The problems were document portability AND integration with other users. This is there MS cleans up and where OSS falls down completely.
Well, I think I know what you meant from reading the rest of your post, but this statement is pretty far off. If everyone were using StarOffice, there would be no problem of document portability or integration with other users. I think instead of "other users" you meant "other software." StarOffice users have no problem sharing documents with other StarOffice users.
And if that weren't bad enough, HTML happens to be the absolute worst way to make "Rich" web applications. HTML provides like 3 or 4 rudimentary "widgets" and that is it. Cross-browser Javascript is getting better (as long as you forget that Mac IE ever existed). HTML is not.
Indeed, it has been shown in many studies that computers can actually reduce the quality of education. It isn't just your opinion. The Computers == Good Education thing is a total myth created by people desparate for a solution to the problems in US schools.
Linux machines need a support staff. Windows machines can get by with phone support.
Ha! Spoken like someone who has never had to maintain computers with children beating on them (the computers). Who, exactly, do you think is going to make the "phone support" calls? Students? Teachers? Who are they goign to call? Teachers have enough to worry about and they rarely get paid enough to do what they do as it is. The reality is that properly supporting many Windows machines is a full time job.
afford computers for every student, something that makes a huge impact on their overall educations."
Really? I thought it had been shown over and over again that computers do not contribute to the overall quality of education for children. And in some cases, relying on comptuters can actually reduce the quality because the basics get ignored.
Seriously, what IS the value of having computers in schools besides computer literacy? Sure, kids should have *a* computer class. Maybe a few computer labs for research. But why one computer per student? What is the value? So kids can skip lunch and IM their friends in another room?
Remember, you have to get it into space in the first place. Then you have to land it on Mars. Mars has a little less gravity than Earth, but still... And even if it doesn't weight anything in space, it still has mass which must be accelerated to an appropriate speed to get to Mars in a reasonable amount of time. The more mass you have, the more energy (and bigger engines) you need to accelerate.
I used IM for a very brief period and got sick of everyone expecting an answer __right__ __now__. So I no longer use it. Ever.
I'm with ya, bro! I stopped hanging out in rooms with other people in them because they expected me to respond when they address me! The nerve!
EMAIL works. IM interrupts work.
Here is a clue for you. Try using the functionality of your IM program and set yourself to "Busy" if yo don't want to be interrupted. Or just don't run IM when you are doing something important. Sheesh.
I understand that a lot of our society today centers on instant gratification. And generally it is considered to be a Bad Thing(tm). But really, I don't htink that IM is representative of that trend. I am 30, and I use IM. It isn't about "instant gratification." It is about communicating casually with friends and family who happen to be online at the same time. Really, IM is no different than turning to the person in the same room and talking to them. Is THAT a form of "instant gratification?" Because if it is, people have been guilty of it since speech evolved.
What would be the point? By the time you developed all the commandline tools needed to make a CLI in Windows particularly useful (or installed Cygwin, or whatever it is called), you'd just have "unix." And not a very good one at that.
Could someone briefly explain exactly how this thing works? Reading through the website I get some idea of what it does, but how does it do it? Do you need to run a specific Linux distribution on your machines or what? Does it just store a bunch of disk images?
It is pretty annoying how, to this day, so many people get so excited about max theoretical bus speeds and confuse it for actual performance. The only time you will get anywhere near 3Gbps is during a transfer from the drive's cache. Otherwise, you are limited by the media rate and head seek time of the drive. These are the primary factors in real world performance. The bus speed is rarely a bottleneck for hard drives except in situations like SCSI where you would be putting many drives on a single bus. I bet this new Hitachi drive would perform nearly identically on a SATA 1.
There are certaintly ways to do this in many cases, but going the Mac route would probably be easier, and maybe even cheaper or at least as expensive if you take man hours into consideration. Plus you have a strong corporate label backing your Mac setup, which you don't necessarily have with Linux, and this is very important to people.
