If you want Linux to win some mindshare, you can't shoot down every company that tries to make money with it.
Consider, for a moment, that it has DA and AD converters that are more than standard. Consider that it can stream to multiple sources wirelessly without having to learn how to use ndiswrapper.
A year ago you all shelled out $600 for an iPod that had color. Is $300 more too much to spend on something that probably sounds better, and may offer many more features for a home sound system?
As grid computing (Google, Oracle, etc) seems to be the more sensible solution as systems become cheaper and cheaper, do you think Microsoft will mate their software (their best product) with a clustered open source solution (much more reliable and secure)?
I know a lot of people love OWA (Outlook Web Acess) and I can imagine Microsoft providing a file/email server with site licenses for it's office products that all work over the net, with interoperability on par with programs like Google Maps.
Do you foresee Word for Web being served up on clustered Linux servers?
Drop a powerbook 6" from a tile kitchen floor. If it hits perpendicularly on a corner, it will blow apart if you're unlucky, or simply dent if you are lucky. If it lands somewhat obliquely, the case will be permanently bent.
Take a sheet of thick aluminum (aircraft grade or not) and bang it with a hammer. It's going to dent, bend, and be nearly impossible to return to a flat surface without re-rolling it. Take a sheet of thick plastic, and bang on it for as long as you want to. It's going to maintain the same shape unless you shatter it.
Aluminum is a great material for structure, but not for finishes in panels, especially when it's as thin as it is in Powerbooks.
I had a 17" 1.67 Powerbook that was far slower than my eMachines M6805. After a small drop on my (now ex) girlfriend's 15" made it close improperly, I swore off aluminum notebooks for good and sold my 17". (I've dropped, banged, and kicked my emachines around for over a year, and though it's scratched, I can defintely attest to the durability of plastic over soft metal.)
Plus, there are architectural apps with no equal in the Linux or Mac world that I use, and I also use QuickBooks.
Also, the powerbook doesn't have a numeric keypad, 1440x900 resolution, or an NVidia GPU.
A clear, crisp display with no glossy finish that doesn't look like ass (I'm looking at you, Dell 9300/XPS Gen2!)
full numeric keypad
Turion processor
two memory slots
DVI Out!
NVidia GPU
Built-in Bluetooth
In all likelyhood, I'll have to settle for an Apptel Powerbook and give up on Turion/NVidia. This assumes, of course, that they offer a new display on the 17". I just hope they make it out of something besides soft metal in the next revision.
Since I tech computers, I have this dream about the future all the time.
Imagine if every computer had easily removable storage components in the front of one standard size. Only two are required - one storage device for the operating system, and one for your data. Optionally, you could add another storage device for a RAID type system, optical drives, whatever. On the computer is a basic kernel that can only be accessed by someone with an administrator key that NEVER GETS TOUCHED, unless it's by someone who knows what they're doing. It provides basic functionality as well as network support. End users have a lockable key that holds the authorizations to applications they've purchased, as well as application preferences if they go on the road.
Now, for people who don't know computers, this is how their day goes - the computer boots up and requires that they backup, which involves either syncing over the network, or walking over to the fire safe and plugging in the data drive. This should take a trival amount of time if it's done every time they use the computer. If they think something is screwed up, they have the option of syncing with the OS vendor over a network, or simply popping out the OS drive and going to the local grocery store and exchanging it out of a kiosk. Walk over and plug in your application key and drop in your OS drive - it either reformats or in case of failure simply spits out a new one.
Computers right now are amazingly close. You could even mod existing machines with drop-in 5.25 hotswap bays that provide everything above. However, with Geeksquad charging $90 just to look at your machine, I don't think it will happen any time soon.
Baseless and sweeping generalities (like the one I'm writing), even if dressed up by prepending "the" to common words, will always be popular since the vagueness can never be proven to be right or wrong.
But let's prove his theory, and borrow all of his newly released novels instead of buying them. As he says in the article, it belongs to us anyway.
...most of these socialists call themselves Republicans.
Anyone else love those new tiny stickers with American flags that simply say, "ROME FELL"? Ask your left winger, and he'll say it was because of American arrogance. Ask your right winger, and he'll say it was because of gay people.
It's illegal to fire someone because of their age. I'd send a friendly letter from your lawyer asking, "Were other people who had less seniority than my client terminated to cut costs? If no, why was he chosen? Why wasn't he offered a similiar position within your company if his department was closed?"
As the baby boomers age, I'd say this is going to become a common thing. Corporations who lie about their financial status to terminate expensive senior employees should be prosecuted very harshly.
