Ok. I first read it as every one was looking for java/LAMP/etc... there were 5 looking for.NET, particularly ASP.NET. Though I would be surprised if even that many were looking for the non-standards rather than java/LAMP/etc. I'm seeing that even those few that did get suckered into trying.NET/ASP have not had a few years of watching their competitors' taillights receded into the distance and have figured out that MS is not a help.
It is possible that you found in your search only 5 regular shops. That could be happening in several ways. The most obvious is that MS shops won't talk or even give a hint about other technologies, the same goes for the employees. They won't mention non-MS jobs or technologies or voluntarily admit their existence. Once you get into that ring, it's darn hard to get 'outside' information.
Another is that bad project managers are going to make many mistakes. So when their dream of implementing ASP/.NET goes over deadline and overbudget, they turn to the lessons learned in The Mythical Man-Month and do the exact opposite: throw more bodies at the project. That and those who got in early start to bail and 'need' to be replaced.
As mentioned, it's about developers wanting to stay fed. That means not only staying employed now, but also lining up your shots so that you sign onto the projects that succeed. Knowing MS crap becomes a liability. Otherwise, two years down the road, you have a worthless resume with a shortage of employable skills, but lots of.NET/ASP, and your list of failed projects. The people I know who went the.NET/ASP route are out of computers and unemployed, underemployed or working outside of computing. Those working with the normal technologies like java/LAMP/etc. have kept their cushy jobs and gotten raises or gotten even better jobs.
People who want to mess with simple stuff can get Picasa for free, from Google.
No. They can't. Look at the system requirements, there isn't a non-Windows version:
...
Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP.*
Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 or better (6.0 recommended). If at any time you get an "unable to authenticate" error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0.
Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended).
...
I'm not sure what Google's up to, but it's not good in this case. We all know the technical problems with DirectX and the technical advantages of OpenGL, so why not just get over their Bill agenda and cough up a standard version that can run on Linux, OS X, BSD, Solaris, and so on? Sure the site links to a fake Linux version, but read the page. It's not a version for Linux. It's a Windows version which runs under WINE. So in addition to tying your images to proprietary DirectX, it's not open source.
So Google needs to turn elsewhere for digital photo organizer. digiKam and KPhotoAlbum could use a bit of help instead.
Same for the main article here. Google is not working towards a version of Photoshop that runs on linux. They are working on a version of WINE that runs Photoshop. There's a world of difference there. I've been using Photoshop since probably the first version and started paying attention to versions with 2 something. I think 7 was the last one I'll ever use. Why? First is because my needs are RGB-only and Gimp does it more conveniently for me. Second, I very rarely fire up OS X anymore and Photoshop is not available for the systems I do most of my work on. If there's a version of Photoshop that truly runs on any of my main systems, then I'll buy it in a heartbeat, just to vote with my wallet but only if it happens. This debate has dragged on for about 6 years and soon I'll just say forget it.
Neither mono nor.Net cut it and are part of the Kudzu that MS brings to the "ecosystem" The farther you keep your services away from that crap, the better your return on investment. As stated, there is no advantage to knowing any more about them than where they are, