People that buy Macs for general use are in general people who don't care about cost, or cost/benefit ratios. If they did, they wouldn't buy a Mac in the first place (Excluding people who do specific things that Macs do better, like graphic arts)
You do realise that Windows has scripting capabilities and a cron-like task scheduler, don't you?
If it did, they did a very good job of hiding them. Last time I used Windows, I think I remember it has some sort of "at" command, and that's about it. I seem to remember you could download some sort of Windows Scripting Host or something, but I seem to remember going around to all the Windows boxes and deleting it due to some virus that required deleting that to be safe.
I remember that feature, I'm not sure if they took it out or not, I haven't really used IE much in the last several years, except to make sure my websites look at least OK in IE after I finish coding and validating.
In any case, it was just an example, one of countless I could have used.
Visual Basic: 3.9 million hits Visual C++: 1.9 million hits C#: 2.1 million
gcc: 6 million hits Perl: 12.7 million hits Bash: 2 million
Now, people have pointed out in the past that my off the cuff google "statistics" are not useful or accurate for many things, but I think a good argument could be made that they do at least reflect the size of the respective web communities.
Sizable, yes, for some definitions of sizable, but when talking about the relative marketing budgets of each, the ratio is near infinity for MS, since gcc et al marketing is near zero. I still call MS's marketing to developers a failure.
The ironic thing is that MS marketing is perfectly spot-on. Developers want the freedom to innovate. That often means avoiding MS development tools.
That's a good idea. When distros like Lindows make such exaggerated claims, it really does make me cringe.
Distros (well, and everyone else too) need to be careful not to get the idea in people's heads that "Ready for the desktop" means "Can work perfectly with Windows closed protocols". Linux will never work 100% with closed protocols that change in undocumented ways each minor version or patch. Same with Wine.
I'm glad you feel better, but I did say that some of them could be purchased, but most of the windows versions are subpar. I've worked with Cygwin, with commercial Windows X servers, and such.
They all sucked to varying degrees, very much like running things Wine under Linux, though not quite that bad.
You have a point, this is only counting projects that actually went retail. Many more of MS's planned things have fallen through, especially developer centric projects.
It's only a matter of time until they ditch the.NET name and start calling their CLR something else. MS, while sometimes a company that can pull off the task of swindling the public right in front of their face, is also a company that has never been able to successfully market to the developer community in any significant way.
The.NET CLR is the closest they have come, if you can call that marketing.
Cygwin is OK, but the last time I tried to use it in the real world, it fell pretty flat.
I just wanted to set up a simple SSH server on a Windows box that was joined at the hip with an expensive Xerox printer that we were considering purchasing. This would let me automatically drop files into hot folders on the Windows box, without bothering with SMB mess just for something so simple.
I sorta got SSH working as a service in 2000, but it left a black box running minimized all the time. It was a big hassle too. That wasn't the bad part though, the bad part is that I was getting something like 2 megs/sec over scp on a 100mbit switched network.
Thankfully, I convinced the higher ups to not buy the printer for other reasons. Good thing too, it had a million insecure ports open, and we were told not to turn anything off on it, or even update it to fix security holes, or they wouldn't support it (for X thousand per year we would pay for support even!!).
I can't believe anyone uses Windows for their commercial server-type products anymore, it just doesn't make sense.
I didn't discover something I couldn't automatically do in Linux, and would require a day's tinkering to get working.
Barely a day goes by that I don't do something in Linux that is impossible (or very much more difficult) to do in Windows. Especially automatic things. An example: I want to check every hour to see if a website has changed. No problem, three lines of shell script in a cron job.
Yes, getting hardware set up can be tough sometimes, especially if you have brand new hardware. Sometimes the community hasn't had time to write a driver, or in the case of video cards, the manufacturer has stonewalled requests for specifications.
Getting closed source apps working on Linux can be difficult too, since there isn't much you can do to debug or fix them.
Note that most of your complaints were with closed source software, quicktime, nvidia drivers, Opera. The reason you didn't get much help with those is because there's little the community can do to support such apps.
A sidenote though, mplayer RPMs from freshrpms.net, and a quick grab of the hacked up DLLs from mplayer's site and you are set with most video formats. You can blame that one on software patents, since distros would be all over mplayer and the codecs, making it as automatic as possible, if it wouldn't open them up to huge legal liabilities.
Anyway, I guess my point is, a lot of your troubles came from issues that Slashdotters are often railing against, software patents, and proprietary software.
It's not all ideological, as you have found out, we do have practical reasons for our views. IP laws are harming Free Software development in real, tangible ways.
You can move the database backend to postgres or whatnot, and keep the Access frontend, while you write up a new frontend in PHP or whatever your favorite language is. It's what we're doing, slowly. Of course, some of the databases are jumping directly from obselete Lotus Approach to postgres/PHP, a fine example of the perils of proprietary software lockin.