Evolutionary Theory Scientist 1: Hey, where did all of this life come from? Scientist 2: I don't know. Let's consider the evidence we have, and construct a theory using the scientific method.
Intelligent Design Theory Scientist 1: Hey, where did all of this life come from? Guy That Sells Bibles: I know! God did it!
Do you understand that games aren't operating systems?
I'm comparing two operating systems and their primary platforms - Darwin on PPC and Linux on x86. I'm saying Linux has all of the features, but no eye candy, so when Enlightenment, or another window manager that's stable with good eye candy arrives, OS X 10.4 will not be so appealing.
Not so appealing, of course, if you can't imagine looking more than ten minutes into the future.
No, I don't expect Apple to do anything they don't want to do. I absolutely respect their vision, and if my grandmother needed a computer, she'd have a Mini in a heartbeat. I have one just because I sell Macs and I use it to keep my familiarity level high.
I've had various laptops during those years, and my girlfriend still uses the 1.5ghz 15" powerbook that I purchased last fall. But when I put that down and pickup my Athlon 64 laptop, things are just faster in XP and Ubuntu. OpenOffice, Firefox, every game I ever play...
My point is, people who like technology and are willing to fuss with it a little bit (like me) are really drawn to the Macs, because the operating system is the nicest we've seen. However, the investment in comparably fast hardware is something like 100% more. For me, that doesn't make any sense. The features don't deserve that kind of price tag - I know that's not true for everyone, but it is true for me.
I'm a Mac dealer. I use Logic, Pro Tools, but not too much video stuff.
My laptop (x86_64) gets more plugins in Pro Tools LE than a second generation Dual 2.0 G5, even though the G5 has 1GB versus 512 RAM on my laptop. That's not a fluke - I get faster results on P4s as well. Check out duc.digidesign.com for more information if you're really interested.
I've seen Tiger on a 1.42 Mac Mini with 512MB RAM. The only thing that worried me is that each instance of a widget in Dashboard took 5-10MB of real memory and about 100MB of virtual memory. Any real Mac guru's know what the hell that is about? Why does that system have 3.38GB virtual memory?
Plus, the hardware is just too expensive. Spec out a Powermac Dual 2.3 - $2,500. I can get a Dual 1.8 opteron with 5.5 more gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) of memory, and six 160GB SATA hard drives with a raid controller, all other specs being equal.
Tiger is nice and shiny, but Enlightenment.17 or any other window manager that can get stable and provide eye candy is going to woo me and a lot of other price/performance conscious nerds away. The plethora of Mac's gee-whiz features (dashboard, rendezvous, expose, neato startup modes) that barely get used are becoming less and less valuable to me as the Apple hardware continues to lag behind.
I've been waiting for a G5 powerbook for two years, and earlier this week I finally ordered a PC laptop that frankly spanks the 17" for about $1600 less. Bouncy icons or $1600... bouncy icons or $1600...
Alright, assholes... who's going to rewrite the only major competitor to Microsoft Office because of some possible philosophical nonsense?
It's still open source, right? So fork it and rewrite it as an ncurses emac extension. I'm sure Joe User is really going to fall in love with that one. "Hey guys! We can type up our spreadsheets and text documents and save them in an MS Office compatible format, or learn emacs, lpr, and not work with anyone else because we're not sure if Java is going to be compatible with our philosophical ideals in the future."
You'd think someone around here had heard about the law of diminshing returns. I guess that's refuted with one word: Gentoo.
Remember the IBM Deskstar series? There were some of the first 7200RPM drives out at 20, 30, and 40GB. The failure rate within a year was about half, though. I had a friend who lost his entire collection of, um, educational videos two or three times. He finally learned his lesson and got a WD after that.
Yeah, and if this guy is recommending Maxtor, he must get a lot of free ones to compensate their failure rate.
From most to least reliable: 1. Seagate 2. Western Digital 3. Hitachi 4. Drug addict who just won the Cash 5 Lotto 5. Maxtor.
"It's not like the old 'Star Wars,' " Lucas told theater owners at the ShoWest convention. "This one's a little bit more emotional. We like to describe it as 'Titanic' in space. It's a tearjerker."
Apologies to penny-arcade. I'd much rather have people absorbed into EQ than to a bad meth habit or a gang. Not because it's necessarily any better according to real ethical standards, but it's much more sustainable and currently more socially acceptable. Not surprisingly, they have the same personality types - low self-esteems combined with identity crises. If it wasn't EQ, it was going to be something else.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Convince Americans that Mars is somewhere near Texas, and it needs a big highway.
2. Vote Republican.
If you want Linux to win some mindshare, you can't shoot down every company that tries to make money with it.