See, I never really got this last argument. Is Microsoft, for example, really "backing" their product? Doesn't the EULA pretty much free them from any and all responsibility? Don't they charge an arm and a leg for support? Certainly this argument works when you get into Big Iron mainframe environments where IBM is knocking at your door before you even know there is a problem. But with desktops, you're basically out to fend for yourself no matter what OS or hardware you use.
Otherwise, I think you are correct that the Mac route is easier if one is looking for an alternative to Microsoft.
The performance problems are not specific to MySQL. Darwin has poor I/O all around at least partially due to the microkernel design. The bottom line is that OS X is not a good choice for servers... unless, of course, you need to run Filemaker or InDesign or something like that.
At the same time, there isn't a whole lot of reason to run Linux at that point. Unless you mean running it as a server. Because lord knows that the OS X/Darwin disk I/O is horribly slow compared to Linux!
Give me a break. It's a fuckin' cookie, for chrissake. The FUD concerning cookies ended like 10 years ago. Get over it. If we were talking about locking certain browsers out of a site, that would be a different story. But you have made a conscious choice to disabled a ubiquitous technology which a site wants to use. I have no sympathy.
It isn't silly at all. They often need to set up the user session as soon as you start browsing so that they can show dynamic indications of your shopping cart status and whatnot... even if you haven't yet selected anything to purchase. If you want to cripple your browser in a silly attempt to protect your "privacy," that is up to you. But don't expect merchants to accomodate.
It isn't surprising at all considering how important cookies are to maintain user sessions. Shopping carts use sessions. Cookies are very useful. Many application simple will not work without them. I don't know why anyone would want to turn them off or even maintain a whitelist.
I'm pretty sure the actual percentage of adware/spyware infected users is well above 59%. The question is, do they notice it? Probably not. I would figure the percentage is closer to 90% for regular Windows internet users.
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Well, I think I know what you meant from reading the rest of your post, but this statement is pretty far off. If everyone were using StarOffice, there would be no problem of document portability or integration with other users. I think instead of "other users" you meant "other software." StarOffice users have no problem sharing documents with other StarOffice users.
-matthew
PLEASE don't point me to any of those ridiculous javascript widget libraries. They are an absolute joke. They are all slow and ugly.
-matthew
And if that weren't bad enough, HTML happens to be the absolute worst way to make "Rich" web applications. HTML provides like 3 or 4 rudimentary "widgets" and that is it. Cross-browser Javascript is getting better (as long as you forget that Mac IE ever existed). HTML is not.
-matthew
Indeed, it has been shown in many studies that computers can actually reduce the quality of education. It isn't just your opinion. The Computers == Good Education thing is a total myth created by people desparate for a solution to the problems in US schools.
-matthew
Ha! Spoken like someone who has never had to maintain computers with children beating on them (the computers). Who, exactly, do you think is going to make the "phone support" calls? Students? Teachers? Who are they goign to call? Teachers have enough to worry about and they rarely get paid enough to do what they do as it is. The reality is that properly supporting many Windows machines is a full time job.
-matthew
Really? I thought it had been shown over and over again that computers do not contribute to the overall quality of education for children. And in some cases, relying on comptuters can actually reduce the quality because the basics get ignored.
Seriously, what IS the value of having computers in schools besides computer literacy? Sure, kids should have *a* computer class. Maybe a few computer labs for research. But why one computer per student? What is the value? So kids can skip lunch and IM their friends in another room?
-matthew
Remember, you have to get it into space in the first place. Then you have to land it on Mars. Mars has a little less gravity than Earth, but still... And even if it doesn't weight anything in space, it still has mass which must be accelerated to an appropriate speed to get to Mars in a reasonable amount of time. The more mass you have, the more energy (and bigger engines) you need to accelerate.
-matthew
Multi thousand dollars? LIke the iMac, Mac Mini, and iBook? All under $1000.
