Will the dual processor nature of these Intels make emulators like Qemu faster? XP in Virtual PC on a G4 is barely useable for Internet Explorer. I'm hoping Mactel means faster emulation and XP in Qemu on OS X with good performance. No, the dual processor nature will not.
However, the Intel nature most definitely WILL.
Rather than a 5:1 performance slowdown, expect 1.2 or 1.1:1
x86 is easy to virutalize on x86. The problem with Qemu is running x86 code on PPC. In fact, these new Intel Core Duo's have VT, which is Intel's transparent virtualization technology. You'll be able to have Linux, OS X, and Windows Vista all running simulataneously, with the only performance degredation being resource starvation. This means minimal overhead; just the same amount of numbers being crunched per second, distributed among your running processes.
It's free; why not run both Windows and OS X in virtual machines on Linux?
Linux is arguably the most reliable, and you don't have to pay any royalties. Every manufacturer can offer you a flavor of Linux (hell, they can market their OWN private label! (Dell's SuSE, HP's Mandriva)), with an option for Vista, and an option for OS X.
Virtualization is coming a long way. Virtualization makes computing more secure. Virtualization is the future of the desktop.
Similarly, go build a Dell laptop with components near a MacBook Pro.
The best you'll come out with is $2249, for a model near the $2499 MacBook pro.
Is $250 worth the ability to run OS X, to not have to deal with Viruses, and for the superior design (both solid engineering and aesthetics?)
Sure it is!
Hell; if you bill out your own Windows maintenance hours at $45 an hour, its no problem. Couple of defrags, one or two system restores, and you end up at the same damn price point.
Even if you don't agree: if you could pay an addition $250 to get OS X on a Dell, you'd most likely pay it. It's a marginal premium for a luxury brand.
Oh; don't forget the neat front row thing, that adds into the $250 too.
Why would you EVER want to boot Windows on these things?
Run Windows in a virtual machine. VMware for OS X, anyone?
Keep in mind VMware now has Direct3D support......
There is a very small subset of Windows apps that run poorly in VMware. This is mainly OpenGL windows games, and pro openGL Windows apps, both of which MS is determined to go the way of the dodo.
Notice something interesting with Redhat ES 3.0? 0 unpatched. 31% system access bugs, versus 55% for Windows 2003. And notice the nature of the vulnerabilities? Things like cups, or curl. Or Realplayer (wtf?). Why aren't realplayer vulnerabilities included for 2003? Surely the vast majority of ES 3.0 installs do NOT include realplayer. *shrug*.
Is 2003 doing better than XP? Yes, perhaps. Then again, NT is doing better than 2003. So that's not "technically" improvement.
The problem is that bug counting gets you no where. Far more useful is number of compromised installations over time. This a metric that reflects administrator competance as well of 'ease of lockdown'. As far as I know, the Unix or Unix-like platform has greater deployment as a server than Windows 2003, or other Windows platforms.
Why is this a fair comparison? Why is it fair to group Linux with Unix?
Exactly how many of those secunia vulnerabilities is a "Linux Kernel" vulnerability? On Redhat ES 3.0, 13. The rest exist in GNU/Unix platform utilies, or utterly weird stuff that _shouldn't_ be included like OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice.org is going to be exploited on a Solaris server as much as it will be on a Redhat server. Either not at all (not installed), or in exactly the same fashion (installed).
So lemme use the famous MS marketshare argument. If Microsoft servers had greater marketshare than Unix or Unix-like platforms, than perhaps Microsoft Windows would have a greater number of vulnerabilities discovered. Sadly, even though Microsoft has LESS marketshare than Unix or Unix-like platforms, the number of critical vulnerabilities, remote vulnerabilities, and unpatched vulnerabilities are greater.
Windows 2003 is no security nirvana. Better than XP? Perhaps. But not by much, and only by exclusion of certain software and disabled services.
Most of the system has been recompiled to thwart buffer-overflow style attacks. Still, just what do you propose they do to "fix" all the Windows XP machines out there ? Grand. I don't care that they recompiled most of the system. Vulnerabilities continue to abound.
What do I propose? Fucked if I know. If I had a good security solution for MS, I'd sell it to them for billions.
