That's because nerds think non-nerds should aspire to be nerds as well.
I liken the iPad debate to any conversation with a camera nerd. They spend more time talking about megapixel counts and interchangeable lenses than they do taking actual pictures.
I had the original F10. I paid something like $300 Canadian during a vacation in Taiwan.
It was such a huge hassle getting any decent amount of music on it. I remember re-encoding my MP3s to radio quality to get the equivalent of 2 CDs or so on it.
Even more annoying than the small capacity was that it used those flat-style rechargeable AA batteries that were expensive and hard to find in North America. Once the original battery I had died, I was left with a brick, that is still gathering dust in my basement.
Good points for an unhacked AppleTV, but given the hack news today, Apple TV should be able to support at least as much as XBMC in the near future.
I would say that the effort required to hack the AppleTV is significantly lower than a G1 XBOX as well. I tend to think that the GeForce Go 7300 can handle 1080i playback as well, especially if the GeForce 6600 go on my old notebook can.
Yeah, sure it can. Let's see it play back an HD file (i.e., 720p or 1080i) without hiccups or spending hours re-encoding TS files.
XBMC is great (I retired my own XBMC once I got a 1080p TV), but get your fanboy head out of your ass and accept the fact that it has limitations once you move up into real HD.
Yeah, but Sony brings on all the PS3 hate on themselves. Harrison and Tretton keep saying the dumbest things, which just compounds on the hate.
Personally, I really like the PS3 (enough to buy one), but I can also understand why everyone hates it. It's expensive (for a console, but not a BD player) and it seems like the Sony brass doesn't care about their core market, the gamers, who don't have loads of cash oozing out of their pockets.
This seems to have less to do with free software than it does with the importance of universality.
2006 isn't 1996. People don't surf the web with just PCs any more. People use everything from game consoles to cel phones to browse the web, and issues are going to pop up if you don't keep your site simple.
The problem, in my experience, is always rooted in one or both of the following:
1 - The decision maker at the client wants all the dancing baloney he/she can get. Flash, DHTML, what-have-you. It's gotta be bleeding edge. If people want to come to our site, damn it, they better be using the latest version of IE on Windows. F*** everyone else. 2 - The agency who builds the web site sells sizzle to the client. The client, not knowing any better, gets sold on all the dancing baloney the agency sells. After all, the only customers worth having use IE on Windows. And if they really want your product, they'll upgrade like everyone else.
The sad part is that there is no point in bitching about it. I would bet that in most cases, your complaints fall on deaf ears, just like they did at the Boston Globe.
I agree that those cases are pretty ugly. The craftsmanship appears to be good, but to me, they look like overwrought stereo shelving. The designs appear to be somewhat derivative, and they haven't seemed to master the balance between wood, metal and glass.
I have yet to see any nice wood designs for PC cases -- I have mostly wood furniture in my house, and I would never buy one of these monstrosities even if they were only $500.
You're on the mark there. You can trust them, but checks and balances will keep the 16 year old honest.
While I had free reign when I was 16, the world is not the same place today as it was 20 years ago. No YouTube, Jackass, MySpace, Cell Phones or IM to contend with. Heck, the average 16 year old has the skills to make a report card forgery that would dupe many parents.
The checks and balances are necessary so that they understand that broken trust has negative consequences.
While Kai's Power Tools does have super-sucky usability, it really did some cool stuff back in the day.
I remember in 1995, when there was actually a MacWorld show in Toronto (!), seeing a seminar presented by Kai Krause. That guy was just as engaging as the Steve, and some of the demos that he did with KPT (which seem pretty lame by today's standards) had the crowd ooh-ing and aah-ing much like a typical Macworld keynote hosted by Jobs.
The big deal back in those days were PDAs - the General Magic guys were showing some interesting stuff off there. Also this weird talk about "intelligent agents"... I'm still waiting for those to really take off (ahem).
I own a.ca domain as well, but I don't think what has happened is any travesty. It's in bad taste and makes the players (politician and CIRA) look like idiots, but that's about it.
