All you're really saying on Feb. 14 is "I got you these flowers because my television told me to." Any other day of the year, the message is "I was driving home from work when it hit me how much I love you, so I stopped off at the store and bought you some flowers."
That's why the whole flower thing equates so closely to the diamond discussion that started this thread. Flowers are bought on St. Valentine's Day because an expectation has been created.
Even so, I think that "here, I grew these for you" would be an even more romantic statement than either of the ones you mentioned.
However, supporting slavery moved the common laborer up one level in social standing. In other ways, the poor Irish immigrant was worse off than the negro slave. They were called in to do dangerous work because if they died, it was of no concern to the land/company owner.
Right. That's why all those slaves were constantly laughing at the plight of the Irish immigrants, and were really sad to lose those comfortable and prestigious slave positions when that bastard Abe Lincoln had them all fired. Also, those chains were just fashion accessories; deep down, they didn't really want to escape or murder their owners or anything.
The truth is, Irish immigrants chose to take shitty and dangerous jobs for the money, becuase they had just fled conditions of abject poverty and starvation back in Ireland. Blacks, on the other hand, were hauld to America like cargo, lived their whole lives in bondage, doing hard labor from the moment they could walk, and were casually discarded when (or, rather, if) they got old.
I find it a little astonishing that Southern revisionism of the brutal facts of slavery still continue to this day.
Shop for cut roses next Feb 13, and see if you feel the same way. It's enough to make a bachelor like me want to build a hothouse in his back yard, just to have a reserve of flowers ready on demand.
The new case looks to me like minor and needed upgrade from what was already the best case in the home computer industry: Better (and probably quieter) air-flow, room for another optical drive & more internal HD's, and Apple's usual swing-open case design that would make the Dell Dude weep with envy.
More important - that's the THEORETICAL peak. You will never see anything close to it in practice.
Yes, but if you compare it to the theoretical peak of the Pentium or Athlon, then it's still a relatively fair comparison of the chip itself... and 18 Gflops is not too shabby.
Nobody is blaming Apple for using Photoshop. The problem is that they don't provide any details. In practice, it looks like they are only testing 3 or 4 filters that are heavily Altivec-optimized, so it is not typical for Photoshop performace.
I agree with you that it is a little misleading, but Photoshop does serve as a showcase for Alti-vec in general; basically saying "if you write code that takes advantage of Alti-vec, check out the speed boost you can get!" For that reason, it's not a totally worthless metric, but it's still not very applicable to the average user.
I run LinuxPPC on my old PowerMac clone, but I prefer OS X anyday.
No doubt about it. LinuxPPC is a great way to breathe life into an old Mac, if you want it to do heavy-lifting that the old Mac OS is unsuited for.
I still have yet to hear anybody convince me why they would ever need to buy a G4 with Linux pre-installed. If I need a Linux system, I'll buy an AMD shitbox and use that. The whole magic and wonder of Linux for the desktop is that you can have a UNIX-alike running on an AMD shitbox.
Sure, Stallmanists will tell you that Linux rocks because it's the only GPL'd choice out there and we should all support the GPL wherever it is found and drink the Flavorade... but while I like some GNU applicatioins, I really don't give a shit about their political agenda. I actually prefer the BSD license; and no, I'm not interested in chatting about it... it's worse than the emacs/vi flame wars.
Bottom line, LinuxPPC is mostly only good for getting extra use out of old Macs, or for Mac owners who want to learn Linux without buying a second machine to do so. Nothing posted under this story has really demonstrated otherwise.
Because he doesn't prioritize playing games above other more important things he uses his computer for... such as his *job*, selling banner ads by ranting about Linux being mad 'leet.
Actually, it sounds like he's talking about more of a recreational machine here, although I could be wrong.
No need to "split" his e-mail. There are a lot of work-arounds to avoid that. There's even a lot of ways to run a "comphy unix mail reader" from a Windows desktop. For relatively platform-agnostic people like me (I use Windows, OS X, Linux, and several flavors of UNIX, and like things about each of them... although less so with Windows), using cross-platform apps and/or remote desktop tools really is not a big deal.