Yes, Vista is really, really late. No, I haven't been following Vista's development very closely, because I find MS's press releases as having far too much marketspeak for the average human, and all the Vista "previews" are fluff pieces.
If Vista is released in a state similar to Visual Studio 2005, which is MS's latest "major" (and rushed) release, Vista will be a security disaster.
That's why there isn't nearly the shareware market on the Mac that there is for Windows (not that all Win shareware is crappy, but quite a bit of it is, or is stuff that you can get for other platforms for free).
I do not find this to be the case.
There's a huge warez market for PCs. There's not much of a warez market for Macs.
OS X shareware is widespread; there's a huge amount of it out there.
Why? Because the black hat community is very, very nice to MS.
I've never met a truly destructive worm or trojan. I don't mean one that disabled systems as a side effect of its operation. I mean one specifically designed to destroy data, and/or BIOS/CMOS/anything flashable.
A 4 month patch cycle. I imagine that if North Korea, or whoever felt angry about the global economy, decided to try and do something devestating that they could easily prepare some kind of trojan payload that would install itself, replicate for a week or so, and then destroy the system in question. Blow away the BIOS (won't be determined until a reboot), blow away the partition table, and then start writing loads of garbage all over the disk.
Such a worm would break MS. MS execs would be brought before a congressional hearing.
That is, after banks, airlines, and major companies managed to rebuild some kind of IT infrastructure.
MS is very luck that no black hats have decided to do such a thing. I guess its most likely because no one wants to bring THAT kind of heat down upon themselves.
"Sit down, shut up, and eat the gruel we put in front of you. We're better than you, smarter than you, and we know whats best."
I'm not aware of any other software project, free or proprietary, that has as poor of a security record as an equivalent Microsoft product.
Don't blame it on marketshare; otherwise, Apache would lead IIS in terms of infection. And even if it is because of marketshare, you would think that the completely untouched (as in 0 viruses) environment of OS X would be a great target.
Surely, there must be some contingent of hackers out there that would love to be the FIRST to get an OS X virus into the wild.
The only reason MS gets away with this crap is because they have no liability whatsoever. MS will not, and does not stand behind the quality of its products. Security is not, and will not be a priority for MS because not having it doesn't cost them ANYTHING, and in many ways makes them money (more MSCE's needed for administration, more parterning with anti-virus firms, and the possibiltiy of future MS anti-virus rent).
I don't believe that the liability situation should be radically changed, however, MS should be punished for constantly advertising 'top notch security', when in reality their products are shoddy and poorly written, both in terms of implemenation (code bugs), and poor design.
If the giant flash companies (or whoever is in danger of paying a FAT royalty) instead put that moderate amount of money towards a few full time developers for alternative file system drivers for Windows, we won't need FAT.
And that's a good thing, because FAT is ancient.
The bigger question is what about VFAT support on Linux. It's not THAT big of a question anymore, since just about everyone I know runs their Windows XP partitions (and Vista, I presume) on NTFS, and has to work around proper file system support anyways.
The best answer to Linux support is most likely going to be things like captive NTFS. That way, you can use a MS implementation, and thus not violate any pattents.
It's pride and flashiness that sells products, and builds dynamic brand images.
You won't be able to maintain a trendy brand without being flashy like that. No one ever got fired for choosing IBM, but when was the last time IBM was considered a trendsetter?
Apple's brand identity requires them to function as they do, and its pretty harmless. Don't judge a book by its cover; Apple's machines are better engineered than their competitors; let them have their fun.
As far as I can tell, a similarly configured Dell with a Duo processor, same ram, same hard drive, etc., will cost me $2274, before shipping and tax.
About $250 cheaper, but you do get a 17" display, I suppose.
$250, a slightly larger display, versus the capability to run OS X?
I take it you don't buy luxury cars either, huh?
Apple is going to be more expensive than other manufacturers. They are a luxury computing brand. However, having intel processors will give them better Windows compatibility, and a better price/performance ratio.
