+1 for PC-BSD. It's basically FreeBSD with a nice package system and more comprehensive installer. If you want FreeBSD on a desktop I highly recommend.
In my experience I have had less crashes in the past 15 years with FreeBSD than I have with Linux. I have had crashes with both. I haven't had significantly more blue screens with Windows either, and the ones I have had with windows have been caused by broken hardware or drivers.
Buy decent hardware with proper driver support and most current operating systems are stable. Problem is most people buy bottom dollar hardware.
SD card slot? Oh noes. How's that fingerprint reader on your Android phone working? How's your software support? Technical spec does not define a product's value, it's what you can do with it and how much of a head fuck it is to live with.
I'd say it was actually Nokia that killed Nokia. There was nothing that stopped Nokia from putting out an Android phone. And Nokia's software was horrible.
And power users complained that Apple stuff doesn't meet their needs - yes, that's true. But Apple doesn't cater to the power user niche - they cater to the common user whose needs are fairly simple.
This often comes up, but many of the power users I know (engineers, including network engineers, etc.) use Macs.
This statement is a fallacy propagated by those who haven't spent any significant time with OS X I suspect. OS X looks shiny on the surface, but is extremely powerful underneath if you care to spend a few days exploring it. It marries unix with a friendly UI and some pretty awesome, easy to use automation capabilities (Automator, Applescript). Yes, other platforms have automation tools as well, but they're nowhere near as quick and easy to make use of.
Selling a tablet was an innovation. If you recall when the iPad was first announced, many, many people thought it was pointless, it would never sell, there was no market (possibly because people had tried to sell tablets before and failed).
Apple were first to make a tablet experience that didn't suck.
More to the point, what has anyone else done? It's all well and good to bitch about apple failing to innovate, but other than Google Glass, there's basically nothing else out there from anyone else, either.
When people look at hardware specs and raw capabilities, they're completely missing the point of the Apple products. I think if I could sum up the difference in one word, that would be "polish".
Exactly. Hardware spec sheet does nothing for how the device feels in your hand, what the UI is like, etc. It's hard for people who haven't spent a lot of time with Apple hardware/software to understand as sometimes it takes a while to "get". But my experience since I switched to OS X for example in 2007 is that the more time I spend with the product the more little things I find that make me think "oh, that's cool" - things that let me short cut tasks or get things done more quickly (e.g., folder actions - how simple they are to create and use.),
As opposed to other platforms where the more time I spend with them the more annoyances I discover.
Those sort of things are hard to quantify - because each individual thing may seem so trivial and insignificant. But they all add up.
Since the departure of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc hasn't come up with any new stuff that make sense - all it got is iteration of the same-old-shit, iPad and iPhone, that's all
I think you underestimate the significance of ApplePay and the iWatch.
TouchID on the iPhone is the first fingerprint reader I've used that is actually more convenient than just typing the pin/password. The architecture of ApplePay looks to be secure. They look to have most of the big banks on board with it.
The iWatch, I think will be a hit. Because they've actually thought about the functionality of it (no cameras for example - you already have that on your smartphone), including making pretty fashionable versions of it (because that is part of why people wear a watch). Only nerds want to wear something like a Galaxy Gear S. Other people car about style.
I had a number of those smartphones before the iPhone. They were shit. Doing anything was an exercise in frustration. The browser was nowhere near desktop standard, for example.
The OP (being me) is misunderstood. I never said anything about moving offshore permanently, I was referring to the practice of taxing AU residents who work FIFO in another country, get paid (and taxed in that country) in non-AU dollars and then taxed again by Australia.
Australia also holds that view on personal income for Australian citizens on money earned abroad. I think the key with this proposal (vs. others which are just a pure money grab or in the Australian income tax case, double dipping) is the credit for taxes paid abroad. Presumably, if the company was already taxed at a higher rate, they would be refunded all the tax they paid to the USA. I think it's a good compromise - the company should have to pay taxes somewhere, and this will ensure that they do.
It has moved on in heaps of ways. Clients are far more powerful and capable of far more processing. 3d acceleration has become commodity. Compression, pixmap caching, etc. are now commonplace. Power consumption is a concern. Security is much more of a concern - bundling so much code into the X server, with the level of security access it has is a bad idea.
You just need to open your eyes and look at well... virtually any other GUI system from the last 10-15 years and see how most of them leave X11 for dead in terms of security, performance, etc.
The much vaunted "network transparency" of X11, the feature everyone whines that they will lose - is crap and done better by plenty of other software, from VNC to ICA to RDP...
The problem is that the core design of X11 was decided upon about 30 years ago and the computing landscape has moved on significantly. During the past 30 years, there have been thousands of hacks to add new functionality to existing code-paths which are no longer relevant to today's environment - but necessary to be "X11" compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 for PC-BSD. It's basically FreeBSD with a nice package system and more comprehensive installer. If you want FreeBSD on a desktop I highly recommend.
Horses for courses. How's your GPU support?
FreeBSD does have Wifi support, but last I used it ('11) it wasn't exactly intuitive.
In my experience I have had less crashes in the past 15 years with FreeBSD than I have with Linux. I have had crashes with both. I haven't had significantly more blue screens with Windows either, and the ones I have had with windows have been caused by broken hardware or drivers.
Buy decent hardware with proper driver support and most current operating systems are stable. Problem is most people buy bottom dollar hardware.
Welcome to the fold. I did this about 10 years ago for everything I could and haven't looked back.
You're saying that non-Unicode supporting applications are "perfectly working"? The vast majority of the population do not speak English.
If by "web browser" you mean something that had trouble rendering basic pages and was generally painful to use, sure.
SD card slot? Oh noes. How's that fingerprint reader on your Android phone working? How's your software support? Technical spec does not define a product's value, it's what you can do with it and how much of a head fuck it is to live with.
I'd say it was actually Nokia that killed Nokia. There was nothing that stopped Nokia from putting out an Android phone. And Nokia's software was horrible.
This often comes up, but many of the power users I know (engineers, including network engineers, etc.) use Macs.
This statement is a fallacy propagated by those who haven't spent any significant time with OS X I suspect. OS X looks shiny on the surface, but is extremely powerful underneath if you care to spend a few days exploring it. It marries unix with a friendly UI and some pretty awesome, easy to use automation capabilities (Automator, Applescript). Yes, other platforms have automation tools as well, but they're nowhere near as quick and easy to make use of.
Selling a tablet was an innovation. If you recall when the iPad was first announced, many, many people thought it was pointless, it would never sell, there was no market (possibly because people had tried to sell tablets before and failed).
Apple were first to make a tablet experience that didn't suck.
More to the point, what has anyone else done? It's all well and good to bitch about apple failing to innovate, but other than Google Glass, there's basically nothing else out there from anyone else, either.
Exactly. Hardware spec sheet does nothing for how the device feels in your hand, what the UI is like, etc. It's hard for people who haven't spent a lot of time with Apple hardware/software to understand as sometimes it takes a while to "get". But my experience since I switched to OS X for example in 2007 is that the more time I spend with the product the more little things I find that make me think "oh, that's cool" - things that let me short cut tasks or get things done more quickly (e.g., folder actions - how simple they are to create and use.),
As opposed to other platforms where the more time I spend with them the more annoyances I discover.
Those sort of things are hard to quantify - because each individual thing may seem so trivial and insignificant. But they all add up.
I think you underestimate the significance of ApplePay and the iWatch.
TouchID on the iPhone is the first fingerprint reader I've used that is actually more convenient than just typing the pin/password. The architecture of ApplePay looks to be secure. They look to have most of the big banks on board with it.
The iWatch, I think will be a hit. Because they've actually thought about the functionality of it (no cameras for example - you already have that on your smartphone), including making pretty fashionable versions of it (because that is part of why people wear a watch). Only nerds want to wear something like a Galaxy Gear S. Other people car about style.
I had a number of those smartphones before the iPhone. They were shit. Doing anything was an exercise in frustration. The browser was nowhere near desktop standard, for example.
The OP (being me) is misunderstood. I never said anything about moving offshore permanently, I was referring to the practice of taxing AU residents who work FIFO in another country, get paid (and taxed in that country) in non-AU dollars and then taxed again by Australia.
Such as FIFO workers who work offshore but are based in Australia. I never said anything about residency.
Or permanent FIFO work when you are living in Austraila and working for an Australian company offshore, but getting paid in non-AUD currency.
Australia also holds that view on personal income for Australian citizens on money earned abroad. I think the key with this proposal (vs. others which are just a pure money grab or in the Australian income tax case, double dipping) is the credit for taxes paid abroad. Presumably, if the company was already taxed at a higher rate, they would be refunded all the tax they paid to the USA. I think it's a good compromise - the company should have to pay taxes somewhere, and this will ensure that they do.
And buses don't generally run 24/7. What's your point?
cloud services
This isn't an iPad problem. This is an idiot parent problem.
Laying that complaint at the iPad is like whining that you can't carry 4 people on the motorcycle you just purchased...
It has moved on in heaps of ways. Clients are far more powerful and capable of far more processing. 3d acceleration has become commodity. Compression, pixmap caching, etc. are now commonplace. Power consumption is a concern. Security is much more of a concern - bundling so much code into the X server, with the level of security access it has is a bad idea.
You just need to open your eyes and look at well... virtually any other GUI system from the last 10-15 years and see how most of them leave X11 for dead in terms of security, performance, etc.
The much vaunted "network transparency" of X11, the feature everyone whines that they will lose - is crap and done better by plenty of other software, from VNC to ICA to RDP...
The problem is that the core design of X11 was decided upon about 30 years ago and the computing landscape has moved on significantly. During the past 30 years, there have been thousands of hacks to add new functionality to existing code-paths which are no longer relevant to today's environment - but necessary to be "X11" compatible.
It's XQuartz, which is open source that they contribute to.