When I signed up for a.ca account, I knew how lame the rules were and that my domain could get pulled for some stupid reason. When you ACTUALLY READ the TERMS, it is very clear how LAME they really are. Caveat emptor. Don't click BUY if you plan to do anything remotely "risky" and keep your site up.
The reality is that Dot-CA is an overpriced and poor alternative to a Dot-Com domain. It's a mickey mouse domain registrar compared to Dot-com (ahem, so you can imagine how lame it really is) so don't expect much when you click "Register".
I agree. We've got a Mediawiki set up with a few extensions and a "restricted access" patch and it works better than anything I could do with Sharepoint or Notes/Domino in the same amount of time. I'm a big fan of Notes/Domino, but the paradigm behind a Wiki (everyone contributes) will help prevent it from becoming shelfware at my company. Yeah, it's missing some functionality that the others can provide, but ultimately the true value of any system lies in the amount of knowledge entered into the system.
VMWare has a small offering of "community" vm appliances that address niche requirements such as those you listed above, with the number growing. Some of these appliances have nifty little web interfaces that handle all of the admin.
Seeing how VMWare Server and Player are free, I can see an increasing market for compact virtualized appliances, which in turn reduces the value of something like a Xandros server product. Sooner or later, some bright guys are going to make an idiot-proof Xen appliance that will handle a lot of the services desirable in a small business/home server.
All due respect, but it's not all there. I used Xandros a lot last year in an effort to wean myself off Windows... before I became a switcher when the Mac Mini came out.
Xandros is better than most of the other linux desktop distros out there, especially when it comes to Windows integration. Keep in mind, that's not saying much at all. I found myself using VMWare running Windows more than actually using the the host operating system. Despite its many strengths, Xandros isn't a great substitute for Windows. Many of the tools that I used in Windows were for the most part, more inconvenient to use on Xandros than in Windows.
I'm a geek with a higher tolerance for inconvenience than the average user, but at some point, I realized that I could spend less time figuring out the idiosyncracies of Xandros then just using the version of Windows that came with my computer.
For average users, I'm not sure that Xandros Business Edition is that great an alternative. I can appreciate the need to reduce licensing costs, but if you're looking for a Windows server clone, you should just stick to Windows. If you're specifically looking for a robust Linux server platform, go with a major vendor like Red Hat. At least you know they'll be around for a while.
If you're willing to wait, and spend a little more on hardware, wait until Apple releases OS X server for x86. IMHO, it's unlikely that Xandros server product would ever get more market share than OS X server anyways. One thing is for sure, Xandros will never be as polished as OS X.
As a desktop distro, Xandros isn't bad. Not great either. Other distros have gotten a lot more attention than Xandros or Linspire in the past 18 months, especially Ubuntu.
As a server distro, however, I would be looking at how well funded the company is. Many companies want to keep a server operational for five years, maybe more. If I'm going to go with Linux, I'm going to choose a reasonably well funded company like Red Hat, or I'm going to go totally free.
I'd also be concerned about support. I used to check out their forums, and the most informative, knowledgeable guy was also one of the rudest characters out there... He didn't work for Xandros, but still... Xandros is a for-pay product, so your customers will have better expectations.
I'm not quite convinced that Xandros will have the longevity businesses need in the server marketplace.
Now, with OSX Server on the way on Intel, I'd rather spend a few extra bucks on an XServe (granted, there is no such thing as an Intel XServe or OSX Server for x86 today) than on a Xandros server.
Dunno if this clarifies things, but when I was "experimenting" with OSX on a whitebox x86 before I got my Intel mini, I had the OSX partition set as the primary. When I hibernated XP, it still had to go through the Darwin bootloader before it could wake up.
Whether this would work with Narf's solution on a _real_ mac would need to be tested. Since I'm not home to install XP on my mini, I won't know for a fact until later. If it is the case, it would be pretty fast, as you say.
Explanation: Lack of coffee and typing on a damn whitebox notebook keyboard! Of course, had I been typing 10.4.5 on a Macbook Pro, I'm _sure_ I would have gotten it right the first time! (Frig, just for this post, I typed in 10.5.5 3 times before I got the version right!)
Haha, I couldn't have said it any better. There seem to be a lot of Mac zealots who are so out of touch that they don't understand that there are people who actually need to run Windows between 9 and 5. Not everyone has enough desk space or cash for two computers.
That's not even factoring the mac users who want to play the latest games at full speed.
It's actually called DarWINE and it's not quite at the level of maturity you see in the Linux world. Codeweavers says they're working on a version of Crossover Office for the Mac, but they haven't posted any news about it recently.
Crossover Office is pretty good on Linux. I'd rather use something like Wine (provided it worked on 100% of the stuff I need -- wishful thinking) than VMWare. Having said that, I'd rather use VMWare than dual boot.
What's stopping you? There are tons of people who are already booting OS X 10.5.5 on cheap commodity hardware. There's even a wiki that tells you what cheapo hardware to buy to get the best Mac experience.
Apple is happy. Now all those Windows users who want a Mac (more market share, yippee!) will buy a Mac and dual boot, yet they can still "try" to protect their OS from running a white box.
Microsoft is happy. They didn't have to spend any of their own money to get compatibility, and if they're lucky, maybe more than 30% of the dual booters will actually pay for a Windows license.
Because you're not a Mac user who lives in the Windows world. Some of us who make our money in the Windows world need to run applications that don't run on Mac... yet. I do Cognos development, and I have to provide my own notebook at work. Outside of work, I'm all Mac. Why have two notebooks when I can have my cake and eat it too? Yes, I could get a whitebox x86 notebook and run a hacked version of OSX, as the PC zealots would have it, but seeing how my PC is used for business, I'd like to stay above board. Which I can't do with an illegal version of Mac OSX running on a whitebox notebook.
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Pixel Qi is one of the feature checklist type of products.
You get two types of display, but the compromise is that it's not the best in either category. At least that's the situation today.
That's because nerds think non-nerds should aspire to be nerds as well.
I liken the iPad debate to any conversation with a camera nerd. They spend more time talking about megapixel counts and interchangeable lenses than they do taking actual pictures.
Part of the magic of meatspace board games is losing the bits and pieces.
You can't do that on an iPad.
All this talk about the iPad not comparing well to other computing devices seems so pointless.
The iPad is sold as an appliance (in spite of having computerish guts) and all non-ereader tablets and laptops are sold as computers.
Seriously, if the iPad's limitations annoy you, it just means you need a real computer, not an appliance.
The iPad is more comparable to a TV with Internet, Music and Book channels than it is to a crippled laptop or "tablet PC".
Like the devs are just saying "If you don't like it, then go fork yourself!"
I had the original F10. I paid something like $300 Canadian during a vacation in Taiwan.
It was such a huge hassle getting any decent amount of music on it. I remember re-encoding my MP3s to radio quality to get the equivalent of 2 CDs or so on it.
Even more annoying than the small capacity was that it used those flat-style rechargeable AA batteries that were expensive and hard to find in North America. Once the original battery I had died, I was left with a brick, that is still gathering dust in my basement.
Good points for an unhacked AppleTV, but given the hack news today, Apple TV should be able to support at least as much as XBMC in the near future.
I would say that the effort required to hack the AppleTV is significantly lower than a G1 XBOX as well. I tend to think that the GeForce Go 7300 can handle 1080i playback as well, especially if the GeForce 6600 go on my old notebook can.
Yeah, sure it can. Let's see it play back an HD file (i.e., 720p or 1080i) without hiccups or spending hours re-encoding TS files.
XBMC is great (I retired my own XBMC once I got a 1080p TV), but get your fanboy head out of your ass and accept the fact that it has limitations once you move up into real HD.
Yeah, but Sony brings on all the PS3 hate on themselves. Harrison and Tretton keep saying the dumbest things, which just compounds on the hate.
Personally, I really like the PS3 (enough to buy one), but I can also understand why everyone hates it. It's expensive (for a console, but not a BD player) and it seems like the Sony brass doesn't care about their core market, the gamers, who don't have loads of cash oozing out of their pockets.
This seems to have less to do with free software than it does with the importance of universality.
2006 isn't 1996. People don't surf the web with just PCs any more. People use everything from game consoles to cel phones to browse the web, and issues are going to pop up if you don't keep your site simple.
The problem, in my experience, is always rooted in one or both of the following:
1 - The decision maker at the client wants all the dancing baloney he/she can get. Flash, DHTML, what-have-you. It's gotta be bleeding edge. If people want to come to our site, damn it, they better be using the latest version of IE on Windows. F*** everyone else.
2 - The agency who builds the web site sells sizzle to the client. The client, not knowing any better, gets sold on all the dancing baloney the agency sells. After all, the only customers worth having use IE on Windows. And if they really want your product, they'll upgrade like everyone else.
The sad part is that there is no point in bitching about it. I would bet that in most cases, your complaints fall on deaf ears, just like they did at the Boston Globe.
I agree that those cases are pretty ugly. The craftsmanship appears to be good, but to me, they look like overwrought stereo shelving. The designs appear to be somewhat derivative, and they haven't seemed to master the balance between wood, metal and glass.
I have yet to see any nice wood designs for PC cases -- I have mostly wood furniture in my house, and I would never buy one of these monstrosities even if they were only $500.
You're on the mark there. You can trust them, but checks and balances will keep the 16 year old honest.
While I had free reign when I was 16, the world is not the same place today as it was 20 years ago. No YouTube, Jackass, MySpace, Cell Phones or IM to contend with. Heck, the average 16 year old has the skills to make a report card forgery that would dupe many parents.
The checks and balances are necessary so that they understand that broken trust has negative consequences.
While Kai's Power Tools does have super-sucky usability, it really did some cool stuff back in the day.
I remember in 1995, when there was actually a MacWorld show in Toronto (!), seeing a seminar presented by Kai Krause. That guy was just as engaging as the Steve, and some of the demos that he did with KPT (which seem pretty lame by today's standards) had the crowd ooh-ing and aah-ing much like a typical Macworld keynote hosted by Jobs.
The big deal back in those days were PDAs - the General Magic guys were showing some interesting stuff off there. Also this weird talk about "intelligent agents"... I'm still waiting for those to really take off (ahem).
I own a .ca domain as well, but I don't think what has happened is any travesty. It's in bad taste and makes the players (politician and CIRA) look like idiots, but that's about it.
.ca account, I knew how lame the rules were and that my domain could get pulled for some stupid reason. When you ACTUALLY READ the TERMS, it is very clear how LAME they really are. Caveat emptor. Don't click BUY if you plan to do anything remotely "risky" and keep your site up.
When I signed up for a
The reality is that Dot-CA is an overpriced and poor alternative to a Dot-Com domain. It's a mickey mouse domain registrar compared to Dot-com (ahem, so you can imagine how lame it really is) so don't expect much when you click "Register".
I agree. We've got a Mediawiki set up with a few extensions and a "restricted access" patch and it works better than anything I could do with Sharepoint or Notes/Domino in the same amount of time. I'm a big fan of Notes/Domino, but the paradigm behind a Wiki (everyone contributes) will help prevent it from becoming shelfware at my company. Yeah, it's missing some functionality that the others can provide, but ultimately the true value of any system lies in the amount of knowledge entered into the system.
VMWare has a small offering of "community" vm appliances that address niche requirements such as those you listed above, with the number growing. Some of these appliances have nifty little web interfaces that handle all of the admin.
Seeing how VMWare Server and Player are free, I can see an increasing market for compact virtualized appliances, which in turn reduces the value of something like a Xandros server product. Sooner or later, some bright guys are going to make an idiot-proof Xen appliance that will handle a lot of the services desirable in a small business/home server.
All due respect, but it's not all there. I used Xandros a lot last year in an effort to wean myself off Windows... before I became a switcher when the Mac Mini came out.
Xandros is better than most of the other linux desktop distros out there, especially when it comes to Windows integration. Keep in mind, that's not saying much at all. I found myself using VMWare running Windows more than actually using the the host operating system. Despite its many strengths, Xandros isn't a great substitute for Windows. Many of the tools that I used in Windows were for the most part, more inconvenient to use on Xandros than in Windows.
I'm a geek with a higher tolerance for inconvenience than the average user, but at some point, I realized that I could spend less time figuring out the idiosyncracies of Xandros then just using the version of Windows that came with my computer.
For average users, I'm not sure that Xandros Business Edition is that great an alternative. I can appreciate the need to reduce licensing costs, but if you're looking for a Windows server clone, you should just stick to Windows. If you're specifically looking for a robust Linux server platform, go with a major vendor like Red Hat. At least you know they'll be around for a while.
If you're willing to wait, and spend a little more on hardware, wait until Apple releases OS X server for x86. IMHO, it's unlikely that Xandros server product would ever get more market share than OS X server anyways. One thing is for sure, Xandros will never be as polished as OS X.
As a desktop distro, Xandros isn't bad. Not great either. Other distros have gotten a lot more attention than Xandros or Linspire in the past 18 months, especially Ubuntu.
As a server distro, however, I would be looking at how well funded the company is. Many companies want to keep a server operational for five years, maybe more. If I'm going to go with Linux, I'm going to choose a reasonably well funded company like Red Hat, or I'm going to go totally free.
I'd also be concerned about support. I used to check out their forums, and the most informative, knowledgeable guy was also one of the rudest characters out there... He didn't work for Xandros, but still... Xandros is a for-pay product, so your customers will have better expectations.
I'm not quite convinced that Xandros will have the longevity businesses need in the server marketplace.
Now, with OSX Server on the way on Intel, I'd rather spend a few extra bucks on an XServe (granted, there is no such thing as an Intel XServe or OSX Server for x86 today) than on a Xandros server.
Dunno if this clarifies things, but when I was "experimenting" with OSX on a whitebox x86 before I got my Intel mini, I had the OSX partition set as the primary. When I hibernated XP, it still had to go through the Darwin bootloader before it could wake up.
Whether this would work with Narf's solution on a _real_ mac would need to be tested. Since I'm not home to install XP on my mini, I won't know for a fact until later. If it is the case, it would be pretty fast, as you say.
Definitely a cool idea.
Explanation: Lack of coffee and typing on a damn whitebox notebook keyboard! Of course, had I been typing 10.4.5 on a Macbook Pro, I'm _sure_ I would have gotten it right the first time! (Frig, just for this post, I typed in 10.5.5 3 times before I got the version right!)
Haha, I couldn't have said it any better. There seem to be a lot of Mac zealots who are so out of touch that they don't understand that there are people who actually need to run Windows between 9 and 5. Not everyone has enough desk space or cash for two computers.
That's not even factoring the mac users who want to play the latest games at full speed.
It's actually called DarWINE and it's not quite at the level of maturity you see in the Linux world. Codeweavers says they're working on a version of Crossover Office for the Mac, but they haven't posted any news about it recently.
Crossover Office is pretty good on Linux. I'd rather use something like Wine (provided it worked on 100% of the stuff I need -- wishful thinking) than VMWare. Having said that, I'd rather use VMWare than dual boot.
What's stopping you? There are tons of people who are already booting OS X 10.5.5 on cheap commodity hardware. There's even a wiki that tells you what cheapo hardware to buy to get the best Mac experience.
Apple is happy. Now all those Windows users who want a Mac (more market share, yippee!) will buy a Mac and dual boot, yet they can still "try" to protect their OS from running a white box.
Microsoft is happy. They didn't have to spend any of their own money to get compatibility, and if they're lucky, maybe more than 30% of the dual booters will actually pay for a Windows license.
Because you're not a Mac user who lives in the Windows world. Some of us who make our money in the Windows world need to run applications that don't run on Mac... yet. I do Cognos development, and I have to provide my own notebook at work. Outside of work, I'm all Mac. Why have two notebooks when I can have my cake and eat it too? Yes, I could get a whitebox x86 notebook and run a hacked version of OSX, as the PC zealots would have it, but seeing how my PC is used for business, I'd like to stay above board. Which I can't do with an illegal version of Mac OSX running on a whitebox notebook.