My wife's daily driver is a MacBook Pro. All the stuff she needs for home is readily available on OSX as easily as on Windows, e.g., Quicken; work is a non-issue because the products she supports are on iOS. Even if the vendors sometimes treat their OSX ports as second-class citizens, it's rare that any basic feature we care about is missing. It's just the latest bling that's usually not ported right away.
OTOH, I wouldn't be able to use a Mac for my job, because my employer requires us to use things including custom in-house apps, that are only available on Windows. Likewise some of the apps our kids use for school. The stuff I do at home beyond web surfing and such, I do on Linux.
Or, you can install the free (for noncommercial use) VMware Player, and in about an hour of googling and not-too-difficult hacking, plus the time to legally download the installation media, you can try out OSX on your existing Windows or Linux machine.
It won't let you know what a low-end Mac Mini feels like as a daily driver, and it's not what I'd recommend for an HTPC, but if you wanted to try cobbling together a small app to see what it's like to develop on OSX compared to Windows or Linux, it's about as low a barrier to entry there is.
Well, crap, now I have to post in order to undo a moderation mistake.:(
ObTopic: Sure we could have zillion-mpg cars. Instead of conventional creature comforts, you get new forms of in-car entertainment, like being able to tell what brand of coffee the body panels used to surround.
In the real world, the risk of unnecessarily perturbing working systems is often higher than the risk of those systems breaking on their own. (Think about the longevity of Netware 3.12.)
Not just kids. Some people have managed to go for decades as cowboys, hacking crap together that barely works but doing it fast enough and visibly enough and in the critical path often enough that they always look like heroes. The worst is when they start believing their own bullshit and stop acknowledging that any other way exists. See also: Asshole Driven Development.
Take a look at the prices of consumer goods from 50 years ago. Stuff was *expensive*. Example: A friend of mine showed me an ad from a discount store in 1960 advertising basic two-slice toasters for $8.88. That's a little over $70 in today's dollars. The day he showed me that, you could buy a basic two-slice toaster from Target for $7.99. That's a little under $8.00 in today's dollars.
The only things that really need to cost less are health care, housing and education, the costs of which have risen faster than the CPI for decades.
People talk about "gifted" kids as if they're simply a normal kid turned up to eleven. Our school system has a pretty good program for those kids (and they're also good at filtering out the normal kids who have whip-cracking tiger parents). Where they completely vapor-lock is when they're presented with a kid who's gifted in some areas, but normal or even below normal in others. My daughter is in the gifted class but also has an IEP. You'd think her teachers were trying to accommodate a silicon-based methane-breathing life form. It's not that they're not willing to try, it's that there's no pigeonhole already there, so they don't know what to do, and they have to make it up as they go along, all the while dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy.
It also matters why he's backing it up. If it's primarily for disaster recovery, you would use a different strategy from what you'd use to deal with accidental deletion. Snapshots a almost always sufficient for the latter.
Less traffic in the suburbs? In what country? In US suburbs, nobody can take public transportation anywhere, so the streets and highways are choked with single-occupancy cars. The transit infrastructure is all about getting from the inner suburbs to the city center. Suburb-to-suburb commuting by public transit means turning a 30-minute drive into a three hour trip downtown and back.
Back when the transit systems were designed, they never anticipated the commuting patterns we have today.
Also, reverse commuting isn't just for hipsters. Outer-ring suburbs are too expensive for low-wage workers.
I did that too, at the last startup I worked for. After months of 100-hour weeks, a 60-hour week *did* feel like a breeze. And that's how I knew how messed up I'd become and that it was time to get out. That was ten years ago. No more startups (or pretend startups) again, ever.
I work 40 hours a week unless *I* feel like putting in extra time on a particularly fun assignment, and I'm happily pissing away all those extra hours by having a life instead of killing myself to make other people richer.
We had to fight HARD to keep our critical servers from being moved to Atlanta. There's plenty of bandwidth, but the latency would kill us. But every time we need anything, it's like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.
No, this is what happens when you underTHINK the IT budget. HP and other services organizations want you to believe that all you have to do is write them a check, and all your IT troubles will magically disappear. Instead, what really happens is that all your problems are still there, with one more layer of bureaucratic delays and miscommunications thrown in. The company I work for outsourced their IT to HP, going so far as to sell a lot of their server infrastructure (the actual hardware) to HP, and it's been a disaster, only part of which is HP's fault.
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My wife's daily driver is a MacBook Pro. All the stuff she needs for home is readily available on OSX as easily as on Windows, e.g., Quicken; work is a non-issue because the products she supports are on iOS. Even if the vendors sometimes treat their OSX ports as second-class citizens, it's rare that any basic feature we care about is missing. It's just the latest bling that's usually not ported right away.
OTOH, I wouldn't be able to use a Mac for my job, because my employer requires us to use things including custom in-house apps, that are only available on Windows. Likewise some of the apps our kids use for school. The stuff I do at home beyond web surfing and such, I do on Linux.
