Listen. I moved to this system from TestDirector, and I must say it kicks the SHIT out of the latter. I've also used a couple other solutions I won't mention because even though they suck, I'm friends with their developers.
1) Outlook's native, not activex/java-inna-window, so it never crashes. TD (and one of the other apps) has the tendency to do that unless you use their client, and they make you pay per license. Outlook's client is basically "free," since it comes with MS Word, Excel, and all the other crap you "have to have" at a business.
2) Most of them FORCE you to enter information. This can take a long time. Sometimes, I just want to add a task to remind me to find a faster way to execute an algorithm. It is much quicker and much easier to use Outlook.
3) Generally (at least 90% of the time), even WITH all the extended information, I needed to meet with the tester who found a problem to watch them replicate it. It's nearly impossible to codify some of the more complicated activities we perform, and many testers, sadly, aren't technical writers. They're clever sadistic people who get their jollys off in proving you wrong (j/k guys, I love you all! Beta Forever!)
4) There's nothing by way of completeness or exactness that you get in a bug tracking system that you CAN'T get with Tasks. Need to know what version they're running? Say, "hey guys, when you enter a task, include the version." Done. Need to include a screen shot, patch file, etc? Done. Need to SEARCH on these things? Done. Maybe not as nicely as you'd like, but you can do it...and it's already here.
But then again, I *like* post-it notes on a whiteboard. And I used to work with this guy.
Yeah, that the one. I think we pay around $2500/yr for it. "Ooh that's a lot," say the $70k+ linux admins. Maybe. But for that money we get 5 licenses of each MS app and 3 support calls per year. The cost of 5 copies of Visual Studio.NET and MS Office, purchased by themselves, for the development team is at least $5000. Put SQL Server, Visio, all the various platforms and the umpteen other apps we get in the service and you're looking at a load of dough.
No, pundits, we can't use the "cheaper" OSS alternatives. We tried that when test marketing our new service (in other words, sending out letters trying to sell vaporware. not a big deal since everything we send out has a "projected completion" date on it). We got nearly ten times the calls when we said "Written on the.NET framework" then we did when we said we were going to write it on Linux. Of course, we're marketing to non-tech sector people, and they're just not impressed by Mr Torvald's Penguins yet.
Email is the least of the features of its big brother, Outlook, however. Outlook handles: task lists (very important...our comapny uses hierarchies of these task lists for all bug tracking in development , because it's stupid enough to be flexible with regards to input), global contacts (as in, for an entire organization), group management, Sticky notes, alerts, a "journal" which tracks changes on all your office docs (fucking awesome), syncing with pocketpc and I THINK palm, publishable schedules, and this is jsut the stuff I actually USE.
Best of all, Outlook is pretty stable, unobtrusive, and surprisingly easy to use. And since our smtp server cleans viruses before they even GET to Outlook, the second biggest downfall is eliminated for us. The biggest, of course, is price, and our license came "free" with the MSDE subscription we get anyway to do our work.
I prefer Squirrelmail for email, and use iCal at home for the killer rendezvous support. But for doing all the sundry business crap I gotta do on Windows, Outlook is second only to a personal assistant (insert secretary shagging joke here).
Hey! I participated in the "hacking" contest on the Swordfish website. Compared to that bullshit, on the waste o chronometer, solving this contest is akin to curing cancer.
You know, the only hold outs in my laserdisc collection were LucasFilms. Now all we need is Star Wars "real trilogy" non-special edition DVDs and I can get rid of this archaic RF modulated format!
More space in my entertainment center for records, yey!
OK. Before I got a cell phone, I too used to be pissed off at people talking on them in public places. Now, I'm not so pissed. Because I realized that my phone voice was no louder than my usual conversation voice. And while sure, there are a lot of people who feel the need to call their friends at odd times -- in the middle of concerts, for example, or at the post office --these are the same people who ten years ago would queue up at the payphone and have long, loving conversations while coating their chin with some stranger's spit.
If my phone rings, I'm going to answer it. I'm not sneaking it quietly in the corner like it was a huge secret that I was having a conversation -- that's crap. When I see someone I haven't seen in a long time in public, I'll walk up and talk to them, I'm not going to pull them into some alley so we don't disturb the people walking silently in the street. I think silence in public is clinical and spooky.
