My Mom's windows installation has been broken for over 3 years (but not so badly that the PC is unusable). She doesn't lack the expertise to reinstall the OS; rather, she lacks the expertise to (1) systematically back up all of her documents; (2) reinstall the OS; (3) then reinstall all of the apps into the new Registry; then (4) reinstall all of her documents into the new folders.
In any OS other than Windows, only (2) is necessary.
Speaking as someone who does own a Mac, and who has paid for Ambrosia products:
How much they charge for their products is their business. While you are well within your rights to tell them what you think of their prices, actually stealing their software (or encouraging others to do so) because you don't like the price is crossing the line.
Your argument about bargain bin software is specious. Why do bargain bins exist? Because stores want to clear out old inventory to make room for new products. Where does the money come from to sell a bargain bin product for $10? From the profits they made when they used to charge $50 for it. Ambrosia has no warehouse full of unwanted software, and they never charged anyone $50 when it was new and shiny.
If you want to claim that nobody's going to pay $25 for a 2-D sprite-based scroller when they could now buy a polygon-filled FPS like Tribes, fine. Go play tribes. Don't steal EV:O. Those of us who can look beyond the flashiness of the graphics and enjoy a well-designed game of any age for what it is will not miss you at all.
"Are there some other advantages of Linux/PPC that I'm missing?"
Yes. Linux is Free software. Free as in, "Give me liberty or give me death." Free as in, this is ours and nobody can ever take it away. Mac OS X is not. Darwin is not.
"A good use for these [ancient] machines is to recycle them and one way to recycle is to create a bigger faster machine with them."
Not if your primary concern is getting the most FLOPS/$. Given that a brand-new $1000 computer will be something like 10 times as fast as your old ones, at the same power consumption, it doesn't take very long before your new computer pays for itself with the money you save in electricity not running 9 additional machines.
Consider:
150 Watts (low for a PC, probably average for a Mac) x $0.10/KWH x 24 Hr/day x 30 day/mo. x 10 machines = $108 per month. Your $1000 new machine will pay for itself in less than a year, from electrical savings alone.
Of course, this assumes dedicated compute servers running all the time. If you run the cluster software as a backgound task on desktop machines with many users, it's a different story.
"the guy who purjured himself, obstructed justice, and disgraced the Presidency"
If you don't mind my saying so (even if you do, for that matter), it seems to me that with the possible exception of Carter, this describes every U.S. President in the past 40 years.
Some people leave out the accents, but I suspect they do that because they can't figure out how to enter them on a keyboard that doesn't have the appropriate characters on it already.
It is true that I do not know a generic method for producing accented characters on a Linux desktop. If someone will fill me in, I'll gladly use them.:-)
However, I would argue that it is acceptable (even correct) to omit accents from words that have been assimilated into a language that does not use accents (such as English), when used in the form of a word of that language.
That is to say, when commonly used in English, the correct spelling of piñata, über and résumé is "pinata", "uber" and "resume", respectively.
"if it wasn't for the movie and record industry you'd have very little to play on them"
Perhaps you have noticed that movies make $millions in profits at the box office, and musicians make $millions from live performances. Home recordings *stimulate demand* for these high-margin performances. They cause no pain to the industry.
I have multiple engineering degrees and several years' experience building and using Linux and BSD, and *I* have trouble configuring, building, and installing the Linux kernel. Forget Aunt Millie -- I want a good kernel autoconfig tool for myself!
... when your property needs it, or it will fall into ruin around you.
Whether you earn a paycheck, live off of savings, or grow your own food, you will always be hostage to your means of sustenance.
It has been my experience that with greater ownership of these means comes more obligatory work, not less. Giving up ownership means relying on others to do things on your behalf, and exchanging money for labor.
The way I see it, I have given up the security of knowing I'll be fed when society collapses in exchange for increased leisure; you propose to do the reverse.
If my money is paying for it, I want my share of ownership. If someone else is going to monopolize and profit from it, they can pay their own development costs.
The parent article really resonates with me because my experience is nearly the same as Mr. Coward's. I, too, have been using Linux since around 1995 and use it on my professional desktop now. I also have a dual-boot (uniprocessor) Windows/Linux machine at home, and share his sentiments about that. What's interesting to me, though, is that you could replace all of the Windows references in the parent article with MacOS 9, and it would still be mostly true in my experience (I triple-boot Linux and two versions of MacOS on one box).
