I just got a 2GHz D620 for that. It has NVidia graphics. (Actually, that was a $60 option that I didn't take, because I couldn't care less about 3D or eye candy.)
For example, after purchasing a copy of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation---which is a poorly tuned version of NT 4.0 Server, minus a few utilities---you can back it up, apply a small patch that fixes the tuning, and run the result.
Microsoft hates this. Of course, Microsoft could restrict your rights by demanding that you sign a contract before you get a copy of Windows NT, but this would not do wonders for Windows sales.
So Microsoft puts a ``license'' on all of its software and pretends that you don't have the right to use the software unless you agree to the ``license.'' You can't patch Windows without their permission, according to the license; you can't use NT Workstation for more than 10 simultaneous connections; you must give Microsoft your first-born son. (Or something like that.)
The problem with Microsoft's license is that it's unenforceable. You can simply ignore it. Microsoft can't win a copyright infringement lawsuit: you own the software that Microsoft sold you, and Congress gave you the right to use it.
Whiny is perfectly acceptable. Why should people who write software for free give a damn about you? Fuck you. If you want things to just work, pay the Mac Tax (although they don't Just Work for me) or buy Windows.
I'll chime in with my 2 cents in general on Linux. Linux isn't for the average Joe. The desktop is good for a corporate environment, though, where someone is around full-time to fix "wierdness". All that needs to work there is networking and perhaps Office, and that's trivial these days. A default GNOME desktop is MUCH nicer than anything out of Redmond (and even Apple). (Even things that Apple "invented" work better under Linux. Spotlight never worked for me with OS X, but Beagle under Linux is very very useful.)
All in all, though, Linux isn't for Joe User. If they want Windows or OS X and the DRM and lock-in, let them have it. For people that contribute to Linux, it's great. Iwouldn't give it up for anything.
The $6.99 plan is quite useful. It gives you unlimited access to all data services on your phone, and lets you tether to your phone to use GPRS. The "catch" is that you can "only check e-mail" while tethered. Of course, with a SOCKS proxy running on port 110 in my office, it's basically unlimited Internet. Very helpful when you're at a coffee shop and want to surf, but don't want to pay $100/hr or whatever hotspots charge these days:)
I've taken to green tea when I want a non-sugary caffeniated beverage. I like coffee and regular tea, but not without sugar. However, certain blends of green tea are drinkable without sugar (my favorites are matcha and houjicha).
> I am pretty sure that all PC in China have a Chinese Government Certification Authority listed in their SSL root file. That is enough for mounting a man-in-the-middle attack against SSL. Now you have dissidents who believe they are safe because of SSL, but in fact the firewall is reading their exchanges. Knock, knock?
No, no, no. This would let the Chinese government impersonate a server that has an SSL certificate that's signed by the Chinese government's CA. For example, the Chinese government could set up a phishing site for the bank of China without anyone noticing:)
I doubt the subserves have their secret SSL proxies registered with the government, so this point is irrelevant to them. They are probably using a trust model like SSH (refuse to connect if the host key has changed), or PGP (web-of-trust).
> Second, SSL can be defeated.
Sure, after nearly all the open problems in mathematics are solved. If you know of someone who's done this, there's several million dollars (and immortality) waiting for them.
If you want to "defeat SSL", it's probably easier to just use a rubber hose to beat to death anyone who uses it.
> You don't get it, many (of course not all) *nix geeks can't differentiate the meaning of commercial and evil, even if they try real hard.
That's because there isn't a difference. Code that you can't change, modify, or improve is evil. Commercial software can't be changed, modified, or improved. Hence commercial and evil are one in the same.
I started using OS X at 10.3 when I got the 15" Powerbook I'm using to type this post. 10.3 was a fine OS. Then 10.4 came out. I hear it made some machines faster; fine. Spotlight isn't that exciting to me, I know where my files are. Automator was broken in 10.4.0 for what I wanted to do (download slashdot to my iPod). Everything else was very incremental, a few minor features here-and-there. (Minimally-useful, ripped from Mozilla) RSS support in Safari. Cool. Great.
