Not really, it's like saying we shouldn't light campfires because they are made of fire and so is the sun and being instantly transported to the sun would result in you burning up. See? Danger! And that's not even mentioning that you might get a splinter from the firewood or any of a thousand other things that could go wrong with your campfire...
Clearly you are not the kind of person who would ever do anything simply to see if you could (travel to Bouvet island is pretty easy, a lone adventurer who saves up for a few years could easily go there and stay there for a few months, travel to Mars or further out is a lot harder).
No, I stated that you deliberately ignoring my arguments and yelling "THEY'RE THE SAME! YUO R TEH FANBOY!" is indicative of you being either a troll or a fanboy.
While programs can be installed to the %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu directory it is not recommended. And generally Windows programs installed on a system do not use actual symlinks (although both Vista and Win7 support symlinks) but shortcut files which are different from actual symlinks.
And as I explained, the Applications stack that is found in the Dock on OS X by default (and which can be easily removed from the Dock) is not functionally equivalent to the Start Menu on Windows. The Applications stack is merely a quick way to access the/Applications directory where applications are installed, it has no other bells and whistles.
Your argument keeps boiling down to "Well, if you ignore all the differences they are exactly the same". You've also made repeated baseless accusations of me being an Apple fanboy. I smell a troll (or a MS fanboy).
The Start menu directory/directories is/are a collection of symlinks (sorry, "shortcuts"). These in turn point at various locations such as C:\Program Files (x86)\Software Development Inc\Application Name\bin\Application.exe
The/Applications directory on Mac OS X on the other hand contains the actual application bundles.
While they share some characteristics they are not "functionally equivalent". Your argument boils down to "they have some shared properties which means they are the same" while ignoring the differences (which there are plenty of).
I'm not saying either is better, I'm saying they're different and that calling what Apple refers to as a "stack" in the Dock a "Start menu" just because it points at the/Applications directory which is the default application install directory on OS X just shows you are trying really hard to ignore the differences...
How about this, the Start menu on Windows lets you access "everything", the Control Panel, My Documents, Programs, Shutting down your computer, Running programs not in the program listing, searching.
By comparison, the/Applications stack that by default is placed in a new user's Dock on OS X does exactly one thing, it lists all the files in the directory/Applications, there is nothing "magic" about this particular stack, you can drag other directories to the Dock as well (as I have pointed out) and they will behave the exact same way.
Yes, it's a directory. Or rather, it is several directories that are treated in a special way by Windows. Mac OS X also treats/Applications a bit differently from other directories.
Also, as stated with Windows it is "a button on a bar at the bottom of the screen" (by default, the bar can be moved to other screen edges). On OS X the "stack" for/Applications can be dragged off the Dock and other directories can be added (and will then behave exactly like the/Applications stack, can you do that on Windows? Can you grab C:\MyTempDir\SomeOtherDir in explorer.exe and drag it to the taskbar and immediately have a second button named "SomeOtherDir" appear there which behaves exactly like the one labeled "Start" (or just labeled with a flag depending on your UI settings)?).
The "Start menu" is a GUI element on MS Windows. Your arguments remind me of how people here in Sweden who only used Windows started calling PPP and SLIP connections "fjärranslutningar" in general because the Swedish translation of Windows 95 had them labeled as such even though pretty much no one used that word to describe them previously. Just because MS uses a term doesn't mean it becomes an established industry standard...
Your reasoning is similar to arguing that all cars have jet engines because they have combustion engines and the purpose of the combustion engine in the car is to make it possible for the car to move forward in the same way that the jet engine of an airplane is there to make it possible for the plane to move forward.
The "Start menu" is very much a MS Windows thing, other systems have similar menus with other names but they are not "The Start menu". Also, OS X doesn't really have such a menu. It has the Dock and by default it also has the Applications directory accessible on the Dock (although this can be removed in which case you'll need to use other methods for accessing all.app bundles in your/Applications directory). And you do know you can drag and drop any directory onto the Dock to access that directory in the same way, right?
Next you'll call the Apple menu a "Start menu" as well...
Just who worships Al Gore? This must be some obscure subculture or something because I don't really know anyone who thinks very highly of Gore (they may not dislike him, they may even have some basic respect for things he's done but they don't put him on a pedestal).
Or maybe it's like the Michael Moore thing, where lots of right-wing idiots (and trolls) thought everyone left of Mussolini worshiped Moore even though the reality of it was that we were slightly impressed by his documentaries but still had some issues with the movies as well as with Moore himself.
One possibility here is of course that the original poster knows that the field is quite large and isn't interested in studying it intensely for several years. In that case it can be good to ask those who already have studied the field for pointers to figure out just which things are most essential to learn about, which books are likely to be most useful and such things. Basically, the original poster may just be trying to avoid wasting his/her time studying more or less irrelevant parts of the field (anyone who has ever gone through a few college courses in a technical field should know what I'm talking about here, there are plenty of textbooks out there that imply pretty heavily that specific peripheral details are somehow core concepts when in reality you could spend a day or two on them and learn all you'll reasonably need to know about them, I myself have a book somewhere in storage which confused me to no end when I was in high school, it went on for page after page after page about linked lists like they were the only thing that mattered to computer science when it could've just explained the concept, what they were good for and then moved on).
Speaking of not answering commands properly, one of the reasons I switched from using my hardware RAID controller in my home server as an actual RAID controller to just having it pretend to be a bunch of SATA ports was actually one disk which managed to confuse the controller to the point where it would freeze up on its own or get the kernel to hang (FreeBSD btw).
That one disk worked fine for about a year and a half, then it started to show write errors, but only when it was more than 80% or so full. And the big problem was that from what I could tell (it's been a couple of years now so my memory is a bit hazy) it didn't just tell the controller that something went wrong, it just stopped responding for a while. And what happens when it keeps doing this to the point where writes are impossible? Yup, controller eventually freaks out...
These days I just use ZFS with RAIDZ, it may be "experimental" but it sure has been more stable than hardware RAID.
That's not entirely true. There are definitely those out there who will hold past experience against you.
If you don't believe this you should try the following experiment: Major in CS, work tech support at a call center during your last year, realize that the job market sucks and continue working tech support while looking for a "real job". After you've spent a year getting rejected for lack of experience you are very likely to instead get rejected because you aren't "quite right" for the job (or if they're a bit more honest they'll tell you outright that they're looking for developers, not tech support monkeys. And yes, I've been on the receiving end of that one a few times).
An interesting twist here is that employers seem to be unable to understand that there is no career path at most call centers, if you start out in 1st line tech support you'll be lucky to be able to move to 2nd line within three or four years (2nd line tends to be quite cushy compared to 1st line), team lead positions are mostly assigned to 2nd line techs based on seniority (at least from my experience and from what I've heard from others working at other call centers) and only become available when a new team is created or an old team lead moves to a new job. In short, you're likely to be stuck in 1st line tech support telling people to power cycle their DSL modems until you quit or get laid off/fired, regardless of what you are actually capable of. But in the eyes of some guy hiring developers it looks suspicious that the applicant he's got in front of him worked at a call center for almost two years and never moved out of 1st line tech support.
Oh btw, I haven't actually done tech support for a few years now, these days I'm a developer, but the mental scarring lasts a lifetime...
Proportions are very important when it comes to design. Ever hear of the golden ratio?
A great way to make something you've designed look ugly is to tweak the proportions, or if you have something that looks a bit too formal or strict you can "fix" it by breaking symmetry (since humans tend to associate symmetry with order, this is why most "boring" corporate logos are symmetrical while those that try to project a "fun" or "edgy" image of the company go for less symmetry).
And as I stated, any first-year design student (industrial, web, whatever) would know this very well. That major furniture manufacturers would be oblivious to it is highly unlikely.
Maybe more people would appreciate furniture built from good materials if those manufacturing furniture didn't think a rectangular TV stand made from wood and with proportions a first-year design student knows by heart was somehow worth $500+ just because it wasn't ugly as hell (I've become increasingly convinced that furniture manufacturers deliberately make their cheaper pieces of furniture ugly in various ways to ensure sales of their more expensive furniture remain high).
Of course, even IKEA seems to be doing this. Their cheaper furniture often looks like they took a decent design and "tweaked" it to have weird proportions and added some random design elements that would ugly it up a bit...
NASA tries to explain the situation and happens to mention some random fact which goes against your "MY HUMMER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING BAD EVER!" dogma and you immediately go into spin-mode.