"Linux developers are weanies and UNIX developers are heavies?"
Linux is such a young operating system, its users are lean and callow teens and 20-somethings. We old-timers who discoverd Unix before Linux came along all went to pot years ago.
"MS Word is about the worst tool around for writers."
"The problem is that it forces, FORCES, you to deal with presentation issues at all times."
I sharply beg to differ.
Naturally, you want to compose the structure and content of your document first, and worry about presentation later. I can hardly imagine any sensible writer doing otherwise. In Word, this is trivially easy.
The key is to write your document in Outline View. For all of its warts, Word has the best outline editor I've ever used. Use the outline view to create your sections and subsections; fill in body text blocks; and rearrange to your heart's content. Use change bars to track your changes if that's important to you.
Once the content is in place, note that the different levels of headers are associated with styles -- very convenient! All you have to do is define your styles, and *poof!* the presentation aspect of your document is done. Better yet, define your styles ahead of time and save them in a temlpate. Note also that your table of contents is trivially generated from your outline headers.
If you don't want to be annoyed by the instant spelling and grammar checkers, just turn them off. I do.
While I detest the anticompetitive business practices of MS as much as the next mustelid, I have yet to encounter a better application for most writing tasks than MS Word. It's not perfect, but it's better than the competition. Its cross-referencing capabilities are a bit weak for academic or scientific publishing, but for general technical writing it is excellent.
In the past, I have interacted with (read: flamed;-) a great many Windows fanatics. One thing that most of them had in common was virtually complete ignorance of any other OS.
Actually, CivIII is shipping now. But that's not the point. The point is, you're barking up the wrong tree. Just because the Mac doesn't have all the SAME games as the PC is nowhere near the same thing as having NO games.
If you look back over the years, you will find that most of the best PC games eventually find their way over to the Mac -- and vice versa. You might even be surprised to learn that some of the bestselling PC games (SimCity, for example) appeared first on the Mac.
But that's not the point at all. The point is that each platform, independently of any ported titles, has a complete set of quality games. Just because they aren't the same titles you play doesn't make them any less good.
'I'm sure you'll say, "but I'm not a gamer, games suck anyway."'
Quite the contrary; I love gaming. I spend way too many hours each week playing games. In over 10 years of playing games on the Mac, and I have never had trouble finding high-quality, fun games. My problem is more a matter of too many great games and too little time.
My all-time favorite computer game runs only on the Mac. I know dedicated PC users who bought Macs just to play it. I won't bother naming it, because it doesn't require a GHz processor or a GeForce3 Ti-500 and therefore couldn't possibly be fun.
I do have a PC which primarily boots into Linux, but that also has a Windows partition solely for games. I have yet to play a single game on it, although my roommate has played one. He plays his PC games using Virtual PC whenever possible because, although it's slower, it's more stable.
'Geforce2 MX isn't exactly cutting edge any more'
I guess that's why nVidia put it into their brand new new nForce chipset. It's more than adequate for a low-end machine, which is what the iMac is.
'Another activity that can't be performed, would be using a mouse with more than one button.'
I threw away the mouse that came with my PC, and I did the same with my Mac. Multi-button mice have only been available on the Mac since about 1986.
Re:Let's look at that clunky 800-MHz G4
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 1
"... benchmark... clearly show that [A] is more than 6 times as fast as... [B] and [C]..."
That is the point of benchmarks, isn't it? Note that the PPC didn't beat these other machines by just a little, it totally crushed them. And if you wanted to show that an X86 was better, you'd pick a benchmark in which it crushes the others. The X86 processors have SIMD instructions too. As pure CPU-flogging benchmarks go, I think RC5 is fair.
The original poster condemned the G4 solely on the basis of its clock speed; all I did was point out one real-world circumstance that shows that MHz isn't necessarily the only factor. Why don't you object to me pointing out that the Athlon benchmarks nearly twice as fast as a P4 with a 25% higher clock, but the argument is just as true there.