Good grief son, buy yourself a clue! Learn some computing history. Read up on OS/2's support for Windows apps in a much simpler API era. At that time, IBM had access to Windows' source code and could "easily" write support to run Windows programs on OS/2. Yet IBM finally gave up because Microsoft could break OS/2's Windows support easily and Microsoft did so many times. IBM finally came to the conlusion that customers bitching about broken Windows support was not worth the headache. Lesson learned: If you control the API, you control everything.
Things are different now. Take a look at the way Crossover Office works. Codeweaver's Crossover Office is a viable application used in quite a few large scale linux deployments.
Codeweaver's does, indeed, work on duplicating the Win32 API (yes, codeweavers contributes substantially to Wine), however, rather than set architectural goals, codeweavers works on an app-by-app basis. They certify one app at a time as a compatible, to a certain patch revision. The end-user commercial product works like that, and the enterprise level support is a customized environment for whatever your needs maybe.
Codeweavers is a good deal more nimble than Win32 (and Microsoft) can be.
You've got to be kidding me. The drivers at most vendor sites default to Windows XP drivers. Throw in your average hardware vendor's CD and it will run in Windows. This is not so for Linux. I don't know what distro you are using, but I have never installed a distro where all my hardware worked as expected without editing a bunch of text files and reading a couple of README files.
Hmm... Except for Wireless drivers, OpenSuSE 10.0 handles most any hardware I throw at it, including ATI and Nvidia card with OpenGL support.
All my hardware works as expected, on my homebrew AMD64 system, my Inspiron 8200, my Sony All-in-one PCV-W510G (desktop on a laptop chasis), my neighbor's Compaq desktop, and a variety of other systems (all our Dell's at work, for example).
Except for Wireless drivers. For those, I use either ndiswrapper or Linuxant's Driverloader. Then I DO go to the manufacturer's site, and download the latest XP drivers.
One of the biggest advantage of SuSE is that all easy to medium difficulty hardware configuration can be handled from YaST. No text files needed. You just need to have moderately linux friendly hardware. The level of complexity and selectivity you need to have is roughly the same for Windows. You'll have problems with some win modems, webcams, and strange sound cards. But I have had problems with those same things in Windows; you find devices that simply don't have 2000 or XP drivers. Not to mention the up and coming Vista.
And don't get me started on Linux 64-bit drivers versus Windows XP 64-bit drivers. That's a crush for linux.
Yes, RPMs are very easy to use. Unfortunately, the problem comes in making sure you have every single library that the app you're installing uses. There are better installers out there, but every single one I have used has had dependency issues with one piece of software or another.
OpenSuSE uses APT-4-RPM by default. APT handles all dependancies automagically, as long as you have the right repositories setup. There are a HUGE number of SuSE repositories out there, most of them conveniently mirrored on ftp.gwdg.de, a nice, high speed server. This includes a bewildering array of software; just about every opensource package I could want to use.
YaST also handles dependancies nicely; that's why the default KDE option for handling RPMs is "yast -i ". YaST will handle the dependancies for you.
SMART is even better, and is most likely the future of SuSE package management. SMART integrates the system RPM database, APT-RPM repositories, and a variety of other systems. It has flexible dependancies, and will run even on a technically 'broken' setup that APT would choke on.
Apparently, you don't ever update your Linux systems with the various security and stability patches.
Well, this is handled automatically. I had done all my security updates through YaST. YOU does a great job, and it can do it on a set schedule.
Now I use ksmarttray, a SMART update manager. It blinks at me whenever updates are avaliable. Two clicks later, it installs them for me. I may have it do it automatically, I'm not sure. Either way, YOU or SMART are a great deal less of a hassle than Windows maintenance. I'm not talking about Windows Update. Automatic updates are the same either way. I'm talking about defrags, virus scans, spyware scans, and the occasional rootkit that fucks over your system.
Hmmm... First you have to install something that handles klik://, not a default in the last distro I ran...
The latest beta SuSE has klik:// built-in, I believe. SLiCK OpenSuSE does for sure. But your being a bit ridiculous; the install instructions are crazy simple. I quote:
klik provides an easy way to download and use software for most major distributions. There are currently 3 distributions which have the klik client preinstalled: Kanotix, openSUSE (SLICK enhanced), and CPX-MINI. For all others, please press Alt-F2 and paste: wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O
Hmm... I've got 3. One 939, with one of those mini ATI motherboards, and two of the older AMD64s (748? 753? whatever). One's an Nforce3, one's a via.