Then 10.4.5 came out, which hosed my machine. Whenever I opened Thunderbird (I ditched Mail.app a while before, since it was losing mail and was generally not Apple's best effort), the machine kernel paniced. Not good. Whenever I opened dashboard, the machine kernel paniced. Eventually the problem went away when I stopped using my Bluetooth mouse.
10.4.6 fixed my desktop problems, but it totally hosed my OS X server. Apache refused to start because something else was listening on port 80. Netstat didn't see anything, and killing every superflous process didn't resolve the problem either. Upon rebooting, sshd wouldn't start either. Nice. I couldn't re-install the OS either, since the OS X server installer doesn't support the system controller in that machine. Calling Apple's tech support yieleded the fact that, even though they sold me the machine with OS X server installed, OS X server was not supported on this configuration. (Brand new dual-core 2.0GHz G5 tower.)
The machine is currently sitting on top of our rack, completely useless until Apple decides to release a fix. If they do, that is -- they already have my money, why should they care?
All in all, I don't see how OS X is a good deal for me. To me, money is better spent on things that aren't proprietary money-making schemes. I understand that paying for things gives you time to do things that are more important... but in this case that didn't happen. OS X has wasted my time -- at least when Linux breaks I learn something fixing it.
Now that Macs are generic Intel machines in a nicer case, I don't see the benefit of paying twice as much, only to be locked into a proprietary platform. (I like how Windows is bad because they lock you into their platform, but somehow Apple's lock-in is something I should pay extra for. Please explain that to me:)
Anyway, you can buy Macs if you like, that's good for you. I just don't see the advantage. All operating systems suck, but Linux sucks less. (OpenBSD is my server OS of choice, though, because I agree with Theo's idealism.)
Anyway, I'm not trolling, I'm just mad that Apple isn't as cool as they used to be:)
Agreed. I just got a core duo Dell laptop that's almost exactly the same as the macbook (the macbook has better graphics, but xterm and emacs don't need a good graphics card). The difference is, instead of paying $2000+ for a laptop, it was $1000. For an extra $700, I got a 24" LCD and a port replicator... in the end, I paid a lot less. (The Dell has some additional niceities like a built-in smart card reader, Intel a/b/g wireless, etc.)
Apple is really going downhill. The Macbook isn't really much better than the generics that are $1000 less. OS X gets worse with each release. Safari is the most unstable web browser I've ever used. iTunes is a resource hog. Mail.app is false advertising:) iEverythingElse is slow or needs you to pay Apple $99/yr for their web hosting account.
All in all, for every reason that Apple gives people to buy a Mac, for me it's a reason to throw my Mac away. I want an OS that lets me do what I want, not what the Content Creators want (PT_DENY_ATTACH. Fuck you, Apple.)
(Not to mention getting a decent emacs under OS X. With debian, I "apt-get install emacs21" and have emacs21 that integrates fully with my environment. multi-lingual input Just Works, the X11 fonts work, emacs looks like every other X11 application, etc. With OS X, I had to compile the CVS version just to get something usable, but it's still missing a lot of features. MULE isn't in there, but OS X's built-in input methods kind-of-sort-of work. Except that you can't use some obscure asian characters that aren't in UTF-8 -- emacs will load them and display them, but OS X refuses to let you copy or paste them into emacs.)
All in all, OS X doesn't fit with my computing mentality. My model of a computer is a device that executes instructions on my behalf. Linux does whatever I tell it to, and if it doesn't work out how I want it to, I can fix the source. With OS X, some Supreme Diety (Jobs) Has Decided How I Shall Use The Holy Computing Device. Not my style. Some people like that, but I don't. I like to hash things out on a mailing list, then code it. Having one guy decide how everything works is silly.
Not to mention that Apple pushes out super unstable OS X Server updates that hose my organization on a regular basis. I still haven't recovered from 10.4.6.
And BTW, I think the shell example is a lot more readable than the MSH example. List all files, print the 9th column of each line, remove the file that's named after the line printed. Simple.
