Unless that motherboard has a lot more than I'd guess, you've left out gigabit ethernet, firewire 400 and 800, optical audio in and out, and amplified analog audio out.
I did forget sound. Add in a SoundBlaster Live for $25. Firewire isn't much concern to me since I don't have anything that uses it; same with optical audio. The next board up from that Tyan has GigE (as well as dual 10/100 NICs). Again, I don't have any fibre (most home users don't) so that didn't seem important. That next board up also has onboard 160MB/sec SCSI. Would most home users of my hypothetical system which had that capability find any more use out of super fast SCSI than gigbit ethernet? Would they consider the Apple's "lack" of dual 10/100 NICs a deal breaker? I doubt it. Most people only need one NIC, Apple or PC.
You can't copmpare Apples to PCs straight across. If you need GigE, then that's what makes the decision for you: buy the Apple. Or get a GigE PCI card for a PC and call it even (just make sure that your PC has a 66MHz PCI slot).
Perhaps more importantly, that system would be about half the speed of the mac to which you're comparing it.
I'd say that "speed" depends greatly on what you are doing with the computer. The Apple vs. PC benchmark debate isn't one easily settled, and seems strongly weighted towards the application being benchmarked. The "Macs are twice as fast as x86 per clock" isn't all that true, from what I've read. That's getting *seriously* close to religious war territory, but at half the price, even if it was 1/4 slower it's a good deal. For me. If not for you, then add another $250 (or therabouts) and you get basically two 3GHz AMD CPUs, thereby wiping out any "megahertz myth" arguments.
Don't need GigE, optical audio, and all that speed? Then you should be comparing to an imac, which is still cheaper than what you've listed.
Not quite. You wouldn't need the expandability of "a lot" of PCI/AGP slots, much less dual CPUs. That first system is a desktop system, and fairly formidable one at that. I'd love to have one. It's got plenty of speed. I'd certainly rather have it than the high-end iMac. A dual-proc 2.4GHz against a single 1GHz PowerPC? That's not a fair comparison (and not only because the PC is cheaper). And although you do get a monitor with the iMac, I don't think it's a better deal.
A better comparison to the iMac would be a Shuttle SN41G2. Which I actually own, and recently built. It has an AMD "Barton" 2800+ CPU, 768 MB PC2700 DDR RAM, an 80GB/8MB disk, an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200, and a Pioneer 2x DVD-RW. The case/mainboard has FireWire, SPDIF, Dolby 5.1 sound, and an onboard nVidia GeForce4 MX (I added a Ti 4200 however; I had it "laying around"). It cost $650 to build. It's basically a tiny desktop PC for games, media, etc. You could compare it to those Alienware Navigator media center PCs that were out a while back. They were based on the Shuttle XPC case and came with Windows XP Media Edition (or whatever). Alienware had one roughly matching my specs which retailed for $1999 (I couldn't find a link but if you have the April 2003 issue of MaximumPC, check the ad on the back page).
The Navigator had a remote and some other goodies, but certainly not $1400 worth. A choice between that Navigator thing and an iMac means an iMac. A choice between building a customized version of (essentially) that Navigator system and buying an iMac means I build my own PC.
Certainly more importantly, you haven't accounted for your time spent selecting, purchasing, and assembling the parts. What's your consulting rate? Several hours work at a few hundred an hour dwarfs the cost of the hardware entirely.
I see your point, but I disagree. For some reason I get nearly e
Apples, for me, are much more expensive than PCs. In fact, Dells are way more expensive than PCs (that PC Jobs compared was probably a dual Xeon, which is not your "normal" desktop PC). All the machines I own are home-built (the Thinkpad I got from my last employer being the exception), using commodity x86 hardware. Until Apple can let me do that, there's no chance I'll ever be able to use OS X. Does that matter to Acme Insurance and ABC Investments and whatever other company that buys hardware from a vendor who offers a support contract? Probably not. But it makes a big difference to me, personally, that Apples cost a lot more. I suspect that it makes a big difference to all the companies that buy white box x86 PCs, too. (We have a lot of those at work, actually. My main development machine is a generic PC.)
The high-end model sells for $2,999 and has two 2GHz G5 chips, 512MB of memory, a 160GB hard drive and an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card. All three machines sport a new aluminum case and come with a SuperDrive that can read and burn both DVDs and CDs.
If I wanted to build a high-end PC from parts that matched the G5 specs (give or take), here's what I'd build:
Thunder K7X dual-proc motherboard: $289
AMD Athlon MP 2400 CPUs: $158 x 2 = $316
512 MB Crucial DDR RAM: $98
Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM 8MB buffer HDD: $146
Radeon 9600 Pro Ultra: $182
Sony DVD+/-RW Recorder Drive: $240
Lian-Li Aluminum case: $75
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 ATX PSU: $189
Operating system (including yearly upgrades): Free
(All that came from a cursory glance through pricewatch.com, with part/model numbers from memory, so there might be a little fudge factor built into those amounts and hardware choices.)
You'd have to also buy some misc parts like a keyboard/mouse, floppy (if you wanted it), IDE cables, etc. Most people who build PCs will already have all that laying around. The total cost is $1535, and that's using high-end, name brand parts. That's about half what the Apple costs, if you build it yourself.
There are actually some hidden savings in doing it yourself, too. If I were building this I'd carefully buy parts online, from vendors outside the state where I live (California). I'd have to pay taxes on the power supply (I personally won't buy anything other than PC Power & Cooling) and the RAM (I don't use anything but Crucial if I can help it) -- the rest I can get tax free. Tax on the G5 in California would bring the cost to around $3240. I figure shipping is largely a wash no matter what you get, but wouldn't cost much from the DIY persepctive. When you factor in having to pay for OS upgrades over the life of the hardware, you get even more benefits from building it yourself. The point is, just the cost of shipping along means you could get another hard drive, or double the RAM, or whatever if you built it yourself.
Now if I wanted to build a high-end PC from parts that bettered the Apple's specs, here's what I'd buy:
Thunder K8S dual-proc motherboard: $479
2 AMD Opteron 242 CPUs: $707 x 2 = $1414
1 GB DDR PC2700 RAM: $140
EIDE 250GB hard drive: $254
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB: $487
Sony DVD+/-RW Recorder Drive: $240
Lian-Li Aluminum case: $75
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 ATX PSU: $189
Operating system (including yearly upgrades): Free
Total on that is $3089. That's for Opteron CPUs, twice the memory, 60% more disk space, and a top-of-the-line Radeon. For a couple dollars more than what the Apples cost. Granted, there's not many reasons why most consumers/SOHO users would want or need an Opteron system, but corporate America likes it a lot. It means in many cases that they don't have to buy Suns or HPUX boxes, and ca
Furthermore, will you have to have a full OS up and running to be able to query and get data out of the DB?
I'm not much of a hardware guy, but it seems like you could work this out if you had a small (50MB?) partition whose filesystem was something "known" and "simple" (FAT32? NTFS? FAT?) that lived on the boot disk. This partition could contain a boot image of a trimmed-down version of enough of the OS to just read that DB and mount/expose partitions where ever needed in order to go into "rescue" mode. I'm thinking of something like Linux's initrd preliminary root file system image for SCSI and such, with added stuff.
That would work well enough, especially if you had some bare-bones framebuffer GUI that let you view and fix partitions, use a USB mouse/keyboard, tools to move files in/out of ramdisks, etc. It could get the creature feep something fierce, but you could easily draw the line at like 100MB of compressed image data and still come away with enough tools to recover data. You could also stick all this on a bootable rescue CD (although I'd be pissed if I had to tote around a CD in order to recover from a crash).
If MS wants to improve their patch process, they need to do a few things
I'd rather deal with software that is open, so you can instantly, and in great detail if need be, tell if something breaks what you need. I'd also rather deal with updating individual software packages rather than everything at once, like you say (the OS is a "software package"; the apps it runs are not). Using emerge, apt, and even RPM lets the admin figure out what needs to be installed. If the printing subsystem has an issue, that's a patch. If one of the file managers has problems, that's another. If the built-in firewalling needs updating, then you have yet another patch. They're all separate.
You just never know whjat ll you will get with a "service pack" even though MS tells you what's in it.
Research has shown that even a one-minute interruption during peak efficiency at work results in fifteen minutes of lost productivity, as it takes a while to get back into the groove. Hell it takes me fifteen minutes just to get comfortable.
I need your help. We need to start a coalition to keep people undisturbed. It's evil to bother a person when they are trying to put together a group of thoughts. It's certainly not fair. It should be stopped.
I find myself working from home (or needing to) more and more, if only to gain a sense of mental continuity so I can get more than an hour's work done in one stretch. More often than not, I head on up to my office when I get home from "work" so that I can actually get something accomplished "at work". It's affecting my psyche, and I need like a Congressional order for some sort of blue ribbon task force needed to stop this from ruining my entire life. Either that or I need to have my sense of duty mitigated somehow. Ideas? (I don't take drugs, so the obvious is out of the way...)
Craft me a clever sign for my office door: "The door is closed for a reason: I'm trying to actually do work. Don't knock, don't leave voicemail. Send me email and let me get back to you." If they have to type it out then they'll be brief, right?
Oh yeah: can this blue ribbon panel find a way to ban jabber forever? I thought "chat" was evil back when IRC started becoming all the rage for SLIP guys in the dorms. Online chat is worse than evil now. It's a guaranteed productivity stopper without parallel. I only have so many keystrokes in my RSI-laden forelimbs, so I have to maximize their earning potential and longevity, right?
45 cents for a jewel case? You're being diddled, son. Even in the UK, you can get them for 12p (~18c).
Hmm. I've never bought a jewel case in my life, so I wouldn't know. I simply searched google for "jewel case" and that's the price from the first link that came up. It seemed high to me, but I was too lazy to comparison shop for just a/. post.
Personally, I go for the 24x fabric cases - higher density than jewel cases, they fit in CD racks, and you can label the spines - so finding stuff is easy.
I've been using locate, mount and grep -- with the added bonus of being able to actually find stuff in the disc's data. That's worth even an "extra" 80 cents to me. Once you start getting used to it, you don't want to go back.
The only downside is game CDs. I've mounted ISOs and had samba serve them up but many games don't like the fact that Windows reports the drive as a network drive vs. a removable media drive.
Howver, the data they contain gets stored on the biggest set of drives I could afford last year, in an old Athlon mid-tower PC running Red Hat 7.3 and doing RAID1 with the raidtools package. I have no need for a CD's physical media beyond a possible "restore from a fat-finger" type of scenario. I can mount whatever ISO image I need to mount instantly, and I can get to the files over the network if need be. Audio CDs get stored as MPEGs which I can stream to work and other parts of the house.
With hard disks at about a buck a gigabyte, it only costs around 65 cents to store a completely full CD. Paper holders are nearly useless because you have to look at each CDs face to see what the disc contains (they travel well, however). Jewel cases can cost about 45 cents and they take up a lot of room. Neither of the two are amenable to grep. The convenience I get for paying the "extra" 20 cents to keep them all on a filer is well worth it to me.
My question is why a closed, not free product gets a plug every time they put out a new release?
It's good software. Being closed or open doesn't matter to many people as long as the software is good. Quite a lot of Mac software (including the OS itself) isn't open, yet you'll see plenty of it here for that same reason. Opera is incredibly fast, very stable and secure. It's not IE, and so represents choice. It's cross platform. It's highly configurable. Lots of people use it, especially those not quite "in the mainstream" (geeks; Slashdot's target audience). Pick one reason I guess.
As far as needing another browser for MS-centric stuff, well I suspect you'd have the same problem if you used Moz, Konqueror, Netscape 4, or anything that isn't IE with MS Money and such (in fact, you'd probably have issues even with older versions of IE). I've seen some issues with sites and online apps that cater exclusively to IE. And since IE isn't available for Linux I have no choice but to find alternatives. Ecommerce hasn't been a problem, however. I've shopped online at about every major ecommerce site you could probably think of without any issues I can recall.
Is this one of those nested advertisements?
No. They may exist, but this isn't one of them. At least nobody paid me to submit it. I literally happened to go to opera.com this morning to insatll the beta of version 7 on a new machine and saw the press release about 7 going gold. Figuring that other people on Slashdot might like to know about it (see above), I submitted it. I also recalled seeing the 7 beta get a mention a few months ago (which is what caused me to go an grab the beta, actually) and I figured folks here would like to know about the final release version too.
I own this book, and it's a good one (it has a lot of examples, and the chapter on generating PDFs was interesting, for example). I'd actually recommend O'Reilly's Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, however. I think the example code is better, and it went into individual details of MySQL and PHP more. You're exactly right about one thing: once you've used either book for any length of time, they become obsolete. PHP moves pretty fast, and even small revs of MySQL can contain lots of new features. Both the PHP and MySQL web sites are excellent references which a book just cannot compete with, no matter how good it is.
An interesting side note: the MySQL people "stole" (Rasmus Lerdorf's words, not mine) php.net's webmaster. For a long time now, I've gotten very used to typing things like php.net/mysql_pconnect in the location bar of my browser and getting redirected to the right page in the online docs. MySQL's new webmaster brought that feature with him, so you can do things like mysql.com/select and get answers fast. (If you want to do this on your site, it's actually fairly simple. Check out lerdorf.com/tips.pdf. Look midway through for a slide on the $PATH_INFO environment variable.)
The web sites obviate both books for all but beginners, IMO.
Take a look at WinSCP, and see if that is what you're talking about.
I know what you mean. At my last job I had a Windows laptop (which had to stay Windows since I had to write InstallShield installers and such). I didn't much like it at first but two things were hard to leave behind: EditPlus and WinSCP. I don't know why I liked EditPlus so much. It was lightweight and did just enough (but more than vim or notepad). It never crashed on me and I liked its sytnax highlighting. Quanta is pretty close though, and is what I wind up using now for XML/HTML/TXT/Whatever more often than not. I wish the word wrap would behave, but that's a minor thing.
WinSCP was really hard to leave. Early versions had serious memory leaks, but the last version I tried (about a year about I guess) worked fine. I looked all over for a gui version of it in the Linux world. I couldn't fnd anything. The closest I got was using scp (and sftp, I suppose) in gFTP. (Start up a connection and then select 'SSH2' in the drop-down near the top, to the far right.) But with the fish kio slave, I don't have to worry about that. I worked from home today and spent 14 hours today in Quanta and Konqueror, editing a bunch of remote files at work. It got a little slow a couple times, but that's network latency.
Using WinSCP, it is so incredibly easy, I can't believe someone hasn't copied it for gnu/linux. I just can't believe it. It's two windows, similar to commander, or a split view of konqueror, and it's drag and drop. That's it. You can specify ssh, login name/pwd, type of encryption, and other basics, but all it is,is drag and drop. Do you want to convert to all lowercase? Do you want to delete files on remote server? Do you want to capitalize first letter of files? Overwrite? That's it. Plain and simple drag and drop. No magic incantation scp command lines. You don't have to memorize a command line, or write it down, or hope it doesn't get bumped from your bash history file
Like the other poster said, I think you'd like using kio_fish. It does pretty much all this. And as an added bonus, if you use ssh-agent
then you can get that same functionality yet never have to type a password. That's even easier (if you can get around the security implications).