The Nforce3 and VIA both worked out-of-box with SuSE 10.0. The ATI required some drivers from ATI, and were a giagantic pain in the ass, but then that's a given with all things linux and ATI.
Suggests that it runs properly in SuSE, without any problems. Are there multiple Intel Pro/100 cards?
Yes, the configure/make/make install thing sucks. IMHO, any driver that requires configure/make/make install is NOT ready for prime time on linux. Honestly, NOTHING should require configure/make/make install; it breaks package management badly. Automated systems that build RPMS from source are a decent kludge, but ideally no one should ever use such a thing.
The model of the new nvidia and ATI drivers is vastly superior. I also like the Samsung Binary laser printer drivers, they work pretty well, with a GUI only setup and decent CUPS integration. All of these can be installed via RPM, and uninstalled via RPM. The Nvidia and ATI drivers do a decent job cleaning up after themselves when you uninstall, but I'm not sure about the Samsung.
I think a large part of the law school app is that it prevents you from using any other applications or internet access. Its a controlled environment testing app, so even if it worked properly, I'm not sure that it would be able to stop konqueror from inside wine;-)
Hmm... Well, I haven't found many postings about the AR5005G and ndiswrapper, but I've had loads of success with ndiswrapper, so I'd give it a try.
The Marvell Yukon sk98lin module seems to have problems with ACPI allocation of IRQs. Apparently a new module may be needed, or append the following line to your kernel configuration, acpi=noirq.
Quote:"Hi all, thanks for this post. After working about 1 full day on this problem, I found this post and the 'acpi=noirq' option seems to work on my new Toshiba M45-S2692. Whew! I've only been running about 10 minutes now, so I don't know if a slow-down will occur or not, but we will see. I'll post again after it runs awhile."
Many laptops have non-standard ACPI configurations, these can be a serious problem. I haven't run into it on modern Sony or HP laptops, but I have had problems with this on Dells. Usually, either acpi=noirq or an updated DSDT table fix this. On SuSE, anyways, both of these options are fairly easy to enable without mucking around in too many configuration files.
I do apologize for not believing you outright. I had not realized there was such a problem with this kernel module, but in my defense I haven't messed with any Marvell Yukon adapters. You may consider filing the a bug report with the maintainers, if you are feeling charitable.
His main problem was getting the WPA-PSK key the same across all computers, since SuSE expects the end of the key to have padding 0, for a full 64 characters, while the Linksys router did not. I believe the latest OpenSuSE runs a recent ndiswrapper, so try that.
Slashdot Mirror
Will the dual processor nature of these Intels make emulators like Qemu faster? XP in Virtual PC on a G4 is barely useable for Internet Explorer. I'm hoping Mactel means faster emulation and XP in Qemu on OS X with good performance.
r y_id=40711
r chives/2005/06/the_way_of_xen.html
No, the dual processor nature will not.
However, the Intel nature most definitely WILL.
Rather than a 5:1 performance slowdown, expect 1.2 or 1.1:1
x86 is easy to virutalize on x86. The problem with Qemu is running x86 code on PPC. In fact, these new Intel Core Duo's have VT, which is Intel's transparent virtualization technology. You'll be able to have Linux, OS X, and Windows Vista all running simulataneously, with the only performance degredation being resource starvation. This means minimal overhead; just the same amount of numbers being crunched per second, distributed among your running processes.
Proof of vanderpool (VT)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core
http://www.wirelessnewsfactor.com/story.xhtml?sto
Xen and Vanderpool:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/a
I hate to use a cliche, but the future is now.
Where does Linux fit in?
It's free; why not run both Windows and OS X in virtual machines on Linux?
Linux is arguably the most reliable, and you don't have to pay any royalties. Every manufacturer can offer you a flavor of Linux (hell, they can market their OWN private label! (Dell's SuSE, HP's Mandriva)), with an option for Vista, and an option for OS X.
Virtualization is coming a long way. Virtualization makes computing more secure. Virtualization is the future of the desktop.
Similarly, go build a Dell laptop with components near a MacBook Pro.