As for servers, they are not designed with top CPU speed in mind. Servers must be ultra-reliable and have high I/O bandwidth. CPU performance is third priority (or below) in servers. Single Alpha and SPARC CPUs haven't ruled the integer performance heap in a long time (although they do have great FP). They are at their best in scalable systems with lots of CPUs.
"Come on.. rc5 as a benchmark? It wasn't written as a benchmark, it measures NOTHING that could actually be considered productive in the real world."
OF COURSE it wasn't written as a benchmark! It is an application... you know, a program that real people run to do stuff. This particular program is designed to flog the CPU as hard possible, and is optimized to the gills for x86.
And how can you claim to be a Slashdot reader and not think cracking RC5 is productive?;-)
Rather than relying on the crutch of some misleading numbers, why not try actually using a machine before you dismiss it.
"...do I have to mention application support?"
Yes. Please do. Sure, 90% of all applications don't run on the Mac. 99% of all applications are crap, and I wouldn't run them on a PC either. The point is, when you want to do something, can you get the job done? I say you can. Prove me wrong. Name one PC activity that cannot be performed with any Mac application.
"...what will happen to all the old (2001) iMacs still for sale..."
Manufacturers try to 'flush the channel' before introducing new products; that is, they stop shipping the old stuff and hope that retailers' inventories dwindle to nearly nothing before the announcement. Ideally, nobody has any stock of the old stuff left to sell. This isn't just Apple; it's everyone.
Let's look at that clunky 800-MHz G4
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 5, Informative
From http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/
PowerPC G4 @ 800 MHz: 8.2 million RC5 keys/sec
AMD Athlon @ 1600 MHz: 5.7 million RC5 keys/sec
Intel Pentim 4 @ 2000 MHz: 2.9 million RC5 keys/sec
Slashdot Mirror
My Mom's windows installation has been broken for over 3 years (but not so badly that the PC is unusable). She doesn't lack the expertise to reinstall the OS; rather, she lacks the expertise to (1) systematically back up all of her documents; (2) reinstall the OS; (3) then reinstall all of the apps into the new Registry; then (4) reinstall all of her documents into the new folders.
In any OS other than Windows, only (2) is necessary.
Windows IS NOT EASY.
1 thru 10 - yeah, no argument. Especially #10.
11. Grow together. You will develop new interests over the years; they may as well be ones that you both share, since you have a choice in the matter.
Microsoft distributes Internet Explorer separately from Windows (e.g., for the Mac). Therefore, it is not an inseparable part of Windows. QED.
Speaking as someone who does own a Mac, and who has paid for Ambrosia products:
How much they charge for their products is their business. While you are well within your rights to tell them what you think of their prices, actually stealing their software (or encouraging others to do so) because you don't like the price is crossing the line.
Your argument about bargain bin software is specious. Why do bargain bins exist? Because stores want to clear out old inventory to make room for new products. Where does the money come from to sell a bargain bin product for $10? From the profits they made when they used to charge $50 for it. Ambrosia has no warehouse full of unwanted software, and they never charged anyone $50 when it was new and shiny.
If you want to claim that nobody's going to pay $25 for a 2-D sprite-based scroller when they could now buy a polygon-filled FPS like Tribes, fine. Go play tribes. Don't steal EV:O. Those of us who can look beyond the flashiness of the graphics and enjoy a well-designed game of any age for what it is will not miss you at all.
"Are there some other advantages of Linux/PPC that I'm missing?"
Yes. Linux is Free software. Free as in, "Give me liberty or give me death." Free as in, this is ours and nobody can ever take it away. Mac OS X is not. Darwin is not.
"A good use for these [ancient] machines is to recycle them and one way to recycle is to create a bigger faster machine with them."
Not if your primary concern is getting the most FLOPS/$. Given that a brand-new $1000 computer will be something like 10 times as fast as your old ones, at the same power consumption, it doesn't take very long before your new computer pays for itself with the money you save in electricity not running 9 additional machines.
Consider:
150 Watts (low for a PC, probably average for a Mac) x $0.10/KWH x 24 Hr/day x 30 day/mo. x 10 machines = $108 per month. Your $1000 new machine will pay for itself in less than a year, from electrical savings alone.
