leap. I think that some of the discussion about some extremely subtle UI elements ("proper" use of transparency, etc...) is a bit pedantic. It is eye candy. No doubt it looks cool / modern / snazzy whatever, but in my mind it is truly just eye candy.
A better question is "what exactly does antitrust mean while Bush is in office"
For damn sure I'm no Dubya fan, but look at the massive corporate consolidation (especially in media) that took place during the Clinton administration. I think the FTC and the Oval Office has been asleep at the wheel for some time now. The incredible concentration of power is not a recent phenomena and is very dangerous to the free market and our personal liberty, IMHO (Milton Friedman, anyone?).
I will certainly give you that Dubya's close ties with business (look at the people he has appointed) and his prediliction to put big businesses' priorities over all others is flat-out scary.
Winners MS - they get off the hook by giving up $750m which others have pointed out they can easily afford given their cash reserves. More guaranteed market share for IE. This isn't a penalty, its an investment for them. AOLTW - Given how the AOL division is a primary cause of the massive amount of AOLTW's debt, getting the $750m looks great on their balance sheet. If I'm not mistaken, dealing w/ AOLTW's debt was one of Dick Parson's most important charges when he took the helm.
Losers Mozilla et. al - Having a Gecko based AOL client would have given an instant boost to Mozilla's marketshare / mindshare which negatively effects... Web Standards - Anything that boosts IE and lessens Mozilla increases the likelihood of MS induced standards Consumers - Less competition (browsers, streaming media formats), more MS entrusted DRM
Jeesh - what exactly does antitrust even mean in today's business climate?
For those who use different desktopsthere is a great program called xbindkeys. Its a very simple program that allows one set of hotkeys for your favorite apps. IIRC there is a GUI program called xbindkeys-config or something similar which makes adding shortcuts a snap.
An el-cheapo (and less featureful) way to do this is to use a script that scp's bookmarks.html (possibly address books as well) from a central location to the local machine, starts up mozilla, then when mozilla exits scp's the recent version back to the central location. Since one set of bookmarks are really the only thing I want from roaming profiles I am happy as a clam.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that one thing that people miss in the "Linux machines should be cheaper b/c Linux is free" arguments, is that Dell (presumably) already has well defined processes to manufacture machines w/ Windows on them. They may not have to pay for Linux, but they do need to develop manufacturing processes to get them on their machines (as well as all of the associated QA, legal, etc... infrastucture). Manufacturing lines of machines with entirely new operating systems is not as simple as you or me downloading an iso, burning it to CD and booting it. These things, to do efficiently and with high quality, do take some time / money / resources.
Over time, once the manufacturing processes mature and they have recouped the cost of development of said processes, at that point one would think that the marginal cost of buying the software should make a difference in the final cost to consumers. It just doesn't make sense to me that the time for buyers to see those savings is now.
I have re-discovered my old iPaq, and am finding it to be great! With MythTV + mencoder + TCPMP + 1GB CF I can take recorded TV with me to watch on the train (+ listen to Podcasts). I can read all of my Palm DOCs and Avantgo content. It still can sync Calendar fine w/ Outlook/Exchange. I upgraded to a high capacity Lithium Polymer battery for ~$20 on Ebay and get good battery life. I can put in PCMCIA sleeve, connect w/ WiFi and play MP3s off of the slimserver at home. With all the hoopla over PMPs etc... my 5 (?) year old PDA still has plenty of life in it and in many ways is more useful than many of the gadgets people are spending bundles on today.
I recently saw a presentation on nanoshells being used to identify and destroy breast cancer tumors. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen...
What's really funny is today we are finally retiring an NT4 SQL Server (we have been planning to do it for a while now, but finally have some time to do it). As I'm in the middle of backing up the data, I scan /. and see that NT4 is getting retired. I feel like a frickin' genius.
I was recently faced w/ this possibility when I found out that blastwave had ported GNOME 2.6 to Solaris. I actually prefer GNOME for various reasons, one thing in particular is that I like Evolution. I had previously ditched my Ultra 60 for a G3 tower running OSX.