The best you'll come out with is $2249, for a model near the $2499 MacBook pro.
Is $250 worth the ability to run OS X, to not have to deal with Viruses, and for the superior design (both solid engineering and aesthetics?)
Sure it is!
Hell; if you bill out your own Windows maintenance hours at $45 an hour, its no problem. Couple of defrags, one or two system restores, and you end up at the same damn price point.
Even if you don't agree: if you could pay an addition $250 to get OS X on a Dell, you'd most likely pay it. It's a marginal premium for a luxury brand.
Oh; don't forget the neat front row thing, that adds into the $250 too.
Why would you EVER want to boot Windows on these things?
Run Windows in a virtual machine. VMware for OS X, anyone?
Keep in mind VMware now has Direct3D support......
There is a very small subset of Windows apps that run poorly in VMware. This is mainly OpenGL windows games, and pro openGL Windows apps, both of which MS is determined to go the way of the dodo.
Linux currently has EFI support.
I suspect Linux will boot on these puppies right now. SuSE 10.0 on a MacBook Pro?
Gravey.
Now, the question is will I get Mac-On-Linux support?
Fuck Windows; I want to run OS X inside SuSE 10.0, with native Wine and Cedega (DirectX9 gaming-style Wine) on Linux.
This means I get native adobe apps (inside OS X), all my Linux favorites, and any Windows apps that run in Wine or Cedega.
AFAIK, the Intel Core Duo (Yonah, I believe) has VT support.
How many security problems has Windows 2003 had ?
i on
d ers-vs-2005-is-fantastic.html
http://secunia.com/product/1174/#advisories lists 8 out of 76 vulnerabilites as 'unpatached'. I have a feeling that Windows 2003 is also vulnerable to the new, critical WMF problems (yes, the ones discovered AFTER the previous one was patched last week.) XP complaint is here: http://secunia.com/advisories/10968/
Either way, the answer is 'a lot'.
Why not compare Redhat ES 3.0 with Windows 2003?
http://secunia.com/product/1174/#advisories_2003
http://secunia.com/product/2535/#statistics_solut
Notice something interesting with Redhat ES 3.0? 0 unpatched. 31% system access bugs, versus 55% for Windows 2003. And notice the nature of the vulnerabilities? Things like cups, or curl. Or Realplayer (wtf?). Why aren't realplayer vulnerabilities included for 2003? Surely the vast majority of ES 3.0 installs do NOT include realplayer. *shrug*.
Is 2003 doing better than XP? Yes, perhaps. Then again, NT is doing better than 2003. So that's not "technically" improvement.
The problem is that bug counting gets you no where. Far more useful is number of compromised installations over time. This a metric that reflects administrator competance as well of 'ease of lockdown'. As far as I know, the Unix or Unix-like platform has greater deployment as a server than Windows 2003, or other Windows platforms.
Why is this a fair comparison? Why is it fair to group Linux with Unix?
Exactly how many of those secunia vulnerabilities is a "Linux Kernel" vulnerability? On Redhat ES 3.0, 13. The rest exist in GNU/Unix platform utilies, or utterly weird stuff that _shouldn't_ be included like OpenOffice.org.
I mean, what the hell: http://secunia.com/advisories/12546/
OpenOffice.org is going to be exploited on a Solaris server as much as it will be on a Redhat server. Either not at all (not installed), or in exactly the same fashion (installed).
So lemme use the famous MS marketshare argument. If Microsoft servers had greater marketshare than Unix or Unix-like platforms, than perhaps Microsoft Windows would have a greater number of vulnerabilities discovered. Sadly, even though Microsoft has LESS marketshare than Unix or Unix-like platforms, the number of critical vulnerabilities, remote vulnerabilities, and unpatched vulnerabilities are greater.
Windows 2003 is no security nirvana. Better than XP? Perhaps. But not by much, and only by exclusion of certain software and disabled services.
Most of the system has been recompiled to thwart buffer-overflow style attacks.
Still, just what do you propose they do to "fix" all the Windows XP machines out there ?
Grand. I don't care that they recompiled most of the system. Vulnerabilities continue to abound.
What do I propose? Fucked if I know. If I had a good security solution for MS, I'd sell it to them for billions.