It's not like I'm strutting my stuff. Cell phones are hardly the status symbol they were in the 1980s...I know a guy who doesn't have an apartment, a job, or a car, but he's got a damn cell phone. Shit, my CABLE bill is bigger than my cell bill. Anybody who's still impressed by or thinks other people are impressed by cell phone technology is totally out of the loop.
So in this late hour, if somebody gets made at me for speaking on my phone in public, it can only mean one of three things: either they are mad that I have a phone, they're mad that people call me on it, or they're mad that they can't hear what the other person is saying. So they're either technophobic, jealous, or voyeuristic. In any case, I'm not going to adjust my life for people who can't deal with the innovations of the present -- what, am I supposed to get out of my car and push next time I'm in Amish country?
Re:You missed a point... a very big point.
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 3, Informative
So people relaxing on a porch are your reason for being an elitist dickhead?
Dude, I've lived in "the ghetto." A lot of people who live there work weekends and nights. Some people work jobs that call you in -- part time laborers who make a lot of money but only work a very slim amount of the time. You caught them in their relaxation time. So of course, they were relaxing.
Some of them are unemployed, but because they're in college, they're living off loans and their parents' assistance. They're studying to be doctors, lawyers, news photogrpahers, that sort of thing.
I live in the suburbs now, and occasionally take off on work days to fix things, etc. And yes, i like to sit on the stoop with the radio bumpin' and a cold coors six. I get 12 vacation days a year and hardly ever take them. Sometimes my neighbours aren't doign anything and they come over. One guy's retired at 55, worked his ass off for the state. Another's an electrician, he works 20 precise hours a week for $50 an hour and spends the rest of the time hoping somebody's wiring was done by the cutrate guys isntead of him. And there's kids on break from school, still looking for work; people who work on saturdays and get thrusdays off, all sorts of nonsense.
Working as a photographer is a pretty fun and stressful job, I've done it, but it doesn't give you the right to criticize people because of WHERE they live and WHEN they're outside. You're supposed to be discovering truth and beauty. Stop trying to make the world into some 700 club infomercial.
Dude, FM antennas and power for them are EXPENSIVE. And the inexpensive kind used by pirate (okay, COMMUNITY) radio enthusiasts don't reach more than a mile, and are easily snubbed out by even the weakest corporate station.
If I set my iTrip to 102.7, I have trouble getting the station in my own CAR due to interference from a radio station 200 miles away in Vermont.
It sucks to hafta use FM...but I'll bet MSOFT got a good deal with those ClearChannel fucks.
Well, I guess another difference here is that Windows is one conceptual app does a lot of apps, compared to Linux being a lot of apps that do one thing.
Windows 2000 is, after all, equivalent to the linux kernel, glib, x server, window manager, web server, web browser, etc. ad nauseum. I wouldn't doubt that there are more than 63,000 conceptual functions of Win2k -- not even considering the obscure combinations of these, like opening a print dialog in IE vs opening a print dialog in Paint.
There are a countably infinite number of combinations of these as well. If testers, during their "what wierd shit can we make this OS do" phase, discovered 63,000 obscure bugs but 1,000,000 plus functions worked perfectly, I'd still ship the thing.
After all, all software over ten lines has bugs and implementation decisions. Some of those 63,000 may have never been found by consumers, while thousands more were no doubt discovered on the first day of release. That's how this industry works. Nothing is flawless or bulletproof...the benefit that Linux has is daily releases. Of course, that's if somebody cares enough about your bug to fix it...you might get stuck doing it your damn self.
How often do you do clean installs? Just wondering, not making a point or anything. I've had 2k crap out on me once in the past 3 years and I'm 90% sure it was my fault for going three months before rebooting after installing new hardware drivers. I used to reinstall 98 all the time due to memory leaks and that kind of muck.
I think it's telling that even though XP's been out for at least a year, 2000 is still available as an option on new Dells. I asked for it 'special when they ordered my new PC for work.
2000 is, in my opinion, the peak windows OS. It works, plays well with hardware, and doesn't try and mess with the concept of the UI too much. It adds transparency but doesn't mutilate it, and you can turn off the one dumb feature (menu sliding and fading).