If you want to make Konqueror look like WinSCP, you just go to Window -> Split View Left/Right, type in the 'fish://example.com' thing in the location bar, enter your password, then click in the right-hand pane and click on the home icon (or type 'file:/path/to/somewhere' in the location bar if you don't want to go $HOME) and you're done. Feel free to right-click on files, drag them around between the two panes, make new local or remote directories, whatever. I hear that there's a way to run remote scripts (you can lower case files with a 3-line shell script) but I haven't looked into it.
After reading the response from the author of the article in the post, I think that having this remote file tree in the tabbed pane of an app like Quanta would be a big help. But even without this, kio_fish makes it really easy to use files remotely. It might be worth the KDE upgrade for you (and the new KDE just looks nice, too).
-B
Re:The reviewer doesn't know about kio_fish
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Quanta Gold Reviewed
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· Score: 0, Troll
It's a lot faster to be able to view the remote directories in realtime and being able to select which files you wish to open with something as simple as a double-click.
Ah, I get what you mean. I've long since turned off the pane on the side. I don't really need to see the file system I suppose. And it takes up a lot of room.
You're exactly right, though: it would be very nice if you could see the remote filesystem through the tabbed window. I'd almost certainly use it again if I could do that. I might go submit this a sa feature request. It shouldn't be so hard it implement (it's essentially the same thing as Konqueror's filesystem tree).
-B
The reviewer doesn't know about kio_fish
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Quanta Gold Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From the review:
For example, saving a document while the FTP tab is open actually FTPs the file back to its original location on a defined server, which is a common feature in almost every other Web development environment. It's arrival in Quanta Gold is certainly welcome, but it would be nice if other protocols like SCP, SFTP, or Rsync were supported as well.
The reviewer doesn't know about kio_fish. (He might also be using an older version of KDE. Although it can be used with older versions if you install it yourself, kio_fish comes standard in KDE 3.1 and above.) It essentially does the scp/sftp thing automatically. Start Quanta, go to File -> Open and in the 'Location' box type something like 'fish://example.com/path/to/document/doc.txt'. Then when asked, enter your password for your account on example.com. You file will open just as if it's living on the filesystem of the machine you started Quanta from. You can open additional remote files, save remote files, open local files, whatever without having to worry about moving files between machines.
This works in any KDE app, too. Hit alt+F2 and enter 'fish://example.com'. You'll get a Konqueror window opened to your home directory on example.com. This is an incredibly handy feature of KDE. This basically settled the GNOME vs. KDE debate for me once I started uising it.
NT4 is about 7(?) years old now and I'd be surprised if many people would be running on RH 5 and expecting support for it, and of those who would be able to code a patch for their own machine? Not many.
I know of guys who *refuse* to move from Red Hat 5.2. They build their own kernels, have added OpenSSH/SSL, keep Apache/MySQL/JVM/glibc/etc updated and tweaked, run samba, all sorts of stuff. I know of some 6.2 servers out there which will likely be around for a while, too. You'd be surprised how many "old" versions you'll find. I was still running on an older machine 6.2 until a couple months ago. I kept it all patched up and updated without having to write a single line of code.
You know what? That's another one of the reasons why Linux makes a very good OS: you get the freedom to update whatever you want, for as long as you want, if you want. Sure, most people don't get down into the actual code and author changes, but there's really nothing stopping you or I from grabbing 5.2 ISOs, installing and patching everything we need -- or writing our own pacthes. Now, you don't actually need to write your own kernel and software patches since you can update the OS and its software piecemeal, but you could if you wanted to. And at least you get the choice.
I never understood why there always existed the notion that if you use Windows, you can't use Linux (and vice versa). I use both at home, and Windows occasionally at work, depending on what I want to accomplish. Here's an odd concept: use the right tool for the job. Use samba, or use Win2K with filesharing. Or use both if you want to. Windows makes a fine desktop OS, Red Hat does OpenAFS and Apache very well. Of course, the choice also depends on what your organization can support. If you have a lot of Linux experience, there's no reason to use Windows for everything, the converse to that being equally true as well.
My main problem with using MS for everything is that their patches come in service packs and not singly. I know of a more than a couple Win32 servers which are firewalled instead of completely patched because the admins just aren't totally sure what all a hotfix/service pack/update will do to their machine (why they don't have other hardware they can test on, I don't know; I suspect time is a limiting factor). This is part of the reason why slapper was so big (the update being a pain to install also helped). That critical updates come with other choices which have been made for you is a hard pill for me to swallow. The Win32 servers at work also seem to have more downtime, but I don't have any numbers compiled so i can't really argue the point.
I'm no great fan of MS, but you are right: thery are doing some pretty impressive stuff. For a small to medium-sized workgroup, I think the two are roughly equivalent. Given the choice I'd personally pick Red Hat primarily because of the patching issues, licensing/cost, familiarity in our workplace, and freedom of choice. But just because some other group doesn't make that same set of choices doesn't mean they are necessarily "losing" anything or are worse off.