I disagree, there has always been competition for first place, the issue these days (compared to say, the 1960s) is that jobs are a lot scarcer. You can't just graduate high school and go straight into a career, you can't just quit that job three weeks later and find a new one the same week with relatively little effort. You can't work "hard enough".
Yes, in a way I'm obviously wearing rose-tinted glasses but just listening to people from my parents' generation about what the job market used to look like and single-income households it just seems like things have gotten worse. These days a couple of 20-somethings who entered the job market less than two years ago can't reasonably afford their own house, my parents' generation could. These days you can't raise a family on a single average white-collar income, my parents' generation could. These days you can't expect to get a job straight out of school (college or high school) and you should be prepared to apply for at least a dozen jobs before getting to your first interview, my parents' generation could graduate and be gainfully employed by the end of the week with little effort (in fact, the country I live in actually had to resort to large-scale immigration to deal with the labor shortage that existed at the time).
You're missing the point. What I meant was that when compared to say, my parents' generation, my generation clearly has to compete on a different level. When I was out of work straight after college my father was baffled by this, when he was that age jobs could be had by just going to a company you thought looked fun to work for and asking them for a job. And in the workplace these days the level of performance expected by each employee is higher (at least in a lot of white-collar jobs). Basically our (western) society has become a lot more competitive and for the average person I just don't think the everyday gains outweigh the cost.
Now yes, if you go back to the 19th century and the wave of industrialization that swept through the world things were worse, the point is that we took a few steps forward and then we started taking steps backwards again.
Well, I think the housing situation here in Sweden would improve a lot if the rules were a bit more relaxed. These days even if you do all the work you can yourself, call in favors from friends and all that you're still unlikely to get away with building a small single-household home for less than SEK 1,500,000.
Hell, brand new studio apartments regularly cost SEK 5,500+ to rent (even though they're in less attractive neighborhoods).
I would love to be able to build my own house but with the prices these days I couldn't afford to build a small summer cottage, much less a house (and this is in Norrland, not Stockholm).
Competition isn't inherently bad, but competition can be pointless and even a lot less useful than competition.
In general competition can be fun, it can be a challenge. But, in today's world we're expected to always compete whether we want to or not, all day every day you're expected to constantly try to be better than the other guy (or girl). We're living in a world where "Good enough" for many people means you're first on the chopping block when the next round of layoffs starts. Where "Good enough" just isn't good enough...
That site is all about "proving" how awesome Star Wars is. However, look at the numbers used to SW tech, it looks an awful lot like George Lucas smoked some crack and pulled a bunch of numbers out of his ass...
And why is that? Well, because Star Wars is fantasy/space opera. I'm not saying Star Trek is anywhere near perfect when it comes to tech specs and such but compared to the Star Wars world it appears someone at least put in some token effort.
You seem to be deliberately misinterpreting me. Enabling screen sharing should be all that's necessary to allow multiple remote GUI sessions at once, it does not require using ssh, my example was merely to point out that yes, of course OS X is a multi-user system, that is painfully obvious to anyone who isn't trying really hard to be obtuse.
No, it is, according to the operating system manufacturer an included feature. So not an "if". And enabling screen sharing under OS X is far from hard to do.
I merely stated that I have not myself tried having multiple users with GUI sessions logged in at the same time. That OS X supports multiple logged in users is obvious to anyone who spends more than five seconds looking into the matter (just try "ssh username1@osxmachine" and then "ssh username2@osxmachine", works just as well as it does for any other *nix).
Well, for someone trading in both Europe and the US it would probably make sense to have the lowest possible latency between their own systems to coordinate trading.
Now, if this would be worth $100M I don't know. But it does kind of make sense if you want your different systems to communicate with each other.
Sadly that's not my experience. I've seen way too many big name OEM boxes that were shoddy to say the least. Often the big problem is that they don't really put much effort into integration (cheapest possible parts combined with whatever driver was available and a bunch of 3rd party software trials on top of that). Then you have driver updates, I've seen a few too many "workstation"/"portable workstation" machines that stopped receiving updates from the manufacturer just a few months after the introduction of the model.
In my experience Apple takes a lot more care when it comes to these matters (Trolls, please note: I'm not saying they're perfect, just that they put more effort into it than Dell et al).
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It sounds stupid, but it's directly comparable.
Not really, it's like saying we shouldn't light campfires because they are made of fire and so is the sun and being instantly transported to the sun would result in you burning up. See? Danger! And that's not even mentioning that you might get a splinter from the firewood or any of a thousand other things that could go wrong with your campfire...