Of course, this assumes dedicated compute servers running all the time. If you run the cluster software as a backgound task on desktop machines with many users, it's a different story.
"the guy who purjured himself, obstructed justice, and disgraced the Presidency"
If you don't mind my saying so (even if you do, for that matter), it seems to me that with the possible exception of Carter, this describes every U.S. President in the past 40 years.
"the guy who got a hummer in the Oval Office"
That too.
Who would want to steal the identity of an idiot?
Maybe anothe idiot, perhaps.
But if you're dealing with an idiot, do you really care which one?
Some people leave out the accents, but I suspect they do that because they can't figure out how to enter them on a keyboard that doesn't have the appropriate characters on it already.
It is true that I do not know a generic method for producing accented characters on a Linux desktop. If someone will fill me in, I'll gladly use them. :-)
However, I would argue that it is acceptable (even correct) to omit accents from words that have been assimilated into a language that does not use accents (such as English), when used in the form of a word of that language.
That is to say, when commonly used in English, the correct spelling of piñata, über and résumé is "pinata", "uber" and "resume", respectively.
Perhaps i'm just being naïve.
This memo doesn't just score a 'BINGO', it fills in the whole damned Buzzword Bingo card!
It's amazing how so many words can say so little.
"if it wasn't for the movie and record industry you'd have very little to play on them"
Perhaps you have noticed that movies make $millions in profits at the box office, and musicians make $millions from live performances. Home recordings *stimulate demand* for these high-margin performances. They cause no pain to the industry.
I have multiple engineering degrees and several years' experience building and using Linux and BSD, and *I* have trouble configuring, building, and installing the Linux kernel. Forget Aunt Millie -- I want a good kernel autoconfig tool for myself!
"I will work when I feel like it"
... when your property needs it, or it will fall into ruin around you.
Whether you earn a paycheck, live off of savings, or grow your own food, you will always be hostage to your means of sustenance.
It has been my experience that with greater ownership of these means comes more obligatory work, not less. Giving up ownership means relying on others to do things on your behalf, and exchanging money for labor.
The way I see it, I have given up the security of knowing I'll be fed when society collapses in exchange for increased leisure; you propose to do the reverse.
If my money is paying for it, I want my share of ownership. If someone else is going to monopolize and profit from it, they can pay their own development costs.
The parent article really resonates with me because my experience is nearly the same as Mr. Coward's. I, too, have been using Linux since around 1995 and use it on my professional desktop now. I also have a dual-boot (uniprocessor) Windows/Linux machine at home, and share his sentiments about that. What's interesting to me, though, is that you could replace all of the Windows references in the parent article with MacOS 9, and it would still be mostly true in my experience (I triple-boot Linux and two versions of MacOS on one box).
"Linux developers are weanies and UNIX developers are heavies?"
Linux is such a young operating system, its users are lean and callow teens and 20-somethings. We old-timers who discoverd Unix before Linux came along all went to pot years ago.
"MS Word is about the worst tool around for writers."
"The problem is that it forces, FORCES, you to deal with presentation issues at all times."
I sharply beg to differ.
Naturally, you want to compose the structure and content of your document first, and worry about presentation later. I can hardly imagine any sensible writer doing otherwise. In Word, this is trivially easy.
The key is to write your document in Outline View. For all of its warts, Word has the best outline editor I've ever used. Use the outline view to create your sections and subsections; fill in body text blocks; and rearrange to your heart's content. Use change bars to track your changes if that's important to you.
Once the content is in place, note that the different levels of headers are associated with styles -- very convenient! All you have to do is define your styles, and *poof!* the presentation aspect of your document is done. Better yet, define your styles ahead of time and save them in a temlpate. Note also that your table of contents is trivially generated from your outline headers.
If you don't want to be annoyed by the instant spelling and grammar checkers, just turn them off. I do.
While I detest the anticompetitive business practices of MS as much as the next mustelid, I have yet to encounter a better application for most writing tasks than MS Word. It's not perfect, but it's better than the competition. Its cross-referencing capabilities are a bit weak for academic or scientific publishing, but for general technical writing it is excellent.
In the past, I have interacted with (read: flamed ;-) a great many Windows fanatics. One thing that most of them had in common was virtually complete ignorance of any other OS.