I'm a KDE user, everywhere I get the choice. But I've given money to the GNOME people, in spite of their MS affectations vis-a-vis Mono.
Thank them? Sure, they do good work. Thank everyone, too. Thank everyone by giving something back, be it code or money. Do what you can to help out. Competition means choices, and that can only be a good thing.
But if you want the major commercial software companies like Adobe, MS(?) to come down and write competitive applications, Linux has to have a wide market acceptance. I think *that* is a sufficient incentive to feel the need to spread Linux to non- geeks.
But not everybody needs Adobe or MS or Intuit or whomever to port their apps. I can't think of a single app I've missed while using Linux -- outside of a game; my one Windows box is basically nothing more than a high-end console. In fact, one of the things that pains me about having to use Windows at all is getting all the apps paid for and installed.
I just installed Red Hat 9 on a new machine last night. The only commercial product I needed was Opera (and not really even then, since Moz or Konqueror will both work). I went trolling through freshmeat and sourceforge to get everything else (although RH9 comes with a lot of stuff already). On Saturday I installed Windows XP on another new machine. The only thing I could put on there was a freeware editor, Opera, and the few games I own. If I wanted anything else for that PC, I'd have to hit Fry's and bust out my credit card.
I don't need to go pay for Photoshop when I have The GIMP. I don't need Word when I have OpenOffice. I don't need Quicken when I have GNUCash (or MoneyDance). I don't need commercial software when I have freeware alternatives that work just as well, give or take. You have to do the math for yourself to decide whether "free with fewer features" is worth it, but in my case it always has been.
I dunno. I sure wouldn't mind greater acceptance of Linux. But rather than pointing to ported commercial apps, I'd think that "when you use Linux nearly all the software you want is free" is a selling point in and of itself.
go to that link, rate them, rate for block, in comments put "porn"
Touche! Well done. I dig your style, man.
Here's what I gave them as comments for my "block" rating:
Unfairly labels non-pornographic sites as "pornography". Therefore might also create "false negatives" by failing to label pornographic sites as such. Recommend blocking so as to be safe in either case.
Slashdot Mirror
I did forget sound. Add in a SoundBlaster Live for $25. Firewire isn't much concern to me since I don't have anything that uses it; same with optical audio. The next board up from that Tyan has GigE (as well as dual 10/100 NICs). Again, I don't have any fibre (most home users don't) so that didn't seem important. That next board up also has onboard 160MB/sec SCSI. Would most home users of my hypothetical system which had that capability find any more use out of super fast SCSI than gigbit ethernet? Would they consider the Apple's "lack" of dual 10/100 NICs a deal breaker? I doubt it. Most people only need one NIC, Apple or PC.
You can't copmpare Apples to PCs straight across. If you need GigE, then that's what makes the decision for you: buy the Apple. Or get a GigE PCI card for a PC and call it even (just make sure that your PC has a 66MHz PCI slot).
Perhaps more importantly, that system would be about half the speed of the mac to which you're comparing it.
I'd say that "speed" depends greatly on what you are doing with the computer. The Apple vs. PC benchmark debate isn't one easily settled, and seems strongly weighted towards the application being benchmarked. The "Macs are twice as fast as x86 per clock" isn't all that true, from what I've read. That's getting *seriously* close to religious war territory, but at half the price, even if it was 1/4 slower it's a good deal. For me. If not for you, then add another $250 (or therabouts) and you get basically two 3GHz AMD CPUs, thereby wiping out any "megahertz myth" arguments.
Don't need GigE, optical audio, and all that speed? Then you should be comparing to an imac, which is still cheaper than what you've listed.
Not quite. You wouldn't need the expandability of "a lot" of PCI/AGP slots, much less dual CPUs. That first system is a desktop system, and fairly formidable one at that. I'd love to have one. It's got plenty of speed. I'd certainly rather have it than the high-end iMac. A dual-proc 2.4GHz against a single 1GHz PowerPC? That's not a fair comparison (and not only because the PC is cheaper). And although you do get a monitor with the iMac, I don't think it's a better deal.
A better comparison to the iMac would be a Shuttle SN41G2. Which I actually own, and recently built. It has an AMD "Barton" 2800+ CPU, 768 MB PC2700 DDR RAM, an 80GB/8MB disk, an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200, and a Pioneer 2x DVD-RW. The case/mainboard has FireWire, SPDIF, Dolby 5.1 sound, and an onboard nVidia GeForce4 MX (I added a Ti 4200 however; I had it "laying around"). It cost $650 to build. It's basically a tiny desktop PC for games, media, etc. You could compare it to those Alienware Navigator media center PCs that were out a while back. They were based on the Shuttle XPC case and came with Windows XP Media Edition (or whatever). Alienware had one roughly matching my specs which retailed for $1999 (I couldn't find a link but if you have the April 2003 issue of MaximumPC, check the ad on the back page).