Clearly you are not the kind of person who would ever do anything simply to see if you could (travel to Bouvet island is pretty easy, a lone adventurer who saves up for a few years could easily go there and stay there for a few months, travel to Mars or further out is a lot harder).
No, I stated that you deliberately ignoring my arguments and yelling "THEY'RE THE SAME! YUO R TEH FANBOY!" is indicative of you being either a troll or a fanboy.
While programs can be installed to the %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu directory it is not recommended. And generally Windows programs installed on a system do not use actual symlinks (although both Vista and Win7 support symlinks) but shortcut files which are different from actual symlinks.
And as I explained, the Applications stack that is found in the Dock on OS X by default (and which can be easily removed from the Dock) is not functionally equivalent to the Start Menu on Windows. The Applications stack is merely a quick way to access the /Applications directory where applications are installed, it has no other bells and whistles.
Your argument keeps boiling down to "Well, if you ignore all the differences they are exactly the same". You've also made repeated baseless accusations of me being an Apple fanboy. I smell a troll (or a MS fanboy).
The Start menu directory/directories is/are a collection of symlinks (sorry, "shortcuts"). These in turn point at various locations such as C:\Program Files (x86)\Software Development Inc\Application Name\bin\Application.exe
The /Applications directory on Mac OS X on the other hand contains the actual application bundles.
While they share some characteristics they are not "functionally equivalent". Your argument boils down to "they have some shared properties which means they are the same" while ignoring the differences (which there are plenty of).
I'm not saying either is better, I'm saying they're different and that calling what Apple refers to as a "stack" in the Dock a "Start menu" just because it points at the /Applications directory which is the default application install directory on OS X just shows you are trying really hard to ignore the differences...
How about this, the Start menu on Windows lets you access "everything", the Control Panel, My Documents, Programs, Shutting down your computer, Running programs not in the program listing, searching.
By comparison, the /Applications stack that by default is placed in a new user's Dock on OS X does exactly one thing, it lists all the files in the directory /Applications, there is nothing "magic" about this particular stack, you can drag other directories to the Dock as well (as I have pointed out) and they will behave the exact same way.
Yes, it's a directory. Or rather, it is several directories that are treated in a special way by Windows. Mac OS X also treats /Applications a bit differently from other directories.
Also, as stated with Windows it is "a button on a bar at the bottom of the screen" (by default, the bar can be moved to other screen edges). On OS X the "stack" for /Applications can be dragged off the Dock and other directories can be added (and will then behave exactly like the /Applications stack, can you do that on Windows? Can you grab C:\MyTempDir\SomeOtherDir in explorer.exe and drag it to the taskbar and immediately have a second button named "SomeOtherDir" appear there which behaves exactly like the one labeled "Start" (or just labeled with a flag depending on your UI settings)?).
The "Start menu" is a GUI element on MS Windows. Your arguments remind me of how people here in Sweden who only used Windows started calling PPP and SLIP connections "fjärranslutningar" in general because the Swedish translation of Windows 95 had them labeled as such even though pretty much no one used that word to describe them previously. Just because MS uses a term doesn't mean it becomes an established industry standard...
You're wrong.
Your reasoning is similar to arguing that all cars have jet engines because they have combustion engines and the purpose of the combustion engine in the car is to make it possible for the car to move forward in the same way that the jet engine of an airplane is there to make it possible for the plane to move forward.
The "Start menu" is very much a MS Windows thing, other systems have similar menus with other names but they are not "The Start menu". Also, OS X doesn't really have such a menu. It has the Dock and by default it also has the Applications directory accessible on the Dock (although this can be removed in which case you'll need to use other methods for accessing all .app bundles in your /Applications directory). And you do know you can drag and drop any directory onto the Dock to access that directory in the same way, right?
Next you'll call the Apple menu a "Start menu" as well...
Just who worships Al Gore? This must be some obscure subculture or something because I don't really know anyone who thinks very highly of Gore (they may not dislike him, they may even have some basic respect for things he's done but they don't put him on a pedestal).
Or maybe it's like the Michael Moore thing, where lots of right-wing idiots (and trolls) thought everyone left of Mussolini worshiped Moore even though the reality of it was that we were slightly impressed by his documentaries but still had some issues with the movies as well as with Moore himself.