XP...well, XP moves shit around on me. Nothing's where I expect it to be. There are all these words...and real estate on menus is sucked up by these complicated sentences that have nothing to do with what I use my computer for.
In short, XP fights my productivity. Every time I try to do something, it slows me down in a way that I only need the first time I do that thing. It's like a tutorial you can't skip past. Whereas Win2k gets things out of my way and only tells me what I need to know. If I need more, it gives me that option.
Even "classic" mode is a bear, because the control panel is all munged up. Erg!
I like Office 2000 better than XP as well...2000 was a good year for MS, maybe it's because it was the last cycle before Balmer came in as Lord of the Sith.
Goddamnit...you must never have programmed anything in your life. Do you honestly think that any organization in the WORLD can create, in 6 years for any amount of money, an operating system, SQL server and office suite as feature rich and bug free as MS' tools available today? Yes, I said bug free. Sure, MS still has bugs, but the thing doesn't crash or leak memory like it did in 1996, or even like it did in 1999.
Good software takes time. Linux is at least 10 years old, and has only been useful to the public for the past 4 or 5. Shit, open office is 4 years old at this point.
Keep in mind, also, that whatever solution the Army chooses would have to perfectly and seemlessly interoperate with what they have now.
So instead of spending $470mil to use software that's good enough now, you want them to spend it on writing new stuff, and ostensibly using NOTHING now?
That $300 was a "BUDGET" for a toilet seat, and included the possible cost of procurement, eg the worst case scenario to pay a guy to not do his job for a day in any part of the world, and instead find a toilet seat.
We don't have to worry about this kind of shit, because we are never under heavy fire from the enemy in a strange country when we go to the wally mart.
Something to think on before you complain about the military is the ramifications of any failure due to underbidding. A shoddily made F16 is worse than no F16 at all, because a failure means one less trained pilot, one less machine capable of flying a sortie in a trouble zone. Sure, sometimes it seems like a Joseph Heller novel, but that's war for you.
I'd like to see linux running on my Incan quipu strands. They are, after all, binary. I'm willing to donate to the project, but I'm broke, so all I can offer to the coder is a terrace farm and all the guinea pigs you can eat.
Well, actually I'd hoped to prove that the "comparable machine" wasn't that much cheaper. But it was $500 off. Ironically, I think that's what my Time Warner discount on the new machines is...
Actually, I did price it out. It's about $4000, for a somewhat similar loadout from Dell with no firewire.
But we're hackers. We makes our own, right? Right. Now remember, the G5 has 4x DVD burning, Firewire 800, USB 2.0, a 160 gig Serial ATA hard disc and an ATI 9600 Pro. SO:
Mobo -- Best I could find was the IWILL DPI533-SATA, which covers our LAN, PCI-X, Serial ATA, USB 1.1 and gigabyte lan. Best price I could find: $357 Chips -- The comparison is at 3.06, best price is: $711 x 2 = $1422
Ram -- 512 meg PC 3200 registered. Best price is: $112
HD -- 160 Gig serial ATA: $160
DVD -- 4x write, 12x read: $154
Firewire 800: $85.
Video -- ATI 9600 Pro: $162
Sound -- Has to have optical in and out: $23
Without a case & power ($70+), fans ($20+) or USB 2.0 ($10), we're already at $2438. Put it all together, and yes you can build a passable alternative for $2538. This is assuming you don't splurge and get decent PS/Case/Fans, that you already have a keyboard and a mouse and that you can somehow get the whole thing shipped for free.
At newegg, this load out came to: well, i could get EXACTLY the same stuff, but close enough loadout was $2572 shipped. And I even resisted getting the cool aluminum case.
Dude, motherfucking IKEA. Anyhow, I don't need furniture. I take my iBook under the apple tree and wait for a Newton moment. Instead, I get the Newton treatment from my wife (get it? he died a virgin? aw what do you know from funny?!?)
You know, I agree with this, despite believing everything Greg said (I do think this was about levelling, and if they have released optimized compiled stats to begin with there'd be an even BIGGER stink about unfair practices, unoptimized code, etc). It would do apple good, and would drum up even more interest and enthusiasm in those chips and the box behind them.