Step one, don't release Vista in the same state that the latest Visual Studio was released in. http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/11/hey-sharehol
Yes, Vista is really, really late. No, I haven't been following Vista's development very closely, because I find MS's press releases as having far too much marketspeak for the average human, and all the Vista "previews" are fluff pieces.
If Vista is released in a state similar to Visual Studio 2005, which is MS's latest "major" (and rushed) release, Vista will be a security disaster.
That's why there isn't nearly the shareware market on the Mac that there is for Windows (not that all Win shareware is crappy, but quite a bit of it is, or is stuff that you can get for other platforms for free).
I do not find this to be the case.
There's a huge warez market for PCs. There's not much of a warez market for Macs.
OS X shareware is widespread; there's a huge amount of it out there.
Why? Because the black hat community is very, very nice to MS.
I've never met a truly destructive worm or trojan. I don't mean one that disabled systems as a side effect of its operation. I mean one specifically designed to destroy data, and/or BIOS/CMOS/anything flashable.
A 4 month patch cycle. I imagine that if North Korea, or whoever felt angry about the global economy, decided to try and do something devestating that they could easily prepare some kind of trojan payload that would install itself, replicate for a week or so, and then destroy the system in question. Blow away the BIOS (won't be determined until a reboot), blow away the partition table, and then start writing loads of garbage all over the disk.
Such a worm would break MS. MS execs would be brought before a congressional hearing.
That is, after banks, airlines, and major companies managed to rebuild some kind of IT infrastructure.
MS is very luck that no black hats have decided to do such a thing. I guess its most likely because no one wants to bring THAT kind of heat down upon themselves.
Umm... How exactly is MS's track record improving?
Details, please?
Why do you feel like they are doing better? Because they release more marketing materials advertising security?
How is XP now more secure than at release? Is the rate of infection down? (no, its not). Are patches being released more quickly? (no, they aren't).
I guess the XP firewall is on by default since SP2. I can't think of anything else, however.
Translation:
"Sit down, shut up, and eat the gruel we put in front of you. We're better than you, smarter than you, and we know whats best."
I'm not aware of any other software project, free or proprietary, that has as poor of a security record as an equivalent Microsoft product.
Don't blame it on marketshare; otherwise, Apache would lead IIS in terms of infection. And even if it is because of marketshare, you would think that the completely untouched (as in 0 viruses) environment of OS X would be a great target.
Surely, there must be some contingent of hackers out there that would love to be the FIRST to get an OS X virus into the wild.
The only reason MS gets away with this crap is because they have no liability whatsoever. MS will not, and does not stand behind the quality of its products. Security is not, and will not be a priority for MS because not having it doesn't cost them ANYTHING, and in many ways makes them money (more MSCE's needed for administration, more parterning with anti-virus firms, and the possibiltiy of future MS anti-virus rent).
I don't believe that the liability situation should be radically changed, however, MS should be punished for constantly advertising 'top notch security', when in reality their products are shoddy and poorly written, both in terms of implemenation (code bugs), and poor design.
Malware is also becoming intelligently designed
Are you sure its not evolving?
Ba-duh-chick!
...the more shall slip through their fingers.
http://rfsd.sourceforge.net/
Or similar projects for ext2.
If the giant flash companies (or whoever is in danger of paying a FAT royalty) instead put that moderate amount of money towards a few full time developers for alternative file system drivers for Windows, we won't need FAT.
And that's a good thing, because FAT is ancient.
The bigger question is what about VFAT support on Linux. It's not THAT big of a question anymore, since just about everyone I know runs their Windows XP partitions (and Vista, I presume) on NTFS, and has to work around proper file system support anyways.
The best answer to Linux support is most likely going to be things like captive NTFS. That way, you can use a MS implementation, and thus not violate any pattents.
That's fair. There isn't really any reason for them to be negative.
;-)
I still like my Powerbook, though
I like my Linux Desktop better, but I'm very happy with my powerbook.
Just a thought; won't the new iMac outperform G5 PowerMacs?
I suspect the 20-inch intel iMac is going to badly cannibalize G5 PowerMac sales.
Hell; the top MacBook Pro will most likely outperform all but the beefiest G5 PowerMacs.