And btw, why would you ls -la | {print $9} when you could just do ls -a | xargs rm?
What exactly is stopping you from passing "structured data" from one app to another under UNIX? Ever hear of YAML or XML?
Besides, what parsing are you doing in a shell script anyway? Most system administration tasks usualy involve the filesystem (accessible via "*" or a similar glob), or reading lines in a file (accessible via xargs or cat) and doing something to them.
Sure it's great that M$ is doing this, but it's no better or no worse than what UNIX has. Why use something that's proprietary and "perl-like" when you can use perl itself for free!?
This is really getting old and clichéd... Macs have parts that Just Don't Work too. For me, I to get my Mac to Just Work, I had to install emacs from the CVS version. I had to ditch iChat for Adium. I had to get rid of Safari and replace it with Firefox. I had to get rid of Mail.app (the buggiest program EVER) and replace it with Thunderbird. Etc., etc., etc.
All this took me a year to realized... now I'm not using anything Apple. The OS routinely gets in my way (IO and process creation are SLOW!)... and frankly it's just not that great anymore. It's Windows with a better base and better graphics, but it's still not that great.
If you think Apple's the solution to all the world's problems, I pity you.
(And please don't mod this troll. I was an Apple fanboy for a long time... but their platform just doesn't work for me anymore. Sorry.)
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Try Dell small business instead of Home. Much better, usually. I got their 24" LCD for $600.
I just got a 2GHz D620 for that. It has NVidia graphics. (Actually, that was a $60 option that I didn't take, because I couldn't care less about 3D or eye candy.)
> Expect "insightful" mod-ups for your content-free post before I finish typing this.
I know I'm going to be modded down for this, but I can be even more content-free! (Content-free as in American beer?)
Whiny is perfectly acceptable. Why should people who write software for free give a damn about you? Fuck you. If you want things to just work, pay the Mac Tax (although they don't Just Work for me) or buy Windows.
YouTube and Google video work fine for me.
I'll chime in with my 2 cents in general on Linux. Linux isn't for the average Joe. The desktop is good for a corporate environment, though, where someone is around full-time to fix "wierdness". All that needs to work there is networking and perhaps Office, and that's trivial these days. A default GNOME desktop is MUCH nicer than anything out of Redmond (and even Apple). (Even things that Apple "invented" work better under Linux. Spotlight never worked for me with OS X, but Beagle under Linux is very very useful.)
All in all, though, Linux isn't for Joe User. If they want Windows or OS X and the DRM and lock-in, let them have it. For people that contribute to Linux, it's great. Iwouldn't give it up for anything.
Citizens, sure. But what if he walked into McDonald's and took out a few suspected terrorists? Then would be be impeached? Probably not.
Makes you wonder why he wants everyone to be a suspected terrorist, doesn't it?
The $6.99 plan is quite useful. It gives you unlimited access to all data services on your phone, and lets you tether to your phone to use GPRS. The "catch" is that you can "only check e-mail" while tethered. Of course, with a SOCKS proxy running on port 110 in my office, it's basically unlimited Internet. Very helpful when you're at a coffee shop and want to surf, but don't want to pay $100/hr or whatever hotspots charge these days :)
I've taken to green tea when I want a non-sugary caffeniated beverage. I like coffee and regular tea, but not without sugar. However, certain blends of green tea are drinkable without sugar (my favorites are matcha and houjicha).
> I am pretty sure that all PC in China have a Chinese Government Certification Authority listed in their SSL root file. That is enough for mounting a man-in-the-middle attack against SSL. Now you have dissidents who believe they are safe because of SSL, but in fact the firewall is reading their exchanges. Knock, knock?
:)
No, no, no. This would let the Chinese government impersonate a server that has an SSL certificate that's signed by the Chinese government's CA. For example, the Chinese government could set up a phishing site for the bank of China without anyone noticing
I doubt the subserves have their secret SSL proxies registered with the government, so this point is irrelevant to them. They are probably using a trust model like SSH (refuse to connect if the host key has changed), or PGP (web-of-trust).