And that's a good thing. After all, both Intel and AMD are putting both feet into the 64 bit fire...if Apple can interest academic research purchasers now, they might stave off sales of the other two chips...and boost Apple's market share a hefty sum.
Well, it's not exactly the same. Unfortunately, Windows and Linux are not directly compatible. So it's NOT like choosing one carpet over another...if you've got programs that run on one, they won't run on another.
What if you bought the house and none of your furniture fit inside anymore? Choosing Windows or Linux is a decision akin to choosing Mac or PC. It completely changes the future of your machine. And people will need to be educated of this choice. Some of them will make a decision solely based on price, have a bad experience and blame your company.
Operating systems are so low level that the choice is not moot, not arbitrary, and not simply something that can be selected from a list like a slower processor or smaller hard drive. If you want to run windows programs, then having windows installed is essential. Allowing people to deselect it is asking for trouble. It's more expensive. And it's not really necessary, since a guy wanting to run Linux can just reformat anyway.
So you're asking manufacturers to do more work, to possibly confuse people by giving them a immense decision when they're first buying their machine, all so that a very, very small segment of the market (less than 5% installed, probably even less of new sales) can save $50?
Not really. It's either a tax or it isn't. It doesn't matter whether I get my money's worth out of my federal taxes...i can't get out of paying them by moving to a different state. Since you can avoid this charge by buying a laptop from a different vendor, you're essentially avoiding the "tax." Ergo, no tax.
Of course, you might not get as good a PC. I've noticed smaller vendors often times don't offer the loadout or the features on their PCs that larger, windows-only operations like Dell can. They just don't have the clout.
So I'd consider it a "better fucking laptop" tax. The fact that it has XP on it (which I'd probably replace with 2k anyway) is inconsequential.
Nor should it be. Think about it: a laptop manufacturer wants to have a competitive price of $1000. Microsoft tells them they don't want people to have to pirate an OS, so they give them a deal: $100 per license if they don't offer a machine without an OS, or $50 per license if they offer the machines with windows only.
As a manufacturer, what's your option? Your price point is $1000. If you offer people $100 off to install their own OS, then to stay under $1000, you have to eliminate $50 worth of equipment. Making your machine $50 shittier. That's the price of another 512 meg of ram, or 20 gig more hard drive space, or a Combo drive instead of a CD Reader. That's a firewire port and USB 2.0. That's a higher resolution screen. One of these options has to be reduced or eliminated to make room for the ability for some of your customers to not use windows.
On top of this, the manufacturer does not want any support calls asking why the machine that jr. ordered doesn't have an OS, or what display driver should I use with my obscure flavor of BSD, etc. Each call could cost $10 or more -- and you're probably making less money off that PC. Less money, more work. How does this make sense?
Even with all these hassles, there are manufacturers who make Linux based laptops. They are not always top-of-the-line, but they're out there. Buy one of these if you really want to avoid the "microsoft tax." But realize that the money you're saving for bucking the "system" is only about $50...and for that price, you can get a system from a more stable company, possibly better support, and almost definitely better hardware.
You're welcome to my $50. I'll gladly give it to you. In exchange, however, I expect you to come to my house and install a world class operating system on my PC. Since that's what I'm getting for my $50 from Dell.
Sure, Linux or BSD or QNX are fine (I prefer Gentoo or FreeBSD, if you care). Just make sure whatever you install can run Microsoft Word, Photoshop and AOL's Instant Messenger. I need these for work. No, OpenOffice, The Gimp, and Jabber are NOT ok. They don't work natively with the file fomats and networks that I have at work, nor am I willing to learn a new program to do what I already know how to do. I guess I'm just stubborn, but hey, you're geting half a Benjamin here. I'm gonna make you sweat for it.
I'll also need a DVD player, photo management software, web browser, graphical email program, C++/Java IDE, MP3 Player and a calculator would be nice.
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Listen. I moved to this system from TestDirector, and I must say it kicks the SHIT out of the latter. I've also used a couple other solutions I won't mention because even though they suck, I'm friends with their developers.
