True... Did I hear that directv's contract with tivo ends in 07? If so and they go with their own dvr that sucks as much as the typical cable co. one does then they'll lose every tivo customer they have.
Actually the main draw of the whole set up is the feature that is in the series3. Dual tuners. So if directv wants to keep my business then they'll need to keep tivo. If they don't, i'm gone.
The competition from the cable companies sucks so much I don't even know where to begin. Here's a letter I wrote when I had to use a so called dvr from a cable company while moving:
+++++
To: Grande Communications - Customer Service, Marketing, Business Development, CEO Subject: Good lord your DVR offering sucks.
I've seen some bad user interfaces over the years and the one featured on your scientific atlanta dvr is pretty much the worst i've ever seen. Where one button would suffice it forces you to use 3. Or sometimes 4. I challenge you to schedule a recording of Sponge Bob Square Pants for two days in the future. With TiVo it's trivial, with your device it is impossible. Forget about attempting to set up something equivalent to a Season Pass. Come on, are you really serious about this product? I suppose the charge to my bank account indicates that you sadly are. Has anyone in your management actually tried to use the device. Or do they all just have TiVo and assume that all DVRs are the same? If so then they are woefully out of touch.
I have to use your crappy offering since my apartment does not have a southern view. But be assured, once I move I will be resuming my DirecTV subscription and continue to use my 2 year old DirecTV dual-tuner TiVo.
+++++
Now I didn't actually send it since I was busy moving. But now... humm....
Urr and about 600 off a quad, and something like 150 of a 23in cinema...
It adds up after a while. Note that i said a NEW HIGH END SYTEM. not a mini. not an ibook. And >I just re-read my post. I certinely wasn't being a fanboy about it. Was just pointing out that you do get something from it.
Whattya want? They are macs. Good luck finding any bigger discounts on them.
I'm finding netbeans 5 beta to be really nice when it's not barfing exceptions at me. Until that gets sorted out i've defaulting to eclipse. But again.. you're not going to have much fun with it on slower hardware or a slightly less used desktop os.
The issue for me is how much time and effort is it worth learning a language and framework that only exists on a single minority platform?
I personally feel that OSX is a beautiful combination of unixy goodness and gui usability. So much so that I dropped a load on a quad-g5 last month. And i've been playing with objectivec/cocoa/xcode/ib long enough to develop a few opinions:
1. Cocoa is the best thing going for the mac. It's feature rich and has loads of good documentation and examples. Far nicer (at a code level) to build GUIs in than say... Swing. 2. XCode/IB - Hello? 1992 called and wants it tech back. Once you get the hang of it's not a bad combo. But Delphi showed the way forward to today and not having two way tools is painful. 3. Objective C ditto. As a java guy I-CANT-STAND having to deal with.h files again. Copy and pasting message signatures around sure is a lot of fun. But that's just me. Bigger issue is memory management. It's a pain but it's better than c at least. 4. Libraries - As long as there is a cocoa lib for what you want to do you're good. As soon as you have to start calling c or c++ based libs you're screwed. It's nice an familiar to c/c++ guys. But it's rather jarring to be running along in objc and all of a sudden have a load of pointers hit you in the face, throw in the CoreFoundatiaon and carbon stuff... ech!. Every time I see it i'm just "argh... this is why I prog in java". 5. Deprecated Java-Cocoa bridge - Nice idea but making java behave like objc does in cocoa is pretty messy from a java prospective. Probably is better than they just killed it off.
So, back to the point. ObjC has some good and some bad. If you could hope to even just port your code to another platform I'd be all over it. But without that ability what business is going to let you build an app with it? What business is going to buy an app that is osx only? Given these two constraints what left? Server based apps? Java pretty much has that wrapped up in all but the most fervent windows only shops.
The good news is that the mac market is expanding like crazy. It's only ~4% or so.. but that's millions and millions of users who actually buy software. Dunno if it's enough to make a living off of yet, but perhaps someday.