> Second, SSL can be defeated.
Sure, after nearly all the open problems in mathematics are solved. If you know of someone who's done this, there's several million dollars (and immortality) waiting for them.
If you want to "defeat SSL", it's probably easier to just use a rubber hose to beat to death anyone who uses it.
> You don't get it, many (of course not all) *nix geeks can't differentiate the meaning of commercial and evil, even if they try real hard.
That's because there isn't a difference. Code that you can't change, modify, or improve is evil. Commercial software can't be changed, modified, or improved. Hence commercial and evil are one in the same.
Here's an interesting take: http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39
You should have used Chart::Graph or Term::Gnuplot. Although they both exec gnuplot, I doubt that PHB-types would be aware of that :)
I started using OS X at 10.3 when I got the 15" Powerbook I'm using to type this post. 10.3 was a fine OS. Then 10.4 came out. I hear it made some machines faster; fine. Spotlight isn't that exciting to me, I know where my files are. Automator was broken in 10.4.0 for what I wanted to do (download slashdot to my iPod). Everything else was very incremental, a few minor features here-and-there. (Minimally-useful, ripped from Mozilla) RSS support in Safari. Cool. Great.
:)
:)
Then 10.4.5 came out, which hosed my machine. Whenever I opened Thunderbird (I ditched Mail.app a while before, since it was losing mail and was generally not Apple's best effort), the machine kernel paniced. Not good. Whenever I opened dashboard, the machine kernel paniced. Eventually the problem went away when I stopped using my Bluetooth mouse.
10.4.6 fixed my desktop problems, but it totally hosed my OS X server. Apache refused to start because something else was listening on port 80. Netstat didn't see anything, and killing every superflous process didn't resolve the problem either. Upon rebooting, sshd wouldn't start either. Nice. I couldn't re-install the OS either, since the OS X server installer doesn't support the system controller in that machine. Calling Apple's tech support yieleded the fact that, even though they sold me the machine with OS X server installed, OS X server was not supported on this configuration. (Brand new dual-core 2.0GHz G5 tower.)
The machine is currently sitting on top of our rack, completely useless until Apple decides to release a fix. If they do, that is -- they already have my money, why should they care?
All in all, I don't see how OS X is a good deal for me. To me, money is better spent on things that aren't proprietary money-making schemes. I understand that paying for things gives you time to do things that are more important... but in this case that didn't happen. OS X has wasted my time -- at least when Linux breaks I learn something fixing it.
Now that Macs are generic Intel machines in a nicer case, I don't see the benefit of paying twice as much, only to be locked into a proprietary platform. (I like how Windows is bad because they lock you into their platform, but somehow Apple's lock-in is something I should pay extra for. Please explain that to me
Anyway, you can buy Macs if you like, that's good for you. I just don't see the advantage. All operating systems suck, but Linux sucks less. (OpenBSD is my server OS of choice, though, because I agree with Theo's idealism.)
Anyway, I'm not trolling, I'm just mad that Apple isn't as cool as they used to be
Agreed. I just got a core duo Dell laptop that's almost exactly the same as the macbook (the macbook has better graphics, but xterm and emacs don't need a good graphics card). The difference is, instead of paying $2000+ for a laptop, it was $1000. For an extra $700, I got a 24" LCD and a port replicator... in the end, I paid a lot less. (The Dell has some additional niceities like a built-in smart card reader, Intel a/b/g wireless, etc.)
:) iEverythingElse is slow or needs you to pay Apple $99/yr for their web hosting account.
Apple is really going downhill. The Macbook isn't really much better than the generics that are $1000 less. OS X gets worse with each release. Safari is the most unstable web browser I've ever used. iTunes is a resource hog. Mail.app is false advertising
All in all, for every reason that Apple gives people to buy a Mac, for me it's a reason to throw my Mac away. I want an OS that lets me do what I want, not what the Content Creators want (PT_DENY_ATTACH. Fuck you, Apple.)