One possibility here is of course that the original poster knows that the field is quite large and isn't interested in studying it intensely for several years. In that case it can be good to ask those who already have studied the field for pointers to figure out just which things are most essential to learn about, which books are likely to be most useful and such things. Basically, the original poster may just be trying to avoid wasting his/her time studying more or less irrelevant parts of the field (anyone who has ever gone through a few college courses in a technical field should know what I'm talking about here, there are plenty of textbooks out there that imply pretty heavily that specific peripheral details are somehow core concepts when in reality you could spend a day or two on them and learn all you'll reasonably need to know about them, I myself have a book somewhere in storage which confused me to no end when I was in high school, it went on for page after page after page about linked lists like they were the only thing that mattered to computer science when it could've just explained the concept, what they were good for and then moved on).
Speaking of not answering commands properly, one of the reasons I switched from using my hardware RAID controller in my home server as an actual RAID controller to just having it pretend to be a bunch of SATA ports was actually one disk which managed to confuse the controller to the point where it would freeze up on its own or get the kernel to hang (FreeBSD btw).
That one disk worked fine for about a year and a half, then it started to show write errors, but only when it was more than 80% or so full. And the big problem was that from what I could tell (it's been a couple of years now so my memory is a bit hazy) it didn't just tell the controller that something went wrong, it just stopped responding for a while. And what happens when it keeps doing this to the point where writes are impossible? Yup, controller eventually freaks out...
These days I just use ZFS with RAIDZ, it may be "experimental" but it sure has been more stable than hardware RAID.
That's not entirely true. There are definitely those out there who will hold past experience against you.
If you don't believe this you should try the following experiment: Major in CS, work tech support at a call center during your last year, realize that the job market sucks and continue working tech support while looking for a "real job". After you've spent a year getting rejected for lack of experience you are very likely to instead get rejected because you aren't "quite right" for the job (or if they're a bit more honest they'll tell you outright that they're looking for developers, not tech support monkeys. And yes, I've been on the receiving end of that one a few times).
An interesting twist here is that employers seem to be unable to understand that there is no career path at most call centers, if you start out in 1st line tech support you'll be lucky to be able to move to 2nd line within three or four years (2nd line tends to be quite cushy compared to 1st line), team lead positions are mostly assigned to 2nd line techs based on seniority (at least from my experience and from what I've heard from others working at other call centers) and only become available when a new team is created or an old team lead moves to a new job. In short, you're likely to be stuck in 1st line tech support telling people to power cycle their DSL modems until you quit or get laid off/fired, regardless of what you are actually capable of. But in the eyes of some guy hiring developers it looks suspicious that the applicant he's got in front of him worked at a call center for almost two years and never moved out of 1st line tech support.
Oh btw, I haven't actually done tech support for a few years now, these days I'm a developer, but the mental scarring lasts a lifetime...
Proportions are very important when it comes to design. Ever hear of the golden ratio?
A great way to make something you've designed look ugly is to tweak the proportions, or if you have something that looks a bit too formal or strict you can "fix" it by breaking symmetry (since humans tend to associate symmetry with order, this is why most "boring" corporate logos are symmetrical while those that try to project a "fun" or "edgy" image of the company go for less symmetry).
And as I stated, any first-year design student (industrial, web, whatever) would know this very well. That major furniture manufacturers would be oblivious to it is highly unlikely.
Maybe more people would appreciate furniture built from good materials if those manufacturing furniture didn't think a rectangular TV stand made from wood and with proportions a first-year design student knows by heart was somehow worth $500+ just because it wasn't ugly as hell (I've become increasingly convinced that furniture manufacturers deliberately make their cheaper pieces of furniture ugly in various ways to ensure sales of their more expensive furniture remain high).
Of course, even IKEA seems to be doing this. Their cheaper furniture often looks like they took a decent design and "tweaked" it to have weird proportions and added some random design elements that would ugly it up a bit...
Right, it's NASA spinning this.
NASA tries to explain the situation and happens to mention some random fact which goes against your "MY HUMMER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING BAD EVER!" dogma and you immediately go into spin-mode.
Or maybe you're just trolling...
I disagree, there has always been competition for first place, the issue these days (compared to say, the 1960s) is that jobs are a lot scarcer. You can't just graduate high school and go straight into a career, you can't just quit that job three weeks later and find a new one the same week with relatively little effort. You can't work "hard enough".