1) Outlook's native, not activex/java-inna-window, so it never crashes. TD (and one of the other apps) has the tendency to do that unless you use their client, and they make you pay per license. Outlook's client is basically "free," since it comes with MS Word, Excel, and all the other crap you "have to have" at a business.
2) Most of them FORCE you to enter information. This can take a long time. Sometimes, I just want to add a task to remind me to find a faster way to execute an algorithm. It is much quicker and much easier to use Outlook.
3) Generally (at least 90% of the time), even WITH all the extended information, I needed to meet with the tester who found a problem to watch them replicate it. It's nearly impossible to codify some of the more complicated activities we perform, and many testers, sadly, aren't technical writers. They're clever sadistic people who get their jollys off in proving you wrong (j/k guys, I love you all! Beta Forever!)
4) There's nothing by way of completeness or exactness that you get in a bug tracking system that you CAN'T get with Tasks. Need to know what version they're running? Say, "hey guys, when you enter a task, include the version." Done. Need to include a screen shot, patch file, etc? Done. Need to SEARCH on these things? Done. Maybe not as nicely as you'd like, but you can do it...and it's already here.
But then again, I *like* post-it notes on a whiteboard. And I used to work with this guy.
Yeah, that the one. I think we pay around $2500/yr for it. "Ooh that's a lot," say the $70k+ linux admins. Maybe. But for that money we get 5 licenses of each MS app and 3 support calls per year. The cost of 5 copies of Visual Studio.NET and MS Office, purchased by themselves, for the development team is at least $5000. Put SQL Server, Visio, all the various platforms and the umpteen other apps we get in the service and you're looking at a load of dough.
.NET framework" then we did when we said we were going to write it on Linux. Of course, we're marketing to non-tech sector people, and they're just not impressed by Mr Torvald's Penguins yet.
No, pundits, we can't use the "cheaper" OSS alternatives. We tried that when test marketing our new service (in other words, sending out letters trying to sell vaporware. not a big deal since everything we send out has a "projected completion" date on it). We got nearly ten times the calls when we said "Written on the
Outlook Express does little more than email.
Email is the least of the features of its big brother, Outlook, however. Outlook handles: task lists (very important...our comapny uses hierarchies of these task lists for all bug tracking in development , because it's stupid enough to be flexible with regards to input), global contacts (as in, for an entire organization), group management, Sticky notes, alerts, a "journal" which tracks changes on all your office docs (fucking awesome), syncing with pocketpc and I THINK palm, publishable schedules, and this is jsut the stuff I actually USE.
Best of all, Outlook is pretty stable, unobtrusive, and surprisingly easy to use. And since our smtp server cleans viruses before they even GET to Outlook, the second biggest downfall is eliminated for us. The biggest, of course, is price, and our license came "free" with the MSDE subscription we get anyway to do our work.
I prefer Squirrelmail for email, and use iCal at home for the killer rendezvous support. But for doing all the sundry business crap I gotta do on Windows, Outlook is second only to a personal assistant (insert secretary shagging joke here).
Hey! I participated in the "hacking" contest on the Swordfish website. Compared to that bullshit, on the waste o chronometer, solving this contest is akin to curing cancer.
You know, the only hold outs in my laserdisc collection were LucasFilms. Now all we need is Star Wars "real trilogy" non-special edition DVDs and I can get rid of this archaic RF modulated format!
More space in my entertainment center for records, yey!
OK. Before I got a cell phone, I too used to be pissed off at people talking on them in public places. Now, I'm not so pissed. Because I realized that my phone voice was no louder than my usual conversation voice. And while sure, there are a lot of people who feel the need to call their friends at odd times -- in the middle of concerts, for example, or at the post office --these are the same people who ten years ago would queue up at the payphone and have long, loving conversations while coating their chin with some stranger's spit.
If my phone rings, I'm going to answer it. I'm not sneaking it quietly in the corner like it was a huge secret that I was having a conversation -- that's crap. When I see someone I haven't seen in a long time in public, I'll walk up and talk to them, I'm not going to pull them into some alley so we don't disturb the people walking silently in the street. I think silence in public is clinical and spooky.