(Not to mention getting a decent emacs under OS X. With debian, I "apt-get install emacs21" and have emacs21 that integrates fully with my environment. multi-lingual input Just Works, the X11 fonts work, emacs looks like every other X11 application, etc. With OS X, I had to compile the CVS version just to get something usable, but it's still missing a lot of features. MULE isn't in there, but OS X's built-in input methods kind-of-sort-of work. Except that you can't use some obscure asian characters that aren't in UTF-8 -- emacs will load them and display them, but OS X refuses to let you copy or paste them into emacs.)
All in all, OS X doesn't fit with my computing mentality. My model of a computer is a device that executes instructions on my behalf. Linux does whatever I tell it to, and if it doesn't work out how I want it to, I can fix the source. With OS X, some Supreme Diety (Jobs) Has Decided How I Shall Use The Holy Computing Device. Not my style. Some people like that, but I don't. I like to hash things out on a mailing list, then code it. Having one guy decide how everything works is silly.
Not to mention that Apple pushes out super unstable OS X Server updates that hose my organization on a regular basis. I still haven't recovered from 10.4.6.
> No sadder than the childless presuming they know what parenting's all about.
No sadder than an Anonymous Coward presuming that we should give a damn about its opinion.
> Finally, just because you don't like her music, does not mean it's crap.
True. But her music is crap, so the distinction is rather academic, isn't it?
First we had slashvertisements, and now we have commentvertisements! Amazing, truly amazing.
:)
This post brought to you by jrockway widgets inc. The finest supplier of imagniary objects this side of http://amazon.com/.
If you hate people so much, maybe you should just stay home? Lock your doors and keep the crying babies out!
> funny ad-hackery
:)
:)
like perl -ne 'print eval';?
Yeah, what a hack. I hate those one-liners
example of this shell in use:
> 2+2
4
> use YAML; Dump({x => 10, y => 20});
---
x: 2
y: 3
> use LWP::Simple; get "http://slashdot.org/"
[[text of slashdot.org]]
Definitely completely useless and a total hack. I'm sure Perl (and the CPAN) will be immediately abandoned by everyone in favor of MSH or Python
> ls -la | '{print $9}' | xargs rm
.*?
You mean, rm *
And BTW, I think the shell example is a lot more readable than the MSH example. List all files, print the 9th column of each line, remove the file that's named after the line printed. Simple.
And btw, why would you ls -la | {print $9} when you could just do ls -a | xargs rm?
What exactly is stopping you from passing "structured data" from one app to another under UNIX? Ever hear of YAML or XML?
Besides, what parsing are you doing in a shell script anyway? Most system administration tasks usualy involve the filesystem (accessible via "*" or a similar glob), or reading lines in a file (accessible via xargs or cat) and doing something to them.
Sure it's great that M$ is doing this, but it's no better or no worse than what UNIX has. Why use something that's proprietary and "perl-like" when you can use perl itself for free!?
> Please show me a Virtual Machine that can run Windows, or Linux so good that you don't even know its there.
qemu. To average Joe Windows User, it's good enough. It's slower than native, but spyware, IE, etc. slow down Windows anyway.
You can't do that. It's ActiveX, not HTML.
This is really getting old and clichéd... Macs have parts that Just Don't Work too. For me, I to get my Mac to Just Work, I had to install emacs from the CVS version. I had to ditch iChat for Adium. I had to get rid of Safari and replace it with Firefox. I had to get rid of Mail.app (the buggiest program EVER) and replace it with Thunderbird. Etc., etc., etc.
All this took me a year to realized... now I'm not using anything Apple. The OS routinely gets in my way (IO and process creation are SLOW!)... and frankly it's just not that great anymore. It's Windows with a better base and better graphics, but it's still not that great.
If you think Apple's the solution to all the world's problems, I pity you.
(And please don't mod this troll. I was an Apple fanboy for a long time... but their platform just doesn't work for me anymore. Sorry.)
I think we should create a police state to prevent people from spreading petitions to create a police state. Problem solved!