As for why read his mail from the Windows environment, the answer is obvious: so he doesn't need to reboot, which was his chief complaint about having to play one of his favorite games in Windows.
You are correct. "Gamers", as in "people who buy their computer just to play games on it" are Windows users, for the obvious reason that their favorite games were either Windows-only or Windows-first.
However, there are those of us who purchased our computers with other considerations in mind, who would also like to play games on them.
Granted, that tends to be the exception these days, now that you can build a more-or-less usable game PC for about 400 bucks. Most Mac geeks I know who like games have a PC on the next desk over for gaming, and most Linux gamers either do the same, or else dual boot.
Personally, I found this set-up ideal back when I was into EQ. I could pull up maps, guild websites, and game info on my Mac's web browser while still keeping one eye on the game itself over on the PC monitor. Other times I could work on various projects on my Mac while my character camped some remote spawn point. Then, of course, there were all those hacks for reading the server traffic so you could know more than the average bear about the game data...
If I was one of those Mac or Linux Zealots, I suppose I would hate the gaming gap... but since I don't really have much of a problem with owning a dedicated "game PC", it's really kind of a non-issue to me.
Not to mention the fact that it's kinda sad that he can't figure out how to check his e-mail from the Windows side of his dual-boot system.
Even if you hate Outlook (rightly so), there are lots of Free-as-in-beer options for this sort of thing, and even a few Free-as-in-Stallman-would-be-mostly-okay-with-it options out there.
Hell, for that matter, since you are probably using one of the/. boxen as your main mail server, just run an SSH client (they have those for Windows, ya know) and log into the server itself.
Besides, you are playing a game on a closed-source operating system already, so it's not you're religious about the GPL or something. Sheesh.
What's a geek who refuses to learn something new? Dead.
I would hardly call a BSD/tcsh person adapting to Linux/bash, or vice versa, "learning something new."
The syntaxes are almost identical for most things, it's just picky little details that annoy you when you are not using your favorite flavor of *nix. And when you are talking about your regular home system or your laptop, you most certainly can afford the luxury of sticking with what you enjoy using.
Maybe I'm just too old (at 26) to deal with the younger geeks without a chuckle at their naive view of operating systems.
Are there still younger geeks than that? I thought we gen-Xers, growing up with Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s, were just about the last of the breed that groks the command line (or even knows where the word "grok" comes from for that matter). Knowing there's a Gen-Y 26 year old kid out there going by the moniker "ksh goddess" actually warms the cockles of my heart just a little.:)
After you reveal it, someone is going to duplicate your work, go back in time before you had the idea, and put a patent in place... continue scenario until the patent is dated the moment the patent office opens.
A yes, like the old Douglas Adams time-traveling copyright dispute.
This is why time machines will never work. Otherwise, somebody will go back in time to patent it, so it would already be known to us by now. Not to mention all the tourists who would want to watch Lincoln and Kennedy get shot. If time travel were posssible, then the Zapruder film would already be crowded with guys in silver suits, looking away from the President to see if there's anybody with a gun on the grassy gnoll.
Somebody with a hotmail account sent the slashdot editors an e-mail, claiming it was forwarded from Dell. Then they proceed to immediately put it on their front page. I suppose next they will post the one about how Mel Gibson once had plastic surgery to fix his broken & scarred face. Or maybe that a little boy who is dying of cancer wants to set the world record for getting the most post cards.
Even if this is legit, is it really that big of a deal? Most Linux users know enough to ignore the "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell" dude, and build their own systems anyway.
America in 1776 was far less free than in 2002, no matter what platitudes may have been written into the preamble. When I look at the progression of American prosperity, egalitarianism, and freedom over the last 200+ years, I boggle at people who somehow think we are living in some kind of police state, just because current copyright law is a little fucked up.
I wish I had a time machine, so I could cram every such person into it and make them live through the 1930's (or better yet, the 1860's) for a few years so they can understand just how good they have it today.
I've never noticed the heat being excessive, but if you have then put a hotpad on your knee first. It's cheaper than a fan, quieter than a fan, and doesn't draw power away from the battery. If you are not running off the battery, you are probably using it in your home or office, in which case why don't you just put it on a desk or table, where it will be easier to type anyway?
I plan on buying a new iBook soon, and there's no way I would want a fan in there.
He's not getting particular[sic] good answers because it was not a particular good question.
This was obviously a case of somebody who has been conditioned by the M$ marketing empire to believe that "PC" is a registered trademark of Intel or Microsoft or somebody, and it somehow stands for "Windows Computer."
When he saw that Apple had something called "PowerPC", he immediately assumed that it must have something to do with Wintel compatability, and in his mind tied it to various rumors of various cross-platform projects he overheard while walking past the cubicles in his office.
That, or he knows perfectly well what PowerPC chips are, and he's just trolling.
It's expensive keeping with AMD and Intel on speed especially when your userbase is so much smaller than x86.
Maybe if they got their shit together and made comparably fast chips, the user base they are selling to would not remain so small. Right now the speed gap of Motorola's chips is probably costing Apple more customers than any other negative factor, including the price gap (which is not as wide).
Tried BSD. Was too used to default settings (BASH, basic fs structure, etc) from Linux, decided relearning or reconfiguring that was too much trouble for essentially the same software as a result.
A lot of BSD (and Solaris) geeks react the same way to Linux. You were asking what the selling points of OS X were over Linux, and for a BSD fan, one of those selling points is "it's not Linux."
IDE? Dev tools? I use emacs. That's it. How '1337. (Personally, I prefer vi or vim to anything else when writing simple Perl scripts, or even big-ish projects in C, so I kind of know where you are coming from.) If Microsofts's Visual Basic tools are the only IDE exposure you have had, I can see why you feel so strongly. Trust me, there are better ones out there. Someday you might even find that you prefer one of them over a raw text editor.
The point is, you didn't think OS X had any selling points. I listed five. The fact that these might not apply to you is not really my concern.
Apple's Xserve box is hardy what I would call a potato clock. It's basically just a rackmounted G4 Macintosh. Does the use of DDR and the half-rack design really make it a radically different challenge for a Linux install?
then I realised that the shell had no syntax highlighting, it didn't have vim... etc
You know, if you have a decent internet connection and a little know-how (which it seems like you do) you probably could have installed all of the tools you missed (and bash, while you were at it), in less time than it took you to get YDL going on that iBook. My G4 tower has a crapload of GNU tools running on it, and they work great. When I first started out (with 10.0.0), I worried that Apple's automatic software updates might break some of the UNIX toys I was installing, but it hasn't happened, and I've stopped worrying about it. Good design pays off.
That GUI is completely lame, and other than that I don't see a single selling point for Mac OS X as a Unix.
Here are a few:
1. If you buy a new Mac, no matter what retailer sells it to you, it's already there.
2. It's BSD (actually, Mach+BSD) instead of UNIX. I know this is slashdot, rah-rah Linux and all that, but you would be surprised how many UNIX geeks strongly prefer BSD over Linux when talking about free *nix platforms.
3. OS X can run a lot of programs that will probably never, ever be ported to Linux. Programs like Photoshop, QuickTime, Quark (in a couple weeks), M$-Office, etc. In fact, with OS X, the Classic environment, the BSD layer, the built-in JVM, and a copy of VPC, you can run damn near every piece of software written in the last 10 years or so, all on the same machine. And don't tell me about open source projects that "do the same thing" as the major comercial OS X & Windows apps... GIMP ain't Photoshop, and Open Office sucks (so far).
4. The IDE and other dev tools for OS X (all available for free) kick ass. Nobody ever took NeXT seriously as a computer company, but the one thing that everybody who used them really liked was their software development tools. OS X's Project Builder picks up where NextStep left off.
5. The OS X community is much bigger than the LinuxPPC community (and may even be bigger than the entire desktop Linux community by now... I haven't seen any recent surveys). I personally know dozens of OS X users, while I know only one person who has even installed YDL, apart from myself. Some parts of LinuxPPC (such as how it boots) are radically different from what the Linux communtity at large is using, so the peer support network for YDL can feel very small sometimes.
As for why one might dismiss an OS for containing a portion of closed-source code: for some people, it's an important moral issue.
Oh, please. Being faithful to your wife, not cheating on your taxes, showing compassion to those less fortunate, dealing honestly and fairly in business; these are important moral issues. Insisting that all the source on your computer be available to read, that's just important if you are trying to be '1337.
For others, they want to be able to see what's exactly going on *everywhere* -- having source to some bits isn't much good...
Have you read anything about Darwin? With OS X, the entire OS (which is a Mach microkernel with a BSD layer) is open. The default GUI (Aqua) is not, because it uses components owned by Adobe & Sorensen that Apple does not have the right to release, but nothing is stopping you from booting a Mac without Aqua. You can even run X on it that way.
And, if you come to depend on some important closed code, you're always under the threat of having the rug pulled out from under you by new licensing, bankrupt companies, etc.
That would never be an issue for anything the parent of your post was talking about. A simple re-compile (and perhaps a few minor tweaks), and any UNIX app you were running in OS X should run fine on a Linux box.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why the whole flower thing equates so closely to the diamond discussion that started this thread. Flowers are bought on St. Valentine's Day because an expectation has been created.
Even so, I think that "here, I grew these for you" would be an even more romantic statement than either of the ones you mentioned.
Right. That's why all those slaves were constantly laughing at the plight of the Irish immigrants, and were really sad to lose those comfortable and prestigious slave positions when that bastard Abe Lincoln had them all fired. Also, those chains were just fashion accessories; deep down, they didn't really want to escape or murder their owners or anything.
The truth is, Irish immigrants chose to take shitty and dangerous jobs for the money, becuase they had just fled conditions of abject poverty and starvation back in Ireland. Blacks, on the other hand, were hauld to America like cargo, lived their whole lives in bondage, doing hard labor from the moment they could walk, and were casually discarded when (or, rather, if) they got old.
I find it a little astonishing that Southern revisionism of the brutal facts of slavery still continue to this day.
Shop for cut roses next Feb 13, and see if you feel the same way. It's enough to make a bachelor like me want to build a hothouse in his back yard, just to have a reserve of flowers ready on demand.
What were you hoping for? An iMac-style dome?
Yes, but if you compare it to the theoretical peak of the Pentium or Athlon, then it's still a relatively fair comparison of the chip itself... and 18 Gflops is not too shabby.
Nobody is blaming Apple for using Photoshop. The problem is that they don't provide any details. In practice, it looks like they are only testing 3 or 4 filters that are heavily Altivec-optimized, so it is not typical for Photoshop performace.
I agree with you that it is a little misleading, but Photoshop does serve as a showcase for Alti-vec in general; basically saying "if you write code that takes advantage of Alti-vec, check out the speed boost you can get!" For that reason, it's not a totally worthless metric, but it's still not very applicable to the average user.
No doubt about it. LinuxPPC is a great way to breathe life into an old Mac, if you want it to do heavy-lifting that the old Mac OS is unsuited for.
I still have yet to hear anybody convince me why they would ever need to buy a G4 with Linux pre-installed. If I need a Linux system, I'll buy an AMD shitbox and use that. The whole magic and wonder of Linux for the desktop is that you can have a UNIX-alike running on an AMD shitbox.
Sure, Stallmanists will tell you that Linux rocks because it's the only GPL'd choice out there and we should all support the GPL wherever it is found and drink the Flavorade... but while I like some GNU applicatioins, I really don't give a shit about their political agenda. I actually prefer the BSD license; and no, I'm not interested in chatting about it... it's worse than the emacs/vi flame wars.
Bottom line, LinuxPPC is mostly only good for getting extra use out of old Macs, or for Mac owners who want to learn Linux without buying a second machine to do so. Nothing posted under this story has really demonstrated otherwise.
Actually, it sounds like he's talking about more of a recreational machine here, although I could be wrong.
As for why read his mail from the Windows environment, the answer is obvious: so he doesn't need to reboot, which was his chief complaint about having to play one of his favorite games in Windows.
However, there are those of us who purchased our computers with other considerations in mind, who would also like to play games on them.
Granted, that tends to be the exception these days, now that you can build a more-or-less usable game PC for about 400 bucks. Most Mac geeks I know who like games have a PC on the next desk over for gaming, and most Linux gamers either do the same, or else dual boot.
Personally, I found this set-up ideal back when I was into EQ. I could pull up maps, guild websites, and game info on my Mac's web browser while still keeping one eye on the game itself over on the PC monitor. Other times I could work on various projects on my Mac while my character camped some remote spawn point. Then, of course, there were all those hacks for reading the server traffic so you could know more than the average bear about the game data...
If I was one of those Mac or Linux Zealots, I suppose I would hate the gaming gap... but since I don't really have much of a problem with owning a dedicated "game PC", it's really kind of a non-issue to me.
Even if you hate Outlook (rightly so), there are lots of Free-as-in-beer options for this sort of thing, and even a few Free-as-in-Stallman-would-be-mostly-okay-with-it options out there.
Hell, for that matter, since you are probably using one of the /. boxen as your main mail server, just run an SSH client (they have those for Windows, ya know) and log into the server itself.
Besides, you are playing a game on a closed-source operating system already, so it's not you're religious about the GPL or something. Sheesh.
It means I'm often a careless speller when I'm just shooting my mouth off on /.
Nah. If hundreds show up, people will just assume it's the early line for Star Wars: Episode III.
I would hardly call a BSD/tcsh person adapting to Linux/bash, or vice versa, "learning something new."
The syntaxes are almost identical for most things, it's just picky little details that annoy you when you are not using your favorite flavor of *nix. And when you are talking about your regular home system or your laptop, you most certainly can afford the luxury of sticking with what you enjoy using.
Maybe I'm just too old (at 26) to deal with the younger geeks without a chuckle at their naive view of operating systems.
Are there still younger geeks than that? I thought we gen-Xers, growing up with Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s, were just about the last of the breed that groks the command line (or even knows where the word "grok" comes from for that matter). Knowing there's a Gen-Y 26 year old kid out there going by the moniker "ksh goddess" actually warms the cockles of my heart just a little. :)
A yes, like the old Douglas Adams time-traveling copyright dispute.
This is why time machines will never work. Otherwise, somebody will go back in time to patent it, so it would already be known to us by now. Not to mention all the tourists who would want to watch Lincoln and Kennedy get shot. If time travel were posssible, then the Zapruder film would already be crowded with guys in silver suits, looking away from the President to see if there's anybody with a gun on the grassy gnoll.
Even if this is legit, is it really that big of a deal? Most Linux users know enough to ignore the "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell" dude, and build their own systems anyway.
I wish I had a time machine, so I could cram every such person into it and make them live through the 1930's (or better yet, the 1860's) for a few years so they can understand just how good they have it today.
I plan on buying a new iBook soon, and there's no way I would want a fan in there.
This was obviously a case of somebody who has been conditioned by the M$ marketing empire to believe that "PC" is a registered trademark of Intel or Microsoft or somebody, and it somehow stands for "Windows Computer."
When he saw that Apple had something called "PowerPC", he immediately assumed that it must have something to do with Wintel compatability, and in his mind tied it to various rumors of various cross-platform projects he overheard while walking past the cubicles in his office.
That, or he knows perfectly well what PowerPC chips are, and he's just trolling.
Maybe if they got their shit together and made comparably fast chips, the user base they are selling to would not remain so small. Right now the speed gap of Motorola's chips is probably costing Apple more customers than any other negative factor, including the price gap (which is not as wide).
A lot of BSD (and Solaris) geeks react the same way to Linux. You were asking what the selling points of OS X were over Linux, and for a BSD fan, one of those selling points is "it's not Linux."
IDE? Dev tools? I use emacs. That's it. How '1337. (Personally, I prefer vi or vim to anything else when writing simple Perl scripts, or even big-ish projects in C, so I kind of know where you are coming from.) If Microsofts's Visual Basic tools are the only IDE exposure you have had, I can see why you feel so strongly. Trust me, there are better ones out there. Someday you might even find that you prefer one of them over a raw text editor.
The point is, you didn't think OS X had any selling points. I listed five. The fact that these might not apply to you is not really my concern.
Apple's Xserve box is hardy what I would call a potato clock. It's basically just a rackmounted G4 Macintosh. Does the use of DDR and the half-rack design really make it a radically different challenge for a Linux install?
You know, if you have a decent internet connection and a little know-how (which it seems like you do) you probably could have installed all of the tools you missed (and bash, while you were at it), in less time than it took you to get YDL going on that iBook. My G4 tower has a crapload of GNU tools running on it, and they work great. When I first started out (with 10.0.0), I worried that Apple's automatic software updates might break some of the UNIX toys I was installing, but it hasn't happened, and I've stopped worrying about it. Good design pays off.
It should read "It's BSD (actually, Mach+BSD) instead of Linux"
Now, I must wait 2 minutes before submitting this correction.... tra la la...
Here are a few:
1. If you buy a new Mac, no matter what retailer sells it to you, it's already there.
2. It's BSD (actually, Mach+BSD) instead of UNIX. I know this is slashdot, rah-rah Linux and all that, but you would be surprised how many UNIX geeks strongly prefer BSD over Linux when talking about free *nix platforms.
3. OS X can run a lot of programs that will probably never, ever be ported to Linux. Programs like Photoshop, QuickTime, Quark (in a couple weeks), M$-Office, etc. In fact, with OS X, the Classic environment, the BSD layer, the built-in JVM, and a copy of VPC, you can run damn near every piece of software written in the last 10 years or so, all on the same machine. And don't tell me about open source projects that "do the same thing" as the major comercial OS X & Windows apps... GIMP ain't Photoshop, and Open Office sucks (so far).
4. The IDE and other dev tools for OS X (all available for free) kick ass. Nobody ever took NeXT seriously as a computer company, but the one thing that everybody who used them really liked was their software development tools. OS X's Project Builder picks up where NextStep left off.
5. The OS X community is much bigger than the LinuxPPC community (and may even be bigger than the entire desktop Linux community by now... I haven't seen any recent surveys). I personally know dozens of OS X users, while I know only one person who has even installed YDL, apart from myself. Some parts of LinuxPPC (such as how it boots) are radically different from what the Linux communtity at large is using, so the peer support network for YDL can feel very small sometimes.
Oh, please. Being faithful to your wife, not cheating on your taxes, showing compassion to those less fortunate, dealing honestly and fairly in business; these are important moral issues. Insisting that all the source on your computer be available to read, that's just important if you are trying to be '1337.
For others, they want to be able to see what's exactly going on *everywhere* -- having source to some bits isn't much good...
Have you read anything about Darwin? With OS X, the entire OS (which is a Mach microkernel with a BSD layer) is open. The default GUI (Aqua) is not, because it uses components owned by Adobe & Sorensen that Apple does not have the right to release, but nothing is stopping you from booting a Mac without Aqua. You can even run X on it that way.
And, if you come to depend on some important closed code, you're always under the threat of having the rug pulled out from under you by new licensing, bankrupt companies, etc.
That would never be an issue for anything the parent of your post was talking about. A simple re-compile (and perhaps a few minor tweaks), and any UNIX app you were running in OS X should run fine on a Linux box.