-matthew
I'm with ya, bro! I stopped hanging out in rooms with other people in them because they expected me to respond when they address me! The nerve!
EMAIL works. IM interrupts work.
Here is a clue for you. Try using the functionality of your IM program and set yourself to "Busy" if yo don't want to be interrupted. Or just don't run IM when you are doing something important. Sheesh.
-matthew
I understand that a lot of our society today centers on instant gratification. And generally it is considered to be a Bad Thing(tm). But really, I don't htink that IM is representative of that trend. I am 30, and I use IM. It isn't about "instant gratification." It is about communicating casually with friends and family who happen to be online at the same time. Really, IM is no different than turning to the person in the same room and talking to them. Is THAT a form of "instant gratification?" Because if it is, people have been guilty of it since speech evolved.
-matthew
I suspect you are installing the wrong distributions.
What would be the point? By the time you developed all the commandline tools needed to make a CLI in Windows particularly useful (or installed Cygwin, or whatever it is called), you'd just have "unix." And not a very good one at that.
-matthew
Sure, but you could easily enabled networking and make the drives writable. That is really just two commands. (three if you want a default route).
-matthew
Could someone briefly explain exactly how this thing works? Reading through the website I get some idea of what it does, but how does it do it? Do you need to run a specific Linux distribution on your machines or what? Does it just store a bunch of disk images?
-matthew
For a single hard drive? Hardly.
It is pretty annoying how, to this day, so many people get so excited about max theoretical bus speeds and confuse it for actual performance. The only time you will get anywhere near 3Gbps is during a transfer from the drive's cache. Otherwise, you are limited by the media rate and head seek time of the drive. These are the primary factors in real world performance. The bus speed is rarely a bottleneck for hard drives except in situations like SCSI where you would be putting many drives on a single bus. I bet this new Hitachi drive would perform nearly identically on a SATA 1.
-matthew
See, I never really got this last argument. Is Microsoft, for example, really "backing" their product? Doesn't the EULA pretty much free them from any and all responsibility? Don't they charge an arm and a leg for support? Certainly this argument works when you get into Big Iron mainframe environments where IBM is knocking at your door before you even know there is a problem. But with desktops, you're basically out to fend for yourself no matter what OS or hardware you use.
Otherwise, I think you are correct that the Mac route is easier if one is looking for an alternative to Microsoft.
-matthew
The performance problems are not specific to MySQL. Darwin has poor I/O all around at least partially due to the microkernel design. The bottom line is that OS X is not a good choice for servers... unless, of course, you need to run Filemaker or InDesign or something like that.
-matthew
At the same time, there isn't a whole lot of reason to run Linux at that point. Unless you mean running it as a server. Because lord knows that the OS X/Darwin disk I/O is horribly slow compared to Linux!
-matthew
Give me a break. It's a fuckin' cookie, for chrissake. The FUD concerning cookies ended like 10 years ago. Get over it. If we were talking about locking certain browsers out of a site, that would be a different story. But you have made a conscious choice to disabled a ubiquitous technology which a site wants to use. I have no sympathy.
-matthew
It isn't silly at all. They often need to set up the user session as soon as you start browsing so that they can show dynamic indications of your shopping cart status and whatnot... even if you haven't yet selected anything to purchase. If you want to cripple your browser in a silly attempt to protect your "privacy," that is up to you. But don't expect merchants to accomodate.
-matthew
Why bother? Is there any good reason for not accepting a cookie?
It isn't surprising at all considering how important cookies are to maintain user sessions. Shopping carts use sessions. Cookies are very useful. Many application simple will not work without them. I don't know why anyone would want to turn them off or even maintain a whitelist.
-matthew
I'm pretty sure the actual percentage of adware/spyware infected users is well above 59%. The question is, do they notice it? Probably not. I would figure the percentage is closer to 90% for regular Windows internet users.
-matthew
Cookies are far too useful to turn off. And they are mostly harmless anyway.
-matthew