So I wiped clean my Ultra, installed Solaris 9, installed GNOME 2.6. Unfortunately, GNOME on the sun box was DOG slow, and Evolution would crash as soon as I opened up a mail folder. Going back to the OSX machine (similar specs in terms of CPU speed and both have 512MB RAM, the Ultra has SCSI, G3 IDE) there was a quantam leap in speed and app stability.
Its too bad - the "last 5%" - app stability and performance was what kept me from migrating back.
I want to be clear that this isn't a slam at all on the great work that the blastwave folks have done - I am ever so grateful for their efforts.
If I want, I can burn my songs to a CD. And play them in my car. Or in my house. Or at work. Or in a portable CD player.
Thats good that you can do all the things you want to do. But there are other examples of legal fair use. Like playing your purchased music on a Linux or OS/2 machine. Or suppose you have 5 macs in your house, iTunes only lets you play them on three machines!
Ummm, why don't you just listen to the CD or rip it to some lossless (FLAC, e.g.) format - should not be much worse than the original AAC. Granted the disk-space usage for FLAC can be a problem, but if disk space and/or convenience is too big a problem and you are willing to take a hit on sound quality, re-rip to 192 kbs OGG/MP3/Whatever.
Not ideal for sure, but far from draconian. If that is the price to have the relatively wide content of iTMS available at $0.99 / song, it REALLY doesn't seem like that big of a deal. More importantly, if you STILL don't like the DRM terms, THEN VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS DON'T BUY ANY FREAKING MUSIC FROM THE ITUNES MUSIC STORE AND STOP WHINING.
Not quite, but pretty close
My other peeve is that it is proprietary
You should try R. Free as in beer + speech, high level scripting, can link in compiled low level code (C, FORTRAN, maybe even Java), good graphics output, good matrix handling, lots of 3rd party extensions (most GPL'd). Not good for symbolic mathematics, though. Used heavily in the statistical community and actively developed by some very smart people.
I can, however, imagine that there are technological luminaries (Tim O'Reilly comes to mind initially) and / or prominent p2p developers that would fairly represent the user's perspective.
As long as its not ESR, its all good.
I have an iPaq w/ 802.11b and there is at least one PPC program (Pocket MVP) that can connect to an icecast / shoutcast server. So I just run an icecast server to my local net, plug my wifi enabled iPaq into the stereo and there you go.
Of course, you can't change songs from the player nor do you have a remote, but if you already have a wifi PDA, might as well use what's already there.
It's the dorky wanna-be-ganster geek from Office Space! Hide your dot-matrix printers!
Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. Got them on my linux box, got them on W2k (via my Nvidia card). Never use them on either, because they're shit. They simply spread the problem over multiple desktops.
Really? If you have a bunch of windows / apps open, expose doesn't seem to scale well. I have used both, and I much prefer multiple desktops vs. expose. The difference is that you can organize things much better with multiple desktops. I have desktop 1 for web browser, desktop 2 for email, desktop 3 for work related xterms, desktop 4 for spreadsheets / wordprocessors, etc...
Benefit 1: I can drill down much faster to what I am looking for.
Benefit 2: Much easier keyboard navigation to get the window I want
Benefit 3: Apps like photoshop / gimp that really require their own desktop can have their own desktop without closing everything else down
The expose thing is certainly cool and handy when the # of windows is relatively small, but squinting at 10-15 (or more) thumbnailed windows does not seem to be ideal.
...just to use all the remote (RPC and other) exploits?
If you have a Pocket PC, you can get many of the project Gutenberg E-Texts in .lit (MS Reader) format from blackmask. I have found that the ipaq with MS Reader makes for an excellent E-Book reader (not to mention that you can listen to some nice background music at the same time).
... on Solaris. I managed to get KDE 3.0 working pretty well, but I must say that the current GNOME 2 desktop from Sun blows. The desktop feels slow in general, but in particular Nautilus is extremely sluggish and unstable. I generally prefer GNOME, so hopefully Sun got it right this time 'round.
mandrake: urpmi --auto-select
I have a Samsung Palm phone, and all you need is to connect, then use the Top Gun SSH client (free!) to log in to your machine. Granted, using grafitti or the mini keyboard is a PITA, but could be great if you have a mini-keyboard. As it is, it is pretty useful.