Try sticking a Windows box in a totally Linux environment, and see how that goes.
No NFS support, broken kerberos support, no NIS support that I know of, no ssh client or server, no X server so no remote apps. Sure, some of these things can be purchased and installed, but most of the windows versions subpar when compared with the real thing.
This study is like putting Michael Jordan on a special olympics basketball team, and then wondering why it didn't make the NBA finals.
That's really a bad argument. The WM controls are all in the same place, the title bar. Even if they weren't all in the same place, once you learned where they were, it wouldn't matter, there would be no hunting. It's really horrible design to put close right next to minimize and maximize.
The only thing worse than that is that windows allows programs to override the behaviors, and do stupid things like minimize to the tray when you click close.
I have no idea why Gnome and KDE want to emulate such bad UI design. Red Hat takes the cake, with metacity being totally windows-like and impossible to configure to get rid of the windows inefficiencies.
You are correct, but your comment is irrelevant to the matter at hand.
The GPL and BSD share the same vulnerability to IP claims. The GPL is even slightly worse, since if a patent claim is successfully made, the GPL code can't be distributed at all in its infringing form, even if you license the patent, because the GPL specifically forbids such encumbered distribution. (Which is probably a good thing).
While not a consistant snapshot, you can come kinda close to snapshot functions with rsync-incrementals or rdiff-backup.
I know this doesn't give you the sort of perfect shot in time that a real snapshot gives, it's more of a smearshot, but it might be good enough for some uses.
I use it in lieu of tapes, and backup things that need real snapshots, like databases, on an application by application basis by running periodic exports to ASCII.
Slashdot Mirror
People that buy Macs for general use are in general people who don't care about cost, or cost/benefit ratios. If they did, they wouldn't buy a Mac in the first place (Excluding people who do specific things that Macs do better, like graphic arts)
I hate to argue against myself, but DOS and cmd support redirection.
dir > file
open up file in notepad, print.
Yeah, it's not as easy as linux/unix, but not as hard as you are making it sound.
Honestly, anyone stupid enough to use MSVC deserves what they get. Dance with the devil, get burned.
the concepts of karma and rebirth arose (partly) as a method of oppression of the underprivileged
All religion is a method of oppression of the underpriviledged.
You do realise that Windows has scripting capabilities and a cron-like task scheduler, don't you?
If it did, they did a very good job of hiding them. Last time I used Windows, I think I remember it has some sort of "at" command, and that's about it. I seem to remember you could download some sort of Windows Scripting Host or something, but I seem to remember going around to all the Windows boxes and deleting it due to some virus that required deleting that to be safe.
What were you saying again?
I remember that feature, I'm not sure if they took it out or not, I haven't really used IE much in the last several years, except to make sure my websites look at least OK in IE after I finish coding and validating.
In any case, it was just an example, one of countless I could have used.
Google:
Visual Basic: 3.9 million hits
Visual C++: 1.9 million hits
C#: 2.1 million
gcc: 6 million hits
Perl: 12.7 million hits
Bash: 2 million
Now, people have pointed out in the past that my off the cuff google "statistics" are not useful or accurate for many things, but I think a good argument could be made that they do at least reflect the size of the respective web communities.
Sizable, yes, for some definitions of sizable, but when talking about the relative marketing budgets of each, the ratio is near infinity for MS, since gcc et al marketing is near zero. I still call MS's marketing to developers a failure.
The ironic thing is that MS marketing is perfectly spot-on. Developers want the freedom to innovate. That often means avoiding MS development tools.
That's a good idea. When distros like Lindows make such exaggerated claims, it really does make me cringe.
Distros (well, and everyone else too) need to be careful not to get the idea in people's heads that "Ready for the desktop" means "Can work perfectly with Windows closed protocols". Linux will never work 100% with closed protocols that change in undocumented ways each minor version or patch. Same with Wine.
I'm glad you feel better, but I did say that some of them could be purchased, but most of the windows versions are subpar. I've worked with Cygwin, with commercial Windows X servers, and such.
They all sucked to varying degrees, very much like running things Wine under Linux, though not quite that bad.
You have a point, this is only counting projects that actually went retail. Many more of MS's planned things have fallen through, especially developer centric projects.
.NET name and start calling their CLR something else. MS, while sometimes a company that can pull off the task of swindling the public right in front of their face, is also a company that has never been able to successfully market to the developer community in any significant way.
.NET CLR is the closest they have come, if you can call that marketing.
It's only a matter of time until they ditch the
The
It won't take 50%, but it will take a slightly larger chunk of the market to break through in some areas.
I base this on the Mac, which excels at really only a couple very specific areas, and yet has pretty wide support.
It's getting there, it's not going to happen overnight. We will have to continue attempting to chase the moving target for a while still.