I play a MMORPG on the Mac. It's not exactly like any of the ones you mention, but it's very addictive.
Actually, CivIII is shipping now. But that's not the point. The point is, you're barking up the wrong tree. Just because the Mac doesn't have all the SAME games as the PC is nowhere near the same thing as having NO games.
If you look back over the years, you will find that most of the best PC games eventually find their way over to the Mac -- and vice versa. You might even be surprised to learn that some of the bestselling PC games (SimCity, for example) appeared first on the Mac.
But that's not the point at all. The point is that each platform, independently of any ported titles, has a complete set of quality games. Just because they aren't the same titles you play doesn't make them any less good.
'I'm sure you'll say, "but I'm not a gamer, games suck anyway."'
Quite the contrary; I love gaming. I spend way too many hours each week playing games. In over 10 years of playing games on the Mac, and I have never had trouble finding high-quality, fun games. My problem is more a matter of too many great games and too little time.
My all-time favorite computer game runs only on the Mac. I know dedicated PC users who bought Macs just to play it. I won't bother naming it, because it doesn't require a GHz processor or a GeForce3 Ti-500 and therefore couldn't possibly be fun.
I do have a PC which primarily boots into Linux, but that also has a Windows partition solely for games. I have yet to play a single game on it, although my roommate has played one. He plays his PC games using Virtual PC whenever possible because, although it's slower, it's more stable.
'Geforce2 MX isn't exactly cutting edge any more'
I guess that's why nVidia put it into their brand new new nForce chipset. It's more than adequate for a low-end machine, which is what the iMac is.
'Another activity that can't be performed, would be using a mouse with more than one button.'
I threw away the mouse that came with my PC, and I did the same with my Mac. Multi-button mice have only been available on the Mac since about 1986.
"... benchmark ... clearly show that [A] is more than 6 times as fast as ... [B] and [C] ..."
That is the point of benchmarks, isn't it? Note that the PPC didn't beat these other machines by just a little, it totally crushed them. And if you wanted to show that an X86 was better, you'd pick a benchmark in which it crushes the others. The X86 processors have SIMD instructions too. As pure CPU-flogging benchmarks go, I think RC5 is fair.
The original poster condemned the G4 solely on the basis of its clock speed; all I did was point out one real-world circumstance that shows that MHz isn't necessarily the only factor. Why don't you object to me pointing out that the Athlon benchmarks nearly twice as fast as a P4 with a 25% higher clock, but the argument is just as true there.
As for servers, they are not designed with top CPU speed in mind. Servers must be ultra-reliable and have high I/O bandwidth. CPU performance is third priority (or below) in servers. Single Alpha and SPARC CPUs haven't ruled the integer performance heap in a long time (although they do have great FP). They are at their best in scalable systems with lots of CPUs.
"Come on.. rc5 as a benchmark? It wasn't written as a benchmark, it measures NOTHING that could actually be considered productive in the real world."
;-)
OF COURSE it wasn't written as a benchmark! It is an application... you know, a program that real people run to do stuff. This particular program is designed to flog the CPU as hard possible, and is optimized to the gills for x86.
And how can you claim to be a Slashdot reader and not think cracking RC5 is productive?
Rather than relying on the crutch of some misleading numbers, why not try actually using a machine before you dismiss it.
"...do I have to mention application support?"
Yes. Please do. Sure, 90% of all applications don't run on the Mac. 99% of all applications are crap, and I wouldn't run them on a PC either. The point is, when you want to do something, can you get the job done? I say you can. Prove me wrong. Name one PC activity that cannot be performed with any Mac application.
"...what will happen to all the old (2001) iMacs still for sale..."
Manufacturers try to 'flush the channel' before introducing new products; that is, they stop shipping the old stuff and hope that retailers' inventories dwindle to nearly nothing before the announcement. Ideally, nobody has any stock of the old stuff left to sell. This isn't just Apple; it's everyone.
From http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/
PowerPC G4 @ 800 MHz: 8.2 million RC5 keys/sec
AMD Athlon @ 1600 MHz: 5.7 million RC5 keys/sec
Intel Pentim 4 @ 2000 MHz: 2.9 million RC5 keys/sec
Now let's talk again about how clunky the G4 is.