Viva ecumenism!
Or, you can install the free (for noncommercial use) VMware Player, and in about an hour of googling and not-too-difficult hacking, plus the time to legally download the installation media, you can try out OSX on your existing Windows or Linux machine.
It won't let you know what a low-end Mac Mini feels like as a daily driver, and it's not what I'd recommend for an HTPC, but if you wanted to try cobbling together a small app to see what it's like to develop on OSX compared to Windows or Linux, it's about as low a barrier to entry there is.
One way to slow that bloat down is to put a limit on the number of test cases.
2nd world is (was) the Communist bloc.
I remember the same thing with Java--reqs demanding five years of Java three years after it first came out.
Well, crap, now I have to post in order to undo a moderation mistake. :(
ObTopic: Sure we could have zillion-mpg cars. Instead of conventional creature comforts, you get new forms of in-car entertainment, like being able to tell what brand of coffee the body panels used to surround.
Netvibes has been a nice drop-in replacement for me.
...mailman-announce is using it.
You're too late. We've been doing that since Carly Fiorina tanked Lucent and HP.
Unappealing, yes (I'm in the throes of it now), but good for job security.
Definitely. Add to that "Quality is Free" by Crosby, and "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister.
"3.0L, direct-injected 305bhp V-6, Mini-ATX form factor"
If it works, don't fix it.
In the real world, the risk of unnecessarily perturbing working systems is often higher than the risk of those systems breaking on their own. (Think about the longevity of Netware 3.12.)
Not just kids. Some people have managed to go for decades as cowboys, hacking crap together that barely works but doing it fast enough and visibly enough and in the critical path often enough that they always look like heroes. The worst is when they start believing their own bullshit and stop acknowledging that any other way exists. See also: Asshole Driven Development.
"We need things to cost less"
Take a look at the prices of consumer goods from 50 years ago. Stuff was *expensive*. Example: A friend of mine showed me an ad from a discount store in 1960 advertising basic two-slice toasters for $8.88. That's a little over $70 in today's dollars. The day he showed me that, you could buy a basic two-slice toaster from Target for $7.99. That's a little under $8.00 in today's dollars.
The only things that really need to cost less are health care, housing and education, the costs of which have risen faster than the CPI for decades.
People talk about "gifted" kids as if they're simply a normal kid turned up to eleven. Our school system has a pretty good program for those kids (and they're also good at filtering out the normal kids who have whip-cracking tiger parents). Where they completely vapor-lock is when they're presented with a kid who's gifted in some areas, but normal or even below normal in others. My daughter is in the gifted class but also has an IEP. You'd think her teachers were trying to accommodate a silicon-based methane-breathing life form. It's not that they're not willing to try, it's that there's no pigeonhole already there, so they don't know what to do, and they have to make it up as they go along, all the while dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy.
Or "bald" is a hair color, or "off" is a TV channel.
It also matters why he's backing it up. If it's primarily for disaster recovery, you would use a different strategy from what you'd use to deal with accidental deletion. Snapshots a almost always sufficient for the latter.
True story: At one place I worked, if you typed "quit" into nslookup, it came back with "exit.not.quit.stoopid.oursite.ourcompany.com".
You forgot all the steps it took to evolve the civets.
You're talking about "cost of time" to a bunch of Slackware users?
Less traffic in the suburbs? In what country? In US suburbs, nobody can take public transportation anywhere, so the streets and highways are choked with single-occupancy cars. The transit infrastructure is all about getting from the inner suburbs to the city center. Suburb-to-suburb commuting by public transit means turning a 30-minute drive into a three hour trip downtown and back.
Back when the transit systems were designed, they never anticipated the commuting patterns we have today.
Also, reverse commuting isn't just for hipsters. Outer-ring suburbs are too expensive for low-wage workers.
I did that too, at the last startup I worked for. After months of 100-hour weeks, a 60-hour week *did* feel like a breeze. And that's how I knew how messed up I'd become and that it was time to get out. That was ten years ago. No more startups (or pretend startups) again, ever.
I work 40 hours a week unless *I* feel like putting in extra time on a particularly fun assignment, and I'm happily pissing away all those extra hours by having a life instead of killing myself to make other people richer.
We had to fight HARD to keep our critical servers from being moved to Atlanta. There's plenty of bandwidth, but the latency would kill us. But every time we need anything, it's like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.
No, this is what happens when you underTHINK the IT budget. HP and other services organizations want you to believe that all you have to do is write them a check, and all your IT troubles will magically disappear. Instead, what really happens is that all your problems are still there, with one more layer of bureaucratic delays and miscommunications thrown in. The company I work for outsourced their IT to HP, going so far as to sell a lot of their server infrastructure (the actual hardware) to HP, and it's been a disaster, only part of which is HP's fault.