Yes, in a way I'm obviously wearing rose-tinted glasses but just listening to people from my parents' generation about what the job market used to look like and single-income households it just seems like things have gotten worse. These days a couple of 20-somethings who entered the job market less than two years ago can't reasonably afford their own house, my parents' generation could. These days you can't raise a family on a single average white-collar income, my parents' generation could. These days you can't expect to get a job straight out of school (college or high school) and you should be prepared to apply for at least a dozen jobs before getting to your first interview, my parents' generation could graduate and be gainfully employed by the end of the week with little effort (in fact, the country I live in actually had to resort to large-scale immigration to deal with the labor shortage that existed at the time).
You're missing the point. What I meant was that when compared to say, my parents' generation, my generation clearly has to compete on a different level. When I was out of work straight after college my father was baffled by this, when he was that age jobs could be had by just going to a company you thought looked fun to work for and asking them for a job. And in the workplace these days the level of performance expected by each employee is higher (at least in a lot of white-collar jobs). Basically our (western) society has become a lot more competitive and for the average person I just don't think the everyday gains outweigh the cost.
Now yes, if you go back to the 19th century and the wave of industrialization that swept through the world things were worse, the point is that we took a few steps forward and then we started taking steps backwards again.
Well, I think the housing situation here in Sweden would improve a lot if the rules were a bit more relaxed. These days even if you do all the work you can yourself, call in favors from friends and all that you're still unlikely to get away with building a small single-household home for less than SEK 1,500,000.
Hell, brand new studio apartments regularly cost SEK 5,500+ to rent (even though they're in less attractive neighborhoods).
I would love to be able to build my own house but with the prices these days I couldn't afford to build a small summer cottage, much less a house (and this is in Norrland, not Stockholm).
"...even a lot less useful than cooperation."
What is wrong with competition?
Competition isn't inherently bad, but competition can be pointless and even a lot less useful than competition.
In general competition can be fun, it can be a challenge. But, in today's world we're expected to always compete whether we want to or not, all day every day you're expected to constantly try to be better than the other guy (or girl). We're living in a world where "Good enough" for many people means you're first on the chopping block when the next round of layoffs starts. Where "Good enough" just isn't good enough...
That site is all about "proving" how awesome Star Wars is. However, look at the numbers used to SW tech, it looks an awful lot like George Lucas smoked some crack and pulled a bunch of numbers out of his ass...
And why is that? Well, because Star Wars is fantasy/space opera. I'm not saying Star Trek is anywhere near perfect when it comes to tech specs and such but compared to the Star Wars world it appears someone at least put in some token effort.
So they have no personal hygiene, listen to rastabilly skank and are their own parents?
You seem to be deliberately misinterpreting me. Enabling screen sharing should be all that's necessary to allow multiple remote GUI sessions at once, it does not require using ssh, my example was merely to point out that yes, of course OS X is a multi-user system, that is painfully obvious to anyone who isn't trying really hard to be obtuse.
No, it is, according to the operating system manufacturer an included feature. So not an "if". And enabling screen sharing under OS X is far from hard to do.
I merely stated that I have not myself tried having multiple users with GUI sessions logged in at the same time. That OS X supports multiple logged in users is obvious to anyone who spends more than five seconds looking into the matter (just try "ssh username1@osxmachine" and then "ssh username2@osxmachine", works just as well as it does for any other *nix).
Well, for someone trading in both Europe and the US it would probably make sense to have the lowest possible latency between their own systems to coordinate trading.
Now, if this would be worth $100M I don't know. But it does kind of make sense if you want your different systems to communicate with each other.
I've never tried having multiple GUI sessions on OS X myself but to my knowledge (and according to apple.com) it is possible (at least with 10.7).
Sadly that's not my experience. I've seen way too many big name OEM boxes that were shoddy to say the least. Often the big problem is that they don't really put much effort into integration (cheapest possible parts combined with whatever driver was available and a bunch of 3rd party software trials on top of that). Then you have driver updates, I've seen a few too many "workstation"/"portable workstation" machines that stopped receiving updates from the manufacturer just a few months after the introduction of the model.
In my experience Apple takes a lot more care when it comes to these matters (Trolls, please note: I'm not saying they're perfect, just that they put more effort into it than Dell et al).