Uh huh! I wanna run SuSE 10.0 on one of these puppies, and dual boot over to Windows.
Please, please god don't let the graphics card be running wonkie firmwares! I wanna use the binary ATI or NVIDIA drivers on these beasts.
Get over it, seriously.
It's pride and flashiness that sells products, and builds dynamic brand images.
You won't be able to maintain a trendy brand without being flashy like that. No one ever got fired for choosing IBM, but when was the last time IBM was considered a trendsetter?
Apple's brand identity requires them to function as they do, and its pretty harmless. Don't judge a book by its cover; Apple's machines are better engineered than their competitors; let them have their fun.
As far as I can tell, a similarly configured Dell with a Duo processor, same ram, same hard drive, etc., will cost me $2274, before shipping and tax.
About $250 cheaper, but you do get a 17" display, I suppose.
$250, a slightly larger display, versus the capability to run OS X?
I take it you don't buy luxury cars either, huh?
Apple is going to be more expensive than other manufacturers. They are a luxury computing brand. However, having intel processors will give them better Windows compatibility, and a better price/performance ratio.
Good grief son, buy yourself a clue! Learn some computing history. Read up on OS/2's support for Windows apps in a much simpler API era. At that time, IBM had access to Windows' source code and could "easily" write support to run Windows programs on OS/2. Yet IBM finally gave up because Microsoft could break OS/2's Windows support easily and Microsoft did so many times. IBM finally came to the conlusion that customers bitching about broken Windows support was not worth the headache. Lesson learned: If you control the API, you control everything.
Things are different now. Take a look at the way Crossover Office works. Codeweaver's Crossover Office is a viable application used in quite a few large scale linux deployments.
Codeweaver's does, indeed, work on duplicating the Win32 API (yes, codeweavers contributes substantially to Wine), however, rather than set architectural goals, codeweavers works on an app-by-app basis. They certify one app at a time as a compatible, to a certain patch revision. The end-user commercial product works like that, and the enterprise level support is a customized environment for whatever your needs maybe.
Codeweavers is a good deal more nimble than Win32 (and Microsoft) can be.
Don't knock WINE like that :-)
Wine runs some serious Windows apps, like MS Office, and Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player.
Picassa, Google Earth, and even many DirectX 9 Games.
Wine is not the abject failure you make it out to be. It's develop is slower than Mozilla at its slowest, but Wine is quite a success, IMHO.
Hmm... Except for Wireless drivers, OpenSuSE 10.0 handles most any hardware I throw at it, including ATI and Nvidia card with OpenGL support.
All my hardware works as expected, on my homebrew AMD64 system, my Inspiron 8200, my Sony All-in-one PCV-W510G (desktop on a laptop chasis), my neighbor's Compaq desktop, and a variety of other systems (all our Dell's at work, for example).
Except for Wireless drivers. For those, I use either ndiswrapper or Linuxant's Driverloader. Then I DO go to the manufacturer's site, and download the latest XP drivers.
One of the biggest advantage of SuSE is that all easy to medium difficulty hardware configuration can be handled from YaST. No text files needed. You just need to have moderately linux friendly hardware. The level of complexity and selectivity you need to have is roughly the same for Windows. You'll have problems with some win modems, webcams, and strange sound cards. But I have had problems with those same things in Windows; you find devices that simply don't have 2000 or XP drivers. Not to mention the up and coming Vista.
And don't get me started on Linux 64-bit drivers versus Windows XP 64-bit drivers. That's a crush for linux.
Yes, RPMs are very easy to use. Unfortunately, the problem comes in making sure you have every single library that the app you're installing uses. There are better installers out there, but every single one I have used has had dependency issues with one piece of software or another.
OpenSuSE uses APT-4-RPM by default. APT handles all dependancies automagically, as long as you have the right repositories setup. There are a HUGE number of SuSE repositories out there, most of them conveniently mirrored on ftp.gwdg.de, a nice, high speed server. This includes a bewildering array of software; just about every opensource package I could want to use.
YaST also handles dependancies nicely; that's why the default KDE option for handling RPMs is "yast -i ". YaST will handle the dependancies for you.
SMART is even better, and is most likely the future of SuSE package management. SMART integrates the system RPM database, APT-RPM repositories, and a variety of other systems. It has flexible dependancies, and will run even on a technically 'broken' setup that APT would choke on.
Apparently, you don't ever update your Linux systems with the various security and stability patches.
Well, this is handled automatically. I had done all my security updates through YaST. YOU does a great job, and it can do it on a set schedule.
Now I use ksmarttray, a SMART update manager. It blinks at me whenever updates are avaliable. Two clicks later, it installs them for me. I may have it do it automatically, I'm not sure. Either way, YOU or SMART are a great deal less of a hassle than Windows maintenance. I'm not talking about Windows Update. Automatic updates are the same either way. I'm talking about defrags, virus scans, spyware scans, and the occasional rootkit that fucks over your system.
Hmmm... First you have to install something that handles klik://, not a default in the last distro I ran...
The latest beta SuSE has klik:// built-in, I believe. SLiCK OpenSuSE does for sure. But your being a bit ridiculous; the install instructions are crazy simple. I quote:
Hmm... I've got 3. One 939, with one of those mini ATI motherboards, and two of the older AMD64s (748? 753? whatever). One's an Nforce3, one's a via.
The Nforce3 and VIA both worked out-of-box with SuSE 10.0. The ATI required some drivers from ATI, and were a giagantic pain in the ass, but then that's a given with all things linux and ATI.
Odd. Perhaps its a particular Slackware problem?
http://tg.an-netz.de/notebook/
Suggests that it runs properly in SuSE, without any problems. Are there multiple Intel Pro/100 cards?
Yes, the configure/make/make install thing sucks. IMHO, any driver that requires configure/make/make install is NOT ready for prime time on linux. Honestly, NOTHING should require configure/make/make install; it breaks package management badly. Automated systems that build RPMS from source are a decent kludge, but ideally no one should ever use such a thing.
The model of the new nvidia and ATI drivers is vastly superior. I also like the Samsung Binary laser printer drivers, they work pretty well, with a GUI only setup and decent CUPS integration. All of these can be installed via RPM, and uninstalled via RPM. The Nvidia and ATI drivers do a decent job cleaning up after themselves when you uninstall, but I'm not sure about the Samsung.
I think a large part of the law school app is that it prevents you from using any other applications or internet access. Its a controlled environment testing app, so even if it worked properly, I'm not sure that it would be able to stop konqueror from inside wine ;-)
:)
I'll give it a whirl, though
Hmm... Well, I haven't found many postings about the AR5005G and ndiswrapper, but I've had loads of success with ndiswrapper, so I'd give it a try.
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The Marvell Yukon sk98lin module seems to have problems with ACPI allocation of IRQs. Apparently a new module may be needed, or append the following line to your kernel configuration, acpi=noirq.
Quote:"Hi all, thanks for this post. After working about 1 full day on this problem, I found this post and the 'acpi=noirq' option seems to work on my new Toshiba M45-S2692. Whew! I've only been running about 10 minutes now, so I don't know if a slow-down will occur or not, but we will see. I'll post again after it runs awhile."
More information:
http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/lofiversion/ind
Many laptops have non-standard ACPI configurations, these can be a serious problem. I haven't run into it on modern Sony or HP laptops, but I have had problems with this on Dells. Usually, either acpi=noirq or an updated DSDT table fix this. On SuSE, anyways, both of these options are fairly easy to enable without mucking around in too many configuration files.
I do apologize for not believing you outright. I had not realized there was such a problem with this kernel module, but in my defense I haven't messed with any Marvell Yukon adapters. You may consider filing the a bug report with the maintainers, if you are feeling charitable.
More information, SuSE on your laptop line. More details on it being some sort of ACPI problem. http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?s=1c1a1b2f45b
Positive result with the AR5005G and ndiswrapper on SuSE. This is with a different Toshiba Laptop model:
http://www.suseforums.net/lofiversion/index.php/t
His main problem was getting the WPA-PSK key the same across all computers, since SuSE expects the end of the key to have padding 0, for a full 64 characters, while the Linksys router did not. I believe the latest OpenSuSE runs a recent ndiswrapper, so try that.