It's not like I'm strutting my stuff. Cell phones are hardly the status symbol they were in the 1980s...I know a guy who doesn't have an apartment, a job, or a car, but he's got a damn cell phone. Shit, my CABLE bill is bigger than my cell bill. Anybody who's still impressed by or thinks other people are impressed by cell phone technology is totally out of the loop.
So in this late hour, if somebody gets made at me for speaking on my phone in public, it can only mean one of three things: either they are mad that I have a phone, they're mad that people call me on it, or they're mad that they can't hear what the other person is saying. So they're either technophobic, jealous, or voyeuristic. In any case, I'm not going to adjust my life for people who can't deal with the innovations of the present -- what, am I supposed to get out of my car and push next time I'm in Amish country?
So people relaxing on a porch are your reason for being an elitist dickhead?
Dude, I've lived in "the ghetto." A lot of people who live there work weekends and nights. Some people work jobs that call you in -- part time laborers who make a lot of money but only work a very slim amount of the time. You caught them in their relaxation time. So of course, they were relaxing.
Some of them are unemployed, but because they're in college, they're living off loans and their parents' assistance. They're studying to be doctors, lawyers, news photogrpahers, that sort of thing.
I live in the suburbs now, and occasionally take off on work days to fix things, etc. And yes, i like to sit on the stoop with the radio bumpin' and a cold coors six. I get 12 vacation days a year and hardly ever take them. Sometimes my neighbours aren't doign anything and they come over. One guy's retired at 55, worked his ass off for the state. Another's an electrician, he works 20 precise hours a week for $50 an hour and spends the rest of the time hoping somebody's wiring was done by the cutrate guys isntead of him. And there's kids on break from school, still looking for work; people who work on saturdays and get thrusdays off, all sorts of nonsense.
Working as a photographer is a pretty fun and stressful job, I've done it, but it doesn't give you the right to criticize people because of WHERE they live and WHEN they're outside. You're supposed to be discovering truth and beauty. Stop trying to make the world into some 700 club infomercial.
Dude, FM antennas and power for them are EXPENSIVE. And the inexpensive kind used by pirate (okay, COMMUNITY) radio enthusiasts don't reach more than a mile, and are easily snubbed out by even the weakest corporate station.
If I set my iTrip to 102.7, I have trouble getting the station in my own CAR due to interference from a radio station 200 miles away in Vermont.
It sucks to hafta use FM...but I'll bet MSOFT got a good deal with those ClearChannel fucks.
Simple? That's two clicks to get what I had before.
Doing more to get the same results is not simple. It's the fucking definition of complex.
Well, I guess another difference here is that Windows is one conceptual app does a lot of apps, compared to Linux being a lot of apps that do one thing.
Windows 2000 is, after all, equivalent to the linux kernel, glib, x server, window manager, web server, web browser, etc. ad nauseum. I wouldn't doubt that there are more than 63,000 conceptual functions of Win2k -- not even considering the obscure combinations of these, like opening a print dialog in IE vs opening a print dialog in Paint.
There are a countably infinite number of combinations of these as well. If testers, during their "what wierd shit can we make this OS do" phase, discovered 63,000 obscure bugs but 1,000,000 plus functions worked perfectly, I'd still ship the thing.
After all, all software over ten lines has bugs and implementation decisions. Some of those 63,000 may have never been found by consumers, while thousands more were no doubt discovered on the first day of release. That's how this industry works. Nothing is flawless or bulletproof...the benefit that Linux has is daily releases. Of course, that's if somebody cares enough about your bug to fix it...you might get stuck doing it your damn self.
How often do you do clean installs? Just wondering, not making a point or anything. I've had 2k crap out on me once in the past 3 years and I'm 90% sure it was my fault for going three months before rebooting after installing new hardware drivers. I used to reinstall 98 all the time due to memory leaks and that kind of muck.
I think it's telling that even though XP's been out for at least a year, 2000 is still available as an option on new Dells. I asked for it 'special when they ordered my new PC for work.
2000 is, in my opinion, the peak windows OS. It works, plays well with hardware, and doesn't try and mess with the concept of the UI too much. It adds transparency but doesn't mutilate it, and you can turn off the one dumb feature (menu sliding and fading).
XP...well, XP moves shit around on me. Nothing's where I expect it to be. There are all these words...and real estate on menus is sucked up by these complicated sentences that have nothing to do with what I use my computer for.
In short, XP fights my productivity. Every time I try to do something, it slows me down in a way that I only need the first time I do that thing. It's like a tutorial you can't skip past. Whereas Win2k gets things out of my way and only tells me what I need to know. If I need more, it gives me that option.
Even "classic" mode is a bear, because the control panel is all munged up. Erg!
I like Office 2000 better than XP as well...2000 was a good year for MS, maybe it's because it was the last cycle before Balmer came in as Lord of the Sith.
Goddamnit...you must never have programmed anything in your life. Do you honestly think that any organization in the WORLD can create, in 6 years for any amount of money, an operating system, SQL server and office suite as feature rich and bug free as MS' tools available today? Yes, I said bug free. Sure, MS still has bugs, but the thing doesn't crash or leak memory like it did in 1996, or even like it did in 1999.
Good software takes time. Linux is at least 10 years old, and has only been useful to the public for the past 4 or 5. Shit, open office is 4 years old at this point.
Keep in mind, also, that whatever solution the Army chooses would have to perfectly and seemlessly interoperate with what they have now.
So instead of spending $470mil to use software that's good enough now, you want them to spend it on writing new stuff, and ostensibly using NOTHING now?
That $300 was a "BUDGET" for a toilet seat, and included the possible cost of procurement, eg the worst case scenario to pay a guy to not do his job for a day in any part of the world, and instead find a toilet seat.
We don't have to worry about this kind of shit, because we are never under heavy fire from the enemy in a strange country when we go to the wally mart.
Something to think on before you complain about the military is the ramifications of any failure due to underbidding. A shoddily made F16 is worse than no F16 at all, because a failure means one less trained pilot, one less machine capable of flying a sortie in a trouble zone. Sure, sometimes it seems like a Joseph Heller novel, but that's war for you.
I'd like to see linux running on my Incan quipu strands. They are, after all, binary. I'm willing to donate to the project, but I'm broke, so all I can offer to the coder is a terrace farm and all the guinea pigs you can eat.
Well, actually I'd hoped to prove that the "comparable machine" wasn't that much cheaper. But it was $500 off. Ironically, I think that's what my Time Warner discount on the new machines is...
Actually, I did price it out. It's about $4000, for a somewhat similar loadout from Dell with no firewire.
But we're hackers. We makes our own, right? Right. Now remember, the G5 has 4x DVD burning, Firewire 800, USB 2.0, a 160 gig Serial ATA hard disc and an ATI 9600 Pro. SO:
Mobo -- Best I could find was the IWILL DPI533-SATA, which covers our LAN, PCI-X, Serial ATA, USB 1.1 and gigabyte lan. Best price I could find:
$357
Chips -- The comparison is at 3.06, best price is:
$711 x 2 = $1422
Ram -- 512 meg PC 3200 registered. Best price is:
$112
HD -- 160 Gig serial ATA:
$160
DVD -- 4x write, 12x read:
$154
Firewire 800:
$85.
Video -- ATI 9600 Pro:
$162
Sound -- Has to have optical in and out:
$23
Without a case & power ($70+), fans ($20+) or USB 2.0 ($10), we're already at $2438. Put it all together, and yes you can build a passable alternative for $2538. This is assuming you don't splurge and get decent PS/Case/Fans, that you already have a keyboard and a mouse and that you can somehow get the whole thing shipped for free.
At newegg, this load out came to: well, i could get EXACTLY the same stuff, but close enough loadout was $2572 shipped. And I even resisted getting the cool aluminum case.
Of course, this is for a 32 bit machine...
Dude, motherfucking IKEA. Anyhow, I don't need furniture. I take my iBook under the apple tree and wait for a Newton moment. Instead, I get the Newton treatment from my wife (get it? he died a virgin? aw what do you know from funny?!?)
You know, I agree with this, despite believing everything Greg said (I do think this was about levelling, and if they have released optimized compiled stats to begin with there'd be an even BIGGER stink about unfair practices, unoptimized code, etc). It would do apple good, and would drum up even more interest and enthusiasm in those chips and the box behind them.