Consider, for a moment, that it has DA and AD converters that are more than standard. Consider that it can stream to multiple sources wirelessly without having to learn how to use ndiswrapper.
A year ago you all shelled out $600 for an iPod that had color. Is $300 more too much to spend on something that probably sounds better, and may offer many more features for a home sound system?
As grid computing (Google, Oracle, etc) seems to be the more sensible solution as systems become cheaper and cheaper, do you think Microsoft will mate their software (their best product) with a clustered open source solution (much more reliable and secure)?
I know a lot of people love OWA (Outlook Web Acess) and I can imagine Microsoft providing a file/email server with site licenses for it's office products that all work over the net, with interoperability on par with programs like Google Maps.
Do you foresee Word for Web being served up on clustered Linux servers?
Drop a powerbook 6" from a tile kitchen floor. If it hits perpendicularly on a corner, it will blow apart if you're unlucky, or simply dent if you are lucky. If it lands somewhat obliquely, the case will be permanently bent.
Take a sheet of thick aluminum (aircraft grade or not) and bang it with a hammer. It's going to dent, bend, and be nearly impossible to return to a flat surface without re-rolling it. Take a sheet of thick plastic, and bang on it for as long as you want to. It's going to maintain the same shape unless you shatter it.
Aluminum is a great material for structure, but not for finishes in panels, especially when it's as thin as it is in Powerbooks.
I had a 17" 1.67 Powerbook that was far slower than my eMachines M6805. After a small drop on my (now ex) girlfriend's 15" made it close improperly, I swore off aluminum notebooks for good and sold my 17". (I've dropped, banged, and kicked my emachines around for over a year, and though it's scratched, I can defintely attest to the durability of plastic over soft metal.)
Plus, there are architectural apps with no equal in the Linux or Mac world that I use, and I also use QuickBooks.
Also, the powerbook doesn't have a numeric keypad, 1440x900 resolution, or an NVidia GPU.
In all likelyhood, I'll have to settle for an Apptel Powerbook and give up on Turion/NVidia. This assumes, of course, that they offer a new display on the 17". I just hope they make it out of something besides soft metal in the next revision.
Since I tech computers, I have this dream about the future all the time.
Imagine if every computer had easily removable storage components in the front of one standard size. Only two are required - one storage device for the operating system, and one for your data. Optionally, you could add another storage device for a RAID type system, optical drives, whatever. On the computer is a basic kernel that can only be accessed by someone with an administrator key that NEVER GETS TOUCHED, unless it's by someone who knows what they're doing. It provides basic functionality as well as network support. End users have a lockable key that holds the authorizations to applications they've purchased, as well as application preferences if they go on the road.
Now, for people who don't know computers, this is how their day goes - the computer boots up and requires that they backup, which involves either syncing over the network, or walking over to the fire safe and plugging in the data drive. This should take a trival amount of time if it's done every time they use the computer. If they think something is screwed up, they have the option of syncing with the OS vendor over a network, or simply popping out the OS drive and going to the local grocery store and exchanging it out of a kiosk. Walk over and plug in your application key and drop in your OS drive - it either reformats or in case of failure simply spits out a new one.
Computers right now are amazingly close. You could even mod existing machines with drop-in 5.25 hotswap bays that provide everything above. However, with Geeksquad charging $90 just to look at your machine, I don't think it will happen any time soon.
"...if you're a dumb creationist."
You've repeated yourself.
Baseless and sweeping generalities (like the one I'm writing), even if dressed up by prepending "the" to common words, will always be popular since the vagueness can never be proven to be right or wrong.
But let's prove his theory, and borrow all of his newly released novels instead of buying them. As he says in the article, it belongs to us anyway.
...most of these socialists call themselves Republicans.
Anyone else love those new tiny stickers with American flags that simply say, "ROME FELL"? Ask your left winger, and he'll say it was because of American arrogance. Ask your right winger, and he'll say it was because of gay people.
Thank God there aren't any gay terrorist groups!
It's lovely.
It's illegal to fire someone because of their age. I'd send a friendly letter from your lawyer asking, "Were other people who had less seniority than my client terminated to cut costs? If no, why was he chosen? Why wasn't he offered a similiar position within your company if his department was closed?"
As the baby boomers age, I'd say this is going to become a common thing. Corporations who lie about their financial status to terminate expensive senior employees should be prosecuted very harshly.
Well, person who wrote screenplays for the star wars prequals, let's hope that you don't get this job too.
"I wrote them. I wrote all of them! They deserved it!"
Evolutionary Theory
Scientist 1: Hey, where did all of this life come from?
Scientist 2: I don't know. Let's consider the evidence we have, and construct a theory using the scientific method.