The Navigator had a remote and some other goodies, but certainly not $1400 worth. A choice between that Navigator thing and an iMac means an iMac. A choice between building a customized version of (essentially) that Navigator system and buying an iMac means I build my own PC.
Certainly more importantly, you haven't accounted for your time spent selecting, purchasing, and assembling the parts. What's your consulting rate? Several hours work at a few hundred an hour dwarfs the cost of the hardware entirely.
I see your point, but I disagree. For some reason I get nearly e
From news.com's story:
If I wanted to build a high-end PC from parts that matched the G5 specs (give or take), here's what I'd build:
(All that came from a cursory glance through pricewatch.com, with part/model numbers from memory, so there might be a little fudge factor built into those amounts and hardware choices.)
You'd have to also buy some misc parts like a keyboard/mouse, floppy (if you wanted it), IDE cables, etc. Most people who build PCs will already have all that laying around. The total cost is $1535, and that's using high-end, name brand parts. That's about half what the Apple costs, if you build it yourself.
There are actually some hidden savings in doing it yourself, too. If I were building this I'd carefully buy parts online, from vendors outside the state where I live (California). I'd have to pay taxes on the power supply (I personally won't buy anything other than PC Power & Cooling) and the RAM (I don't use anything but Crucial if I can help it) -- the rest I can get tax free. Tax on the G5 in California would bring the cost to around $3240. I figure shipping is largely a wash no matter what you get, but wouldn't cost much from the DIY persepctive. When you factor in having to pay for OS upgrades over the life of the hardware, you get even more benefits from building it yourself. The point is, just the cost of shipping along means you could get another hard drive, or double the RAM, or whatever if you built it yourself.
Now if I wanted to build a high-end PC from parts that bettered the Apple's specs, here's what I'd buy:
Total on that is $3089. That's for Opteron CPUs, twice the memory, 60% more disk space, and a top-of-the-line Radeon. For a couple dollars more than what the Apples cost. Granted, there's not many reasons why most consumers/SOHO users would want or need an Opteron system, but corporate America likes it a lot. It means in many cases that they don't have to buy Suns or HPUX boxes, and ca
I had a feeling that I was "inventing" anything new. Thanks for the link!
-B
I'm not much of a hardware guy, but it seems like you could work this out if you had a small (50MB?) partition whose filesystem was something "known" and "simple" (FAT32? NTFS? FAT?) that lived on the boot disk. This partition could contain a boot image of a trimmed-down version of enough of the OS to just read that DB and mount/expose partitions where ever needed in order to go into "rescue" mode. I'm thinking of something like Linux's initrd preliminary root file system image for SCSI and such, with added stuff.
That would work well enough, especially if you had some bare-bones framebuffer GUI that let you view and fix partitions, use a USB mouse/keyboard, tools to move files in/out of ramdisks, etc. It could get the creature feep something fierce, but you could easily draw the line at like 100MB of compressed image data and still come away with enough tools to recover data. You could also stick all this on a bootable rescue CD (although I'd be pissed if I had to tote around a CD in order to recover from a crash).
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I'd rather deal with software that is open, so you can instantly, and in great detail if need be, tell if something breaks what you need. I'd also rather deal with updating individual software packages rather than everything at once, like you say (the OS is a "software package"; the apps it runs are not). Using emerge, apt, and even RPM lets the admin figure out what needs to be installed. If the printing subsystem has an issue, that's a patch. If one of the file managers has problems, that's another. If the built-in firewalling needs updating, then you have yet another patch. They're all separate.
You just never know whjat ll you will get with a "service pack" even though MS tells you what's in it.
But I'm preaching to the pope...
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I need your help. We need to start a coalition to keep people undisturbed. It's evil to bother a person when they are trying to put together a group of thoughts. It's certainly not fair. It should be stopped.
I find myself working from home (or needing to) more and more, if only to gain a sense of mental continuity so I can get more than an hour's work done in one stretch. More often than not, I head on up to my office when I get home from "work" so that I can actually get something accomplished "at work". It's affecting my psyche, and I need like a Congressional order for some sort of blue ribbon task force needed to stop this from ruining my entire life. Either that or I need to have my sense of duty mitigated somehow. Ideas? (I don't take drugs, so the obvious is out of the way...)
Craft me a clever sign for my office door: "The door is closed for a reason: I'm trying to actually do work. Don't knock, don't leave voicemail. Send me email and let me get back to you." If they have to type it out then they'll be brief, right?
Oh yeah: can this blue ribbon panel find a way to ban jabber forever? I thought "chat" was evil back when IRC started becoming all the rage for SLIP guys in the dorms. Online chat is worse than evil now. It's a guaranteed productivity stopper without parallel. I only have so many keystrokes in my RSI-laden forelimbs, so I have to maximize their earning potential and longevity, right?
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Enough of my ranting.
Hmm. I've never bought a jewel case in my life, so I wouldn't know. I simply searched google for "jewel case" and that's the price from the first link that came up. It seemed high to me, but I was too lazy to comparison shop for just a /. post.
Personally, I go for the 24x fabric cases - higher density than jewel cases, they fit in CD racks, and you can label the spines - so finding stuff is easy.
I've been using locate, mount and grep -- with the added bonus of being able to actually find stuff in the disc's data. That's worth even an "extra" 80 cents to me. Once you start getting used to it, you don't want to go back.
The only downside is game CDs. I've mounted ISOs and had samba serve them up but many games don't like the fact that Windows reports the drive as a network drive vs. a removable media drive.
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With hard disks at about a buck a gigabyte, it only costs around 65 cents to store a completely full CD. Paper holders are nearly useless because you have to look at each CDs face to see what the disc contains (they travel well, however). Jewel cases can cost about 45 cents and they take up a lot of room. Neither of the two are amenable to grep. The convenience I get for paying the "extra" 20 cents to keep them all on a filer is well worth it to me.
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It's good software. Being closed or open doesn't matter to many people as long as the software is good. Quite a lot of Mac software (including the OS itself) isn't open, yet you'll see plenty of it here for that same reason. Opera is incredibly fast, very stable and secure. It's not IE, and so represents choice. It's cross platform. It's highly configurable. Lots of people use it, especially those not quite "in the mainstream" (geeks; Slashdot's target audience). Pick one reason I guess.
As far as needing another browser for MS-centric stuff, well I suspect you'd have the same problem if you used Moz, Konqueror, Netscape 4, or anything that isn't IE with MS Money and such (in fact, you'd probably have issues even with older versions of IE). I've seen some issues with sites and online apps that cater exclusively to IE. And since IE isn't available for Linux I have no choice but to find alternatives. Ecommerce hasn't been a problem, however. I've shopped online at about every major ecommerce site you could probably think of without any issues I can recall.
Is this one of those nested advertisements?
No. They may exist, but this isn't one of them. At least nobody paid me to submit it. I literally happened to go to opera.com this morning to insatll the beta of version 7 on a new machine and saw the press release about 7 going gold. Figuring that other people on Slashdot might like to know about it (see above), I submitted it. I also recalled seeing the 7 beta get a mention a few months ago (which is what caused me to go an grab the beta, actually) and I figured folks here would like to know about the final release version too.
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An interesting side note: the MySQL people "stole" (Rasmus Lerdorf's words, not mine) php.net's webmaster. For a long time now, I've gotten very used to typing things like php.net/mysql_pconnect in the location bar of my browser and getting redirected to the right page in the online docs. MySQL's new webmaster brought that feature with him, so you can do things like mysql.com/select and get answers fast. (If you want to do this on your site, it's actually fairly simple. Check out lerdorf.com/tips.pdf. Look midway through for a slide on the $PATH_INFO environment variable.)
The web sites obviate both books for all but beginners, IMO.
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I know what you mean. At my last job I had a Windows laptop (which had to stay Windows since I had to write InstallShield installers and such). I didn't much like it at first but two things were hard to leave behind: EditPlus and WinSCP. I don't know why I liked EditPlus so much. It was lightweight and did just enough (but more than vim or notepad). It never crashed on me and I liked its sytnax highlighting. Quanta is pretty close though, and is what I wind up using now for XML/HTML/TXT/Whatever more often than not. I wish the word wrap would behave, but that's a minor thing.
WinSCP was really hard to leave. Early versions had serious memory leaks, but the last version I tried (about a year about I guess) worked fine. I looked all over for a gui version of it in the Linux world. I couldn't fnd anything. The closest I got was using scp (and sftp, I suppose) in gFTP. (Start up a connection and then select 'SSH2' in the drop-down near the top, to the far right.) But with the fish kio slave, I don't have to worry about that. I worked from home today and spent 14 hours today in Quanta and Konqueror, editing a bunch of remote files at work. It got a little slow a couple times, but that's network latency.
Using WinSCP, it is so incredibly easy, I can't believe someone hasn't copied it for gnu/linux. I just can't believe it. It's two windows, similar to commander, or a split view of konqueror, and it's drag and drop. That's it. You can specify ssh, login name/pwd, type of encryption, and other basics, but all it is,is drag and drop. Do you want to convert to all lowercase? Do you want to delete files on remote server? Do you want to capitalize first letter of files? Overwrite? That's it. Plain and simple drag and drop. No magic incantation scp command lines. You don't have to memorize a command line, or write it down, or hope it doesn't get bumped from your bash history file
Like the other poster said, I think you'd like using kio_fish. It does pretty much all this. And as an added bonus, if you use ssh-agent then you can get that same functionality yet never have to type a password. That's even easier (if you can get around the security implications).
If you want to make Konqueror look like WinSCP, you just go to Window -> Split View Left/Right, type in the 'fish://example.com' thing in the location bar, enter your password, then click in the right-hand pane and click on the home icon (or type 'file:/path/to/somewhere' in the location bar if you don't want to go $HOME) and you're done. Feel free to right-click on files, drag them around between the two panes, make new local or remote directories, whatever. I hear that there's a way to run remote scripts (you can lower case files with a 3-line shell script) but I haven't looked into it.
After reading the response from the author of the article in the post, I think that having this remote file tree in the tabbed pane of an app like Quanta would be a big help. But even without this, kio_fish makes it really easy to use files remotely. It might be worth the KDE upgrade for you (and the new KDE just looks nice, too).