And that's a good thing. After all, both Intel and AMD are putting both feet into the 64 bit fire...if Apple can interest academic research purchasers now, they might stave off sales of the other two chips...and boost Apple's market share a hefty sum.
Debious...is that a combination of dubious and devious?
Or does it mean, "pertaining to Debian Linux?"
Either way, I like the new word and intend to use it in my marketting lit.
Well, it's not exactly the same. Unfortunately, Windows and Linux are not directly compatible. So it's NOT like choosing one carpet over another...if you've got programs that run on one, they won't run on another.
What if you bought the house and none of your furniture fit inside anymore? Choosing Windows or Linux is a decision akin to choosing Mac or PC. It completely changes the future of your machine. And people will need to be educated of this choice. Some of them will make a decision solely based on price, have a bad experience and blame your company.
Operating systems are so low level that the choice is not moot, not arbitrary, and not simply something that can be selected from a list like a slower processor or smaller hard drive. If you want to run windows programs, then having windows installed is essential. Allowing people to deselect it is asking for trouble. It's more expensive. And it's not really necessary, since a guy wanting to run Linux can just reformat anyway.
So you're asking manufacturers to do more work, to possibly confuse people by giving them a immense decision when they're first buying their machine, all so that a very, very small segment of the market (less than 5% installed, probably even less of new sales) can save $50?
How big do you think you are?
'Sokay. I hate things too. Check out my website.
But everybody strongarms their vendors a little. What's that about RedHat not "supporting" ReiserFS, or certain version of the kernel?
Not really. It's either a tax or it isn't. It doesn't matter whether I get my money's worth out of my federal taxes...i can't get out of paying them by moving to a different state. Since you can avoid this charge by buying a laptop from a different vendor, you're essentially avoiding the "tax." Ergo, no tax.
Of course, you might not get as good a PC. I've noticed smaller vendors often times don't offer the loadout or the features on their PCs that larger, windows-only operations like Dell can. They just don't have the clout.
So I'd consider it a "better fucking laptop" tax. The fact that it has XP on it (which I'd probably replace with 2k anyway) is inconsequential.
Nor should it be. Think about it: a laptop manufacturer wants to have a competitive price of $1000. Microsoft tells them they don't want people to have to pirate an OS, so they give them a deal: $100 per license if they don't offer a machine without an OS, or $50 per license if they offer the machines with windows only.
As a manufacturer, what's your option? Your price point is $1000. If you offer people $100 off to install their own OS, then to stay under $1000, you have to eliminate $50 worth of equipment. Making your machine $50 shittier. That's the price of another 512 meg of ram, or 20 gig more hard drive space, or a Combo drive instead of a CD Reader. That's a firewire port and USB 2.0. That's a higher resolution screen. One of these options has to be reduced or eliminated to make room for the ability for some of your customers to not use windows.
On top of this, the manufacturer does not want any support calls asking why the machine that jr. ordered doesn't have an OS, or what display driver should I use with my obscure flavor of BSD, etc. Each call could cost $10 or more -- and you're probably making less money off that PC. Less money, more work. How does this make sense?
Even with all these hassles, there are manufacturers who make Linux based laptops. They are not always top-of-the-line, but they're out there. Buy one of these if you really want to avoid the "microsoft tax." But realize that the money you're saving for bucking the "system" is only about $50...and for that price, you can get a system from a more stable company, possibly better support, and almost definitely better hardware.
You're welcome to my $50. I'll gladly give it to you. In exchange, however, I expect you to come to my house and install a world class operating system on my PC. Since that's what I'm getting for my $50 from Dell.
Sure, Linux or BSD or QNX are fine (I prefer Gentoo or FreeBSD, if you care). Just make sure whatever you install can run Microsoft Word, Photoshop and AOL's Instant Messenger. I need these for work. No, OpenOffice, The Gimp, and Jabber are NOT ok. They don't work natively with the file fomats and networks that I have at work, nor am I willing to learn a new program to do what I already know how to do. I guess I'm just stubborn, but hey, you're geting half a Benjamin here. I'm gonna make you sweat for it.
I'll also need a DVD player, photo management software, web browser, graphical email program, C++/Java IDE, MP3 Player and a calculator would be nice.
Get those working and the $50 is yours