Intelligent Design Theory
Scientist 1: Hey, where did all of this life come from?
Guy That Sells Bibles: I know! God did it!
Yeah, I'm not buying it.
Activity Monitor in the Utilites folder. I haven't used vmmap yet to double check.
Duke Nukem Forever is much better than World of Warcraft.
Do you understand that games aren't operating systems?
I'm comparing two operating systems and their primary platforms - Darwin on PPC and Linux on x86. I'm saying Linux has all of the features, but no eye candy, so when Enlightenment, or another window manager that's stable with good eye candy arrives, OS X 10.4 will not be so appealing.
Not so appealing, of course, if you can't imagine looking more than ten minutes into the future.
Just thanks.
No, I don't expect Apple to do anything they don't want to do. I absolutely respect their vision, and if my grandmother needed a computer, she'd have a Mini in a heartbeat. I have one just because I sell Macs and I use it to keep my familiarity level high.
I've had various laptops during those years, and my girlfriend still uses the 1.5ghz 15" powerbook that I purchased last fall. But when I put that down and pickup my Athlon 64 laptop, things are just faster in XP and Ubuntu. OpenOffice, Firefox, every game I ever play...
My point is, people who like technology and are willing to fuss with it a little bit (like me) are really drawn to the Macs, because the operating system is the nicest we've seen. However, the investment in comparably fast hardware is something like 100% more. For me, that doesn't make any sense. The features don't deserve that kind of price tag - I know that's not true for everyone, but it is true for me.
I'm a Mac dealer. I use Logic, Pro Tools, but not too much video stuff.
My laptop (x86_64) gets more plugins in Pro Tools LE than a second generation Dual 2.0 G5, even though the G5 has 1GB versus 512 RAM on my laptop. That's not a fluke - I get faster results on P4s as well. Check out duc.digidesign.com for more information if you're really interested.
I've seen Tiger on a 1.42 Mac Mini with 512MB RAM. The only thing that worried me is that each instance of a widget in Dashboard took 5-10MB of real memory and about 100MB of virtual memory. Any real Mac guru's know what the hell that is about? Why does that system have 3.38GB virtual memory?
.17 or any other window manager that can get stable and provide eye candy is going to woo me and a lot of other price/performance conscious nerds away. The plethora of Mac's gee-whiz features (dashboard, rendezvous, expose, neato startup modes) that barely get used are becoming less and less valuable to me as the Apple hardware continues to lag behind.
Plus, the hardware is just too expensive. Spec out a Powermac Dual 2.3 - $2,500. I can get a Dual 1.8 opteron with 5.5 more gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) of memory, and six 160GB SATA hard drives with a raid controller, all other specs being equal.
Tiger is nice and shiny, but Enlightenment
I've been waiting for a G5 powerbook for two years, and earlier this week I finally ordered a PC laptop that frankly spanks the 17" for about $1600 less. Bouncy icons or $1600... bouncy icons or $1600...
Alright, assholes... who's going to rewrite the only major competitor to Microsoft Office because of some possible philosophical nonsense?
It's still open source, right? So fork it and rewrite it as an ncurses emac extension. I'm sure Joe User is really going to fall in love with that one. "Hey guys! We can type up our spreadsheets and text documents and save them in an MS Office compatible format, or learn emacs, lpr, and not work with anyone else because we're not sure if Java is going to be compatible with our philosophical ideals in the future."
You'd think someone around here had heard about the law of diminshing returns. I guess that's refuted with one word: Gentoo.
Remember the IBM Deskstar series? There were some of the first 7200RPM drives out at 20, 30, and 40GB. The failure rate within a year was about half, though. I had a friend who lost his entire collection of, um, educational videos two or three times. He finally learned his lesson and got a WD after that.
Yeah, and if this guy is recommending Maxtor, he must get a lot of free ones to compensate their failure rate.
From most to least reliable:
1. Seagate
2. Western Digital
3. Hitachi
4. Drug addict who just won the Cash 5 Lotto
5. Maxtor.
"It's not like the old 'Star Wars,' " Lucas told theater owners at the ShoWest convention. "This one's a little bit more emotional. We like to describe it as 'Titanic' in space. It's a tearjerker."
THAT WAS NOT A JOKE. THAT. WAS AN ACTUAL QUOTE.
"That kid was fucked up when I met him."
Apologies to penny-arcade. I'd much rather have people absorbed into EQ than to a bad meth habit or a gang. Not because it's necessarily any better according to real ethical standards, but it's much more sustainable and currently more socially acceptable. Not surprisingly, they have the same personality types - low self-esteems combined with identity crises. If it wasn't EQ, it was going to be something else.