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Ah, I get what you mean. I've long since turned off the pane on the side. I don't really need to see the file system I suppose. And it takes up a lot of room.
You're exactly right, though: it would be very nice if you could see the remote filesystem through the tabbed window. I'd almost certainly use it again if I could do that. I might go submit this a sa feature request. It shouldn't be so hard it implement (it's essentially the same thing as Konqueror's filesystem tree).
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The reviewer doesn't know about kio_fish. (He might also be using an older version of KDE. Although it can be used with older versions if you install it yourself, kio_fish comes standard in KDE 3.1 and above.) It essentially does the scp/sftp thing automatically. Start Quanta, go to File -> Open and in the 'Location' box type something like 'fish://example.com/path/to/document/doc.txt'. Then when asked, enter your password for your account on example.com. You file will open just as if it's living on the filesystem of the machine you started Quanta from. You can open additional remote files, save remote files, open local files, whatever without having to worry about moving files between machines.
This works in any KDE app, too. Hit alt+F2 and enter 'fish://example.com'. You'll get a Konqueror window opened to your home directory on example.com. This is an incredibly handy feature of KDE. This basically settled the GNOME vs. KDE debate for me once I started uising it.
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I know of guys who *refuse* to move from Red Hat 5.2. They build their own kernels, have added OpenSSH/SSL, keep Apache/MySQL/JVM/glibc/etc updated and tweaked, run samba, all sorts of stuff. I know of some 6.2 servers out there which will likely be around for a while, too. You'd be surprised how many "old" versions you'll find. I was still running on an older machine 6.2 until a couple months ago. I kept it all patched up and updated without having to write a single line of code.
You know what? That's another one of the reasons why Linux makes a very good OS: you get the freedom to update whatever you want, for as long as you want, if you want. Sure, most people don't get down into the actual code and author changes, but there's really nothing stopping you or I from grabbing 5.2 ISOs, installing and patching everything we need -- or writing our own pacthes. Now, you don't actually need to write your own kernel and software patches since you can update the OS and its software piecemeal, but you could if you wanted to. And at least you get the choice.
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Yeah, um, that should have been "slammer", not slapper. Slammer == MS SQL Server, slapper == Linux Apache server.
Hey, at least I said the two OSes were roughly equivalent, right?
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My main problem with using MS for everything is that their patches come in service packs and not singly. I know of a more than a couple Win32 servers which are firewalled instead of completely patched because the admins just aren't totally sure what all a hotfix/service pack/update will do to their machine (why they don't have other hardware they can test on, I don't know; I suspect time is a limiting factor). This is part of the reason why slapper was so big (the update being a pain to install also helped). That critical updates come with other choices which have been made for you is a hard pill for me to swallow. The Win32 servers at work also seem to have more downtime, but I don't have any numbers compiled so i can't really argue the point.
I'm no great fan of MS, but you are right: thery are doing some pretty impressive stuff. For a small to medium-sized workgroup, I think the two are roughly equivalent. Given the choice I'd personally pick Red Hat primarily because of the patching issues, licensing/cost, familiarity in our workplace, and freedom of choice. But just because some other group doesn't make that same set of choices doesn't mean they are necessarily "losing" anything or are worse off.
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Thank them? Sure, they do good work. Thank everyone, too. Thank everyone by giving something back, be it code or money. Do what you can to help out. Competition means choices, and that can only be a good thing.
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But not everybody needs Adobe or MS or Intuit or whomever to port their apps. I can't think of a single app I've missed while using Linux -- outside of a game; my one Windows box is basically nothing more than a high-end console. In fact, one of the things that pains me about having to use Windows at all is getting all the apps paid for and installed.
I just installed Red Hat 9 on a new machine last night. The only commercial product I needed was Opera (and not really even then, since Moz or Konqueror will both work). I went trolling through freshmeat and sourceforge to get everything else (although RH9 comes with a lot of stuff already). On Saturday I installed Windows XP on another new machine. The only thing I could put on there was a freeware editor, Opera, and the few games I own. If I wanted anything else for that PC, I'd have to hit Fry's and bust out my credit card.
I don't need to go pay for Photoshop when I have The GIMP. I don't need Word when I have OpenOffice. I don't need Quicken when I have GNUCash (or MoneyDance). I don't need commercial software when I have freeware alternatives that work just as well, give or take. You have to do the math for yourself to decide whether "free with fewer features" is worth it, but in my case it always has been.
I dunno. I sure wouldn't mind greater acceptance of Linux. But rather than pointing to ported commercial apps, I'd think that "when you use Linux nearly all the software you want is free" is a selling point in and of itself.
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I think that you are lacking humor. Teh funny kind. Get a grip, lighten up.
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Go ask RMS what the word 'Linux' means. Heh heh...
I personally think that just 'Linux' covers all the bases I need covered, but thn I never had much desire to be kewl.
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Touche! Well done. I dig your style, man.
Here's what I gave them as comments for my "block" rating:
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Who gives two squirts if they rate your site as pr0n? It shouldn't affect you at all.
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