OK fine... comment templates. We all know a good way to argue your point is to pick out a little mistake in my hastily written post and construe that I was saying that ides could magically write meaningful comments.
RE Verbosity:
My point is that if the IDE can generate and maintain the 'boilerplate' code then it doesn't matter if the language is concise or not. The IDE has effectively removed that feature of the language from consideration. All the ides will fold the code up so you don't even have to look at it if you don't want to.
I'm not saying java is 'better' or that it couldn't use some cleaning up. Or for that matter that some of the new language features in 1.5 are not just way to complex. I am saying that a good IDE can smooth out the rough areas enough that you no longer have to worry about them. This is especially true for the IDEs that constantly compile the code while you edit it so that you immediately see compile time errors. HUGE time saver.
I'm not the one to help with using eclipse on netbsd. If you're not used to using an IDE I wouldn't start with eclipse. Try jbuilder foundation or netbeans. They both are swing based and quite a bit more user friendly. And for that matter try them out on linux or os x. You'll be a lot happier with them.
I've done all my java dev with jbuilder/eclipse on os x for the past 3 years and deploy to linux, solaris, aix, and win with little trouble. That is the portable part. The UI stuff requires dealing with the subtle window/event handling on different platforms and can get really funky.
They all have built in refactoring and code generation utils that do NOT mark up the source in any unusual way. ( The main exception is the UI tools. Most have/*** do not edit **/ blocks and such. Except for jbuilder. It rouddtrips swing. ) For example... you add your object attributes and then rightmouse -> refactor -> 'generate accessor methods'. And blink... you have properly formatted, commented, and scoped getters and setters. Need to change the name of your attribute? Just rightmouse -> refactor -> rename. Change it's name and the accessor methods are changed and all uses of them in your code are changed. Refactor a class name? Same deal.
Now of course this is a feature of the IDE and could/should be applied to any language your using. But the fact that the IDE handles this sort of thing means that I don't care about the verbosity of any language I might work with. I don't care about saving keystrokes when writing code since a good ide will save me that effort and come on... most of your time coding is NOT typing.. it's thinking about the problem.
The article is the first time I've actually seen any Ruby. Looks nice... but some of the examples are quickly turning into code soup on the level of perl or c++. I don't want to be the compiler and have to decipher some compact syntax.... verbosity is not necessarily a bad thing. I would argue that for code maintenance it's better to be more explicit than not.
Of course java has it's faults... But the notion that the syntax of a language needs to be super efficient for people using vi and emacs is kinda missing the point of what makes good maintainable code.
You do realized that the popup menu for iTune's dock icon has all the typical controls for play, stop, next, prev, etc? Can't take up much less space than that.
My itunes is using about 300MB of memory... but I've 3G and I let the VM system deal with it. So I don't really care. Even on my TiBook with 1G of ram I still don't care.
It is exactly like the current apple mouse in feel (a good thing). But it doesn't have the clear exterior on the white interior. It's just white.
It clicks just like the current apple mouse, but it can tell if your pushing more on the right or the left. This works really well and you don't even notice that there are not separate buttons.
The squeeze is a little weird since you have to have your fingers right on the buttons. This might not be so great for some, I had to use my thumb and little finger bent in a weird way. Again, kinda strange, but I could get used to it. Esply if it was assiged to something I didn't do too often.
The scroll ball is a little small, but again is something you'd probably get used to. It clicks quite nicely and the scrolling seems to work well. Hard to tell if it will gum up really bad or not. I didn't attempt to take it appart.
All in all (after 4 min of playing with it) it is a nice mouse. The right and left mousing work really well, the scrolling is good and the rest is... cool but nothing too exciting.
I would definitly get one with a new mac. But 50 clams is a little steep to replace my kensingtons.
It's not that you can't get the functionality with applescript or some programming. It's just that for $30/(major release) I can do it with no effort. My time is worth a hell of a lot more than $30/(time it write something by hand).
Don't get me started about VLC and MPlayer. If they are all you have on linux then they are great. On OSX? $30 is dirt cheap for the QTPro functionality.
These are systems that are really pretty cool. And really freaking expensive.
They have nothing to do with HP-UX or Unix of any kind. They are Tadem machines (feel free to look that up).
These are rather slow but super reliable machines with a bizzare OS that has had features for decades that mainstream os's still don't have. Take the current clustering and grid tech and meld it all together and you get something like the tandem. The company I work for came out of the tandem space. The typical intro to the machines for new hires is to note that you can smash one with a sledge hammer and you won't lose any transactions.
Who uses these things? Banks, Banks, Banks, Airlines, Governement, Dell, etc...
They (HP) have been working on a unixy layer to run on top of the tandem os for a number of years now. Apparently this hasn't been going too well. Sounds like Linux might help them do something similar to IBM and the VMs on the mainframe.
They just want a machine that works. If they even have a choice then the mac is more attractive than linux. All the geeky stuff means zip to them. iTunes and iPhoto are attention getters like nothing on the linux side.
I'm not saying that people will jump at the chance to spend more, and I'm not saying that people will dump their windows machines. I'm simply saying that for the vast majority of users out there the mac is a better choice than any linux distro. This is less true on the corporate side. But propbably not much in the long run.
Ok fine. Some good points. Although 'cheating' is a little much.
At my company they use RHAS. Period. Most companies are like that. If youre runing production machines in this type of environment then forget about randome RPM problems. There just aren't any because you don't do anything that isn't 'standard'. FreeBSD is cool... but it aint no red hat (good or bad).
And yeah... I'm talking about the g5 imacs. For style, ease of use and default software set I don't think you can put a matching linux box together for any resonable price. I got one for my dad last xmas. Opened it up and it looked like a sparc server inside. beutiful.
But there is market share and then there is market share.
As you say, those corproate desktops sitting idle on the weekend are prime canidates for linux. They are a huge ammount of the market share that windows has. The mom and pop machines are the other huge market share (this is my def of a normal user). Linux still isn't there yet for this segment IMHO and the mac (w/ iLife) is going to keep linux out of it.
It's just possible that Apple may even beat linux to the corporate desktop too. RH and Novell really need to get the ease of use and ease of administration down solid now. Without it those MSxxs will not even look at linux twice. It can't be as good as the windows tools. It needs to be better.
If apple can get to the CxOs first then linux is going to have an even bigger fight on it's hands. TCO for a corporate version of the mini could be drastically in favor of apple/ms office. With this switch to intel they'll have an ample supply of chips and systems guts and be poised to be a reliable supplier.
In any event... The current linux user base is vocal, and active. But not significant compared to those above. Esply on the desktop which is what the whole thread is about.
Dude I use a mac all day long. I'm even going to buy a dual 2.7 powermac. But I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that it's the fastest machine around. Feel free to post real world reviews that show the 970 blowing away the Intel box. I'd be happy to see them.
Let's face it. IBM doesn't want to make a fast desktop chip. The needs of the systems that use the POWER arch do not include blinding speed. Cell doesn't count. It's not a general purpose device.
I have done this with dell because that's what my (and everyone elses company) uses.
If you match things feature for feature both hardware and software the mac is typically cheaper. Not always... but at least sometimes. Include the ease of use and not massive exposure to (bad) hackers the mac is a better deal.
I priced out an xserve vs. a dual cpu dell for an application at my company. The xserve was 1K cheaper. (Mainly due to the cost of RH AS lic). Of course the company went with the dell. But not because it cost less to acquire.
What you call a dead end all in one I call the perfect machine for my dad and mom that will last them for 4-8 years.
1. Normal users simply don't care about any of this. Besides I can't think of a single user app on linux that is as slick as any one of the iLife apps. Until there is... forget about it.
2. Bah. again normal users don't care. They want to turn the machine on and get their webmail.
3. see 1 and 2. Normal users don't care about any of this and will fall asleep/back out of the room if you try and tell them about it.
4. Lordy see 1,2,3.
5. The slickness of OS X is built into the toolkits. KDE/Gnome will have to change drastically to match this. X11 doesn't have more than a little to do with it.
6. This is your best point... But we're not really talking about desktop share anymore.
7. HAHAHAHAHA. You know nothing about OS X and again, normal users couldn't care less. Apple script (weird moon language) relies upon the app toolkit and the devs desire to make the app scriptable. Until KDE/Gnome allow this linux desktops are going to be far behind.
I can get behind your motivation. But I think you're a little optimistic. Increased market share is about NORMAL people. I like all the geeky stuff in the linux distros. But I still use OS X as my primary development system. It's just mo better.
Until Linux/KDE/Gnome devs take a good close look at OS X they will have a hard time matching it. Forget about beating it.
1. Macs are price competitive with win/intel boxes right now. Price out a dell with similar specs to a given class of mac. The mac tends to be a bit cheaper. Don't forget you have to include all the software on the dell too. This is what typically causes the prices to be comparable. XServes are especially competitive. Actually the same goes for linux distros. Check out the price on RH Workstation these days and look at the quality of the software avialable.
2. Macs on intel are going to be no different than macs on powerpc. Except faster. The internals of the mac are already almost completely a pc anyway. Forget about legally loading OS X on your hand assembled opteron box. Apple will never do it. So for someone who needs unix on a cheap box linux will continue to be preferred.
3. Mac's are already kicking Linux ass on the desktop. Let's face it. KDE/Gnome/X11 is ok at best. All these UI's are chasing the wrong horse. Windows is not where it's at anymore. If you want to see linux desktop share increase then they will need to emulate OS X. Both look/feel, ease of use, and application installation. Right now it's not even close.
4. There are far more new mac users than old. The bitching and moaning about how great classic OS 7-9 is by a very small group. They are flat out wrong anyway. I still don't know that the point of the Chooser is. And don't get me started about the need to manually allocate memory for your programs. Classic is a vast improvement over DOS and Win3.1. It sucks compared to OS X.
Picking good hardward is indeed a requirement in the x86 world. In my experiance windows is more particular about this than Linux. But cheaping out on parts is always a bad idea.
To address your points:
1. If your last reboot was feb 8th does this mean you've installed none of the updates?
2. You list a set of programs you have running all at once but then say that "these program reqularly get close and reopend..."
In my exerpiance the people who have the least problems with windows do exactly that. Repeatedly close and open programs as needed. Unix types (like me) tend to leave applications open all the time. On windows this always (in my experiance) leads to system trouble. Perhaps XP sp 2 fixes this.
It's not a maven requirement (I've done nothing more than read about maven).
By putting the JAVA_HOME/bin at the front of your path you are ensuring that the version of java being used is the one you want.
Oracle, Sybase and others tend to drop all sorts of JVM versions into your path. Effing everything up.
There are other various ways of making sure your app uses the right jvm, but this is the easiest that I know about.
For the situation you describe you can include a JRE with your installer (install anywhere does this). By passing the path altogether. Or you can have a bat file that always looks for the JAVA_HOME (or attempts to find it). Or about 20 other methods.
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True... Did I hear that directv's contract with tivo ends in 07? If so and they go with their own dvr that sucks as much as the typical cable co. one does then they'll lose every tivo customer they have.
Actually the main draw of the whole set up is the feature that is in the series3. Dual tuners. So if directv wants to keep my business then they'll need to keep tivo. If they don't, i'm gone.
The competition from the cable companies sucks so much I don't even know where to begin. Here's a letter I wrote when I had to use a so called dvr from a cable company while moving:
+++++
To: Grande Communications - Customer Service, Marketing, Business Development, CEO
Subject: Good lord your DVR offering sucks.
I've seen some bad user interfaces over the years and the one featured on your scientific atlanta dvr is pretty much the worst i've ever seen. Where one button would suffice it forces you to use 3. Or sometimes 4. I challenge you to schedule a recording of Sponge Bob Square Pants for two days in the future. With TiVo it's trivial, with your device it is impossible. Forget about attempting to set up something equivalent to a Season Pass. Come on, are you really serious about this product? I suppose the charge to my bank account indicates that you sadly are. Has anyone in your management actually tried to use the device. Or do they all just have TiVo and assume that all DVRs are the same? If so then they are woefully out of touch.
I have to use your crappy offering since my apartment does not have a southern view. But be assured, once I move I will be resuming my DirecTV subscription and continue to use my 2 year old DirecTV dual-tuner TiVo.
+++++
Now I didn't actually send it since I was busy moving. But now... humm....
Urr and about 600 off a quad, and something like 150 of a 23in cinema...
It adds up after a while. Note that i said a NEW HIGH END SYTEM. not a mini. not an ibook. And >I just re-read my post. I certinely wasn't being a fanboy about it. Was just pointing out that you do get something from it.
Whattya want? They are macs. Good luck finding any bigger discounts on them.
I'm finding netbeans 5 beta to be really nice when it's not barfing exceptions at me. Until that gets sorted out i've defaulting to eclipse. But again.. you're not going to have much fun with it on slower hardware or a slightly less used desktop os.
If you get the 500$ ADC membership you get a shiny cd with 10.4 on it, and a monthly update of DVD/CDs.
And a black t-shirt.
And one hardware discount at the apple developer store. If you're buying a new high end machine it's pretty much the only deal you'll get.
The issue for me is how much time and effort is it worth learning a language and framework that only exists on a single minority platform?
.h files again. Copy and pasting message signatures around sure is a lot of fun. But that's just me. Bigger issue is memory management. It's a pain but it's better than c at least.
I personally feel that OSX is a beautiful combination of unixy goodness and gui usability. So much so that I dropped a load on a quad-g5 last month. And i've been playing with objectivec/cocoa/xcode/ib long enough to develop a few opinions:
1. Cocoa is the best thing going for the mac. It's feature rich and has loads of good documentation and examples. Far nicer (at a code level) to build GUIs in than say... Swing.
2. XCode/IB - Hello? 1992 called and wants it tech back. Once you get the hang of it's not a bad combo. But Delphi showed the way forward to today and not having two way tools is painful.
3. Objective C ditto. As a java guy I-CANT-STAND having to deal with
4. Libraries - As long as there is a cocoa lib for what you want to do you're good. As soon as you have to start calling c or c++ based libs you're screwed. It's nice an familiar to c/c++ guys. But it's rather jarring to be running along in objc and all of a sudden have a load of pointers hit you in the face, throw in the CoreFoundatiaon and carbon stuff... ech!. Every time I see it i'm just "argh... this is why I prog in java".
5. Deprecated Java-Cocoa bridge - Nice idea but making java behave like objc does in cocoa is pretty messy from a java prospective. Probably is better than they just killed it off.
So, back to the point. ObjC has some good and some bad. If you could hope to even just port your code to another platform I'd be all over it. But without that ability what business is going to let you build an app with it? What business is going to buy an app that is osx only? Given these two constraints what left? Server based apps? Java pretty much has that wrapped up in all but the most fervent windows only shops.
The good news is that the mac market is expanding like crazy. It's only ~4% or so.. but that's millions and millions of users who actually buy software. Dunno if it's enough to make a living off of yet, but perhaps someday.
OK fine... comment templates. We all know a good way to argue your point is to pick out a little mistake in my hastily written post and construe that I was saying that ides could magically write meaningful comments.
RE Verbosity:
My point is that if the IDE can generate and maintain the 'boilerplate' code then it doesn't matter if the language is concise or not. The IDE has effectively removed that feature of the language from consideration. All the ides will fold the code up so you don't even have to look at it if you don't want to.
I'm not saying java is 'better' or that it couldn't use some cleaning up. Or for that matter that some of the new language features in 1.5 are not just way to complex. I am saying that a good IDE can smooth out the rough areas enough that you no longer have to worry about them. This is especially true for the IDEs that constantly compile the code while you edit it so that you immediately see compile time errors. HUGE time saver.
I'm not the one to help with using eclipse on netbsd. If you're not used to using an IDE I wouldn't start with eclipse. Try jbuilder foundation or netbeans. They both are swing based and quite a bit more user friendly. And for that matter try them out on linux or os x. You'll be a lot happier with them.
I've done all my java dev with jbuilder/eclipse on os x for the past 3 years and deploy to linux, solaris, aix, and win with little trouble. That is the portable part. The UI stuff requires dealing with the subtle window/event handling on different platforms and can get really funky.
Sit down and actually USE any of the following:
/*** do not edit **/ blocks and such. Except for jbuilder. It rouddtrips swing. ) For example... you add your object attributes and then rightmouse -> refactor -> 'generate accessor methods'. And blink... you have properly formatted, commented, and scoped getters and setters. Need to change the name of your attribute? Just rightmouse -> refactor -> rename. Change it's name and the accessor methods are changed and all uses of them in your code are changed. Refactor a class name? Same deal.
JBuilder (for Swing apps), eclipse, netbeans, intelliJ, etc.,etc. etc....
They all have built in refactoring and code generation utils that do NOT mark up the source in any unusual way. ( The main exception is the UI tools. Most have
Now of course this is a feature of the IDE and could/should be applied to any language your using. But the fact that the IDE handles this sort of thing means that I don't care about the verbosity of any language I might work with. I don't care about saving keystrokes when writing code since a good ide will save me that effort and come on... most of your time coding is NOT typing.. it's thinking about the problem.
The article is the first time I've actually seen any Ruby. Looks nice... but some of the examples are quickly turning into code soup on the level of perl or c++. I don't want to be the compiler and have to decipher some compact syntax.... verbosity is not necessarily a bad thing. I would argue that for code maintenance it's better to be more explicit than not.
Of course java has it's faults... But the notion that the syntax of a language needs to be super efficient for people using vi and emacs is kinda missing the point of what makes good maintainable code.
You do realized that the popup menu for iTune's dock icon has all the typical controls for play, stop, next, prev, etc? Can't take up much less space than that.
My itunes is using about 300MB of memory... but I've 3G and I let the VM system deal with it. So I don't really care. Even on my TiBook with 1G of ram I still don't care.
It is exactly like the current apple mouse in feel (a good thing). But it doesn't have the clear exterior on the white interior. It's just white.
It clicks just like the current apple mouse, but it can tell if your pushing more on the right or the left. This works really well and you don't even notice that there are not separate buttons.
The squeeze is a little weird since you have to have your fingers right on the buttons. This might not be so great for some, I had to use my thumb and little finger bent in a weird way. Again, kinda strange, but I could get used to it. Esply if it was assiged to something I didn't do too often.
The scroll ball is a little small, but again is something you'd probably get used to. It clicks quite nicely and the scrolling seems to work well. Hard to tell if it will gum up really bad or not. I didn't attempt to take it appart.
All in all (after 4 min of playing with it) it is a nice mouse. The right and left mousing work really well, the scrolling is good and the rest is... cool but nothing too exciting.
I would definitly get one with a new mac. But 50 clams is a little steep to replace my kensingtons.
Quicktime "Pro" is more than just a movie player. It does format conversions and capture.
Why not take a look at the product page?
It's not that you can't get the functionality with applescript or some programming. It's just that for $30/(major release) I can do it with no effort. My time is worth a hell of a lot more than $30/(time it write something by hand).
Don't get me started about VLC and MPlayer. If they are all you have on linux then they are great. On OSX? $30 is dirt cheap for the QTPro functionality.
At 200K a swing? No. Not really. : (
These are systems that are really pretty cool. And really freaking expensive.
They have nothing to do with HP-UX or Unix of any kind. They are Tadem machines (feel free to look that up).
These are rather slow but super reliable machines with a bizzare OS that has had features for decades that mainstream os's still don't have. Take the current clustering and grid tech and meld it all together and you get something like the tandem. The company I work for came out of the tandem space. The typical intro to the machines for new hires is to note that you can smash one with a sledge hammer and you won't lose any transactions.
Who uses these things? Banks, Banks, Banks, Airlines, Governement, Dell, etc...
They (HP) have been working on a unixy layer to run on top of the tandem os for a number of years now. Apparently this hasn't been going too well. Sounds like Linux might help them do something similar to IBM and the VMs on the mainframe.
They just want a machine that works. If they even have a choice then the mac is more attractive than linux. All the geeky stuff means zip to them. iTunes and iPhoto are attention getters like nothing on the linux side.
I'm not saying that people will jump at the chance to spend more, and I'm not saying that people will dump their windows machines. I'm simply saying that for the vast majority of users out there the mac is a better choice than any linux distro. This is less true on the corporate side. But propbably not much in the long run.
Ok fine. Some good points. Although 'cheating' is a little much.
At my company they use RHAS. Period. Most companies are like that. If youre runing production machines in this type of environment then forget about randome RPM problems. There just aren't any because you don't do anything that isn't 'standard'. FreeBSD is cool... but it aint no red hat (good or bad).
And yeah... I'm talking about the g5 imacs. For style, ease of use and default software set I don't think you can put a matching linux box together for any resonable price. I got one for my dad last xmas. Opened it up and it looked like a sparc server inside. beutiful.
All good points.
But there is market share and then there is market share.
As you say, those corproate desktops sitting idle on the weekend are prime canidates for linux. They are a huge ammount of the market share that windows has. The mom and pop machines are the other huge market share (this is my def of a normal user). Linux still isn't there yet for this segment IMHO and the mac (w/ iLife) is going to keep linux out of it.
It's just possible that Apple may even beat linux to the corporate desktop too. RH and Novell really need to get the ease of use and ease of administration down solid now. Without it those MSxxs will not even look at linux twice. It can't be as good as the windows tools. It needs to be better.
If apple can get to the CxOs first then linux is going to have an even bigger fight on it's hands. TCO for a corporate version of the mini could be drastically in favor of apple/ms office. With this switch to intel they'll have an ample supply of chips and systems guts and be poised to be a reliable supplier.
In any event... The current linux user base is vocal, and active. But not significant compared to those above. Esply on the desktop which is what the whole thread is about.
For a moment there I forgot I was on slashdot. Thanks.
Fan-boy?
Dude I use a mac all day long. I'm even going to buy a dual 2.7 powermac. But I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that it's the fastest machine around. Feel free to post real world reviews that show the 970 blowing away the Intel box. I'd be happy to see them.
Let's face it. IBM doesn't want to make a fast desktop chip. The needs of the systems that use the POWER arch do not include blinding speed. Cell doesn't count. It's not a general purpose device.
I have done this with dell because that's what my (and everyone elses company) uses.
If you match things feature for feature both hardware and software the mac is typically cheaper. Not always... but at least sometimes. Include the ease of use and not massive exposure to (bad) hackers the mac is a better deal.
I priced out an xserve vs. a dual cpu dell for an application at my company. The xserve was 1K cheaper. (Mainly due to the cost of RH AS lic). Of course the company went with the dell. But not because it cost less to acquire.
What you call a dead end all in one I call the perfect machine for my dad and mom that will last them for 4-8 years.
But that's just me.
1. Normal users simply don't care about any of this. Besides I can't think of a single user app on linux that is as slick as any one of the iLife apps. Until there is... forget about it.
2. Bah. again normal users don't care. They want to turn the machine on and get their webmail.
3. see 1 and 2. Normal users don't care about any of this and will fall asleep/back out of the room if you try and tell them about it.
4. Lordy see 1,2,3.
5. The slickness of OS X is built into the toolkits. KDE/Gnome will have to change drastically to match this. X11 doesn't have more than a little to do with it.
6. This is your best point... But we're not really talking about desktop share anymore.
7. HAHAHAHAHA. You know nothing about OS X and again, normal users couldn't care less. Apple script (weird moon language) relies upon the app toolkit and the devs desire to make the app scriptable. Until KDE/Gnome allow this linux desktops are going to be far behind.
I can get behind your motivation. But I think you're a little optimistic. Increased market share is about NORMAL people. I like all the geeky stuff in the linux distros. But I still use OS X as my primary development system. It's just mo better.
Until Linux/KDE/Gnome devs take a good close look at OS X they will have a hard time matching it. Forget about beating it.
1. Macs are price competitive with win/intel boxes right now. Price out a dell with similar specs to a given class of mac. The mac tends to be a bit cheaper. Don't forget you have to include all the software on the dell too. This is what typically causes the prices to be comparable. XServes are especially competitive. Actually the same goes for linux distros. Check out the price on RH Workstation these days and look at the quality of the software avialable.
2. Macs on intel are going to be no different than macs on powerpc. Except faster. The internals of the mac are already almost completely a pc anyway. Forget about legally loading OS X on your hand assembled opteron box. Apple will never do it. So for someone who needs unix on a cheap box linux will continue to be preferred.
3. Mac's are already kicking Linux ass on the desktop. Let's face it. KDE/Gnome/X11 is ok at best. All these UI's are chasing the wrong horse. Windows is not where it's at anymore. If you want to see linux desktop share increase then they will need to emulate OS X. Both look/feel, ease of use, and application installation. Right now it's not even close.
4. There are far more new mac users than old. The bitching and moaning about how great classic OS 7-9 is by a very small group. They are flat out wrong anyway. I still don't know that the point of the Chooser is. And don't get me started about the need to manually allocate memory for your programs. Classic is a vast improvement over DOS and Win3.1. It sucks compared to OS X.
Picking good hardward is indeed a requirement in the x86 world. In my experiance windows is more particular about this than Linux. But cheaping out on parts is always a bad idea.
To address your points:
1. If your last reboot was feb 8th does this mean you've installed none of the updates?
2. You list a set of programs you have running all at once but then say that "these program reqularly get close and reopend..."
In my exerpiance the people who have the least problems with windows do exactly that. Repeatedly close and open programs as needed. Unix types (like me) tend to leave applications open all the time. On windows this always (in my experiance) leads to system trouble. Perhaps XP sp 2 fixes this.
> and perhaps even to create the Walkman of the 21st century.
0 3& sid=a58iozj_2jXM
It's called an iPod.
56% of surveyed kids (!) have one.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=100001
It's not just the player that has to be beaten... it's the branding too.
It's not a maven requirement (I've done nothing more than read
about maven).
By putting the JAVA_HOME/bin at the front of your path you
are ensuring that the version of java being used is the one you want.
Oracle, Sybase and others tend to drop all sorts of JVM versions into your path. Effing everything up.
There are other various ways of making sure your app uses the right jvm, but this is the easiest that I know about.
For the situation you describe you can include a JRE with your installer (install anywhere does this). By passing the path altogether. Or you can have a bat file that always looks for the JAVA_HOME (or attempts to find it). Or about 20 other methods.
Also make sure your path is set correctly.
...>
Click on PATH and edit it so the JAVA_HOME is at the FRONT
of the path as so:
%JAVA_HOME%\bin;<... rest of path
and you have JAVA_HOME set as:
JAVA_HOME=<path to jsdk or jre home>
This will save you boatloads of problems.
------------
It's a good thing Swing sucks and is too hard to use or else
I wouldn't be able to do my dev on a mac and deploy my apps
to windows. Silly me.