The title of the article is "Pure Math, Pure Joy" and it's about MSRI. While it is a phenomenal place, it is no picnic for young mathematicians for sure and is often referred to as "misery", as in "yeah, I spent a year in misery (MSRI)".
Breathe on the glass sensor to get the outline of the last person's print. Will fool many systems if the previous print was authorized. (Read this in the economist a couple of weeks ago...)
A bit OT, but thought others might find this interesting. Please don't let the DMCA dogs loose on me.
Maybe even 6 months ago I would agree on most of these points, but using Mandrake, it seems like many of these issues are addressed.
/. it was all about CLIs, and xterms, etc... Pragmatically, I really just haven't found much in OS X that gives it a usability quantam leap. I think that some of the discussion about some extremely subtle UI elements ("proper" use of transparency, etc...) is a bit pedantic. It is eye candy. No doubt it looks cool / modern / snazzy whatever, but in my mind it is truly just eye candy.
1) The X font management sucks...
Adding fonts under Mandrake is quite easy, and it takes some doing, but the fonts look fine (GNOME 2.2) to me.
2) DLL hell...
urpmi solves most of this; I can't speak to whether or not it causes more bloat than OSX. I must say that on my wife's iMac (600 MhZ) OSX is certainly no speed demon, though.
3) Commercial software...
Crossover covers the major one (Office). Can't speak from personal experience about how well it runs photoshop. Also, the latest OpenOffice is getting quite good. There are great scientific tools, and the UNIX philosophy is soooo much nicer than commercial software in some cases (XEmacs + Latex + DVIPS + gv + shell scripts). The one piece of commercial software that I use regularly (SAS) runs like a champ. This is getting better quickly.
4) Hardware Support...
Given that there is so much more HW choice on x86 and that Linux does a pretty darned good job (and modern distros like Mandrake make it pretty easy) I would hardly call this a slam dunk for Apple...
5) Better Integration...
OS X definitely kicks butt here
6) Appearance...
Maybe I just have simpler needs, but after using OS X for a while, the eye candy eventually got a little bit boring. Linux (GNOME) provides me with a pleasant enough looking desktop that is ergonomic, easy enough to configure and allows me to work very efficiently.
I don't know if it is simply the anti-establishment coolness + BSD under-the-hood thing that OS X has going for it, but when Windows was "prettier" than linux, on
A better question is "what exactly does antitrust mean while Bush is in office"
For damn sure I'm no Dubya fan, but look at the massive corporate consolidation (especially in media) that took place during the Clinton administration. I think the FTC and the Oval Office has been asleep at the wheel for some time now. The incredible concentration of power is not a recent phenomena and is very dangerous to the free market and our personal liberty, IMHO (Milton Friedman, anyone?).
I will certainly give you that Dubya's close ties with business (look at the people he has appointed) and his prediliction to put big businesses' priorities over all others is flat-out scary.
Winners
MS - they get off the hook by giving up $750m which others have pointed out they can easily afford given their cash reserves. More guaranteed market share for IE. This isn't a penalty, its an investment for them.
AOLTW - Given how the AOL division is a primary cause of the massive amount of AOLTW's debt, getting the $750m looks great on their balance sheet. If I'm not mistaken, dealing w/ AOLTW's debt was one of Dick Parson's most important charges when he took the helm.
Losers
Mozilla et. al - Having a Gecko based AOL client would have given an instant boost to Mozilla's marketshare / mindshare which negatively effects...
Web Standards - Anything that boosts IE and lessens Mozilla increases the likelihood of MS induced standards
Consumers - Less competition (browsers, streaming media formats), more MS entrusted DRM
Jeesh - what exactly does antitrust even mean in today's business climate?
For those who use different desktopsthere is a great program called xbindkeys. Its a very simple program that allows one set of hotkeys for your favorite apps. IIRC there is a GUI program called xbindkeys-config or something similar which makes adding shortcuts a snap.
An el-cheapo (and less featureful) way to do this is to use a script that scp's bookmarks.html (possibly address books as well) from a central location to the local machine, starts up mozilla, then when mozilla exits scp's the recent version back to the central location. Since one set of bookmarks are really the only thing I want from roaming profiles I am happy as a clam.
there is an IE easter egg that calls Opera engineers weenies?