Cygwin is OK, but the last time I tried to use it in the real world, it fell pretty flat.
I just wanted to set up a simple SSH server on a Windows box that was joined at the hip with an expensive Xerox printer that we were considering purchasing. This would let me automatically drop files into hot folders on the Windows box, without bothering with SMB mess just for something so simple.
I sorta got SSH working as a service in 2000, but it left a black box running minimized all the time. It was a big hassle too. That wasn't the bad part though, the bad part is that I was getting something like 2 megs/sec over scp on a 100mbit switched network.
Thankfully, I convinced the higher ups to not buy the printer for other reasons. Good thing too, it had a million insecure ports open, and we were told not to turn anything off on it, or even update it to fix security holes, or they wouldn't support it (for X thousand per year we would pay for support even!!).
I can't believe anyone uses Windows for their commercial server-type products anymore, it just doesn't make sense.
The pitfalls of being quoted out of context. :)
I didn't discover something I couldn't automatically do in Linux, and would require a day's tinkering to get working.
Barely a day goes by that I don't do something in Linux that is impossible (or very much more difficult) to do in Windows. Especially automatic things. An example: I want to check every hour to see if a website has changed. No problem, three lines of shell script in a cron job.
Yes, getting hardware set up can be tough sometimes, especially if you have brand new hardware. Sometimes the community hasn't had time to write a driver, or in the case of video cards, the manufacturer has stonewalled requests for specifications.
Getting closed source apps working on Linux can be difficult too, since there isn't much you can do to debug or fix them.
Note that most of your complaints were with closed source software, quicktime, nvidia drivers, Opera. The reason you didn't get much help with those is because there's little the community can do to support such apps.
A sidenote though, mplayer RPMs from freshrpms.net, and a quick grab of the hacked up DLLs from mplayer's site and you are set with most video formats. You can blame that one on software patents, since distros would be all over mplayer and the codecs, making it as automatic as possible, if it wouldn't open them up to huge legal liabilities.
Anyway, I guess my point is, a lot of your troubles came from issues that Slashdotters are often railing against, software patents, and proprietary software.
It's not all ideological, as you have found out, we do have practical reasons for our views. IP laws are harming Free Software development in real, tangible ways.
You can move the database backend to postgres or whatnot, and keep the Access frontend, while you write up a new frontend in PHP or whatever your favorite language is. It's what we're doing, slowly. Of course, some of the databases are jumping directly from obselete Lotus Approach to postgres/PHP, a fine example of the perils of proprietary software lockin.
Try sticking a Windows box in a totally Linux environment, and see how that goes.
No NFS support, broken kerberos support, no NIS support that I know of, no ssh client or server, no X server so no remote apps. Sure, some of these things can be purchased and installed, but most of the windows versions subpar when compared with the real thing.
This study is like putting Michael Jordan on a special olympics basketball team, and then wondering why it didn't make the NBA finals.
That's really a bad argument. The WM controls are all in the same place, the title bar. Even if they weren't all in the same place, once you learned where they were, it wouldn't matter, there would be no hunting. It's really horrible design to put close right next to minimize and maximize.
The only thing worse than that is that windows allows programs to override the behaviors, and do stupid things like minimize to the tray when you click close.
I have no idea why Gnome and KDE want to emulate such bad UI design. Red Hat takes the cake, with metacity being totally windows-like and impossible to configure to get rid of the windows inefficiencies.
HTML email, another of MS's failings. :)
/. had a story a couple days ago about a search engine that would email you the resulting web sites. :)
Although, you never know,
You forgot to mention Windows.
Well, it is VB, which is barely one step above pseudocode. They could have used better variable names though.
Wow, that must suck more than working for the National Artistic Zealots Institute in 1942.
XMMS skips frequently when switching desktops or running a CPU intensive program in the background.
I get this with Red Hat 8.0 also on one of my boxes. Haven't tested to see if it does it on 9 too. 8.0 is unstable enough for me.
But what if your brute force gets lucky and hits the key too soon? :)
I don't think it's possible to have any sort of brute force algorithm that doesn't have the possibility of hitting the right key on the first try.
You are correct, but your comment is irrelevant to the matter at hand.
The GPL and BSD share the same vulnerability to IP claims. The GPL is even slightly worse, since if a patent claim is successfully made, the GPL code can't be distributed at all in its infringing form, even if you license the patent, because the GPL specifically forbids such encumbered distribution. (Which is probably a good thing).
While not a consistant snapshot, you can come kinda close to snapshot functions with rsync-incrementals or rdiff-backup.
I know this doesn't give you the sort of perfect shot in time that a real snapshot gives, it's more of a smearshot, but it might be good enough for some uses.
I use it in lieu of tapes, and backup things that need real snapshots, like databases, on an application by application basis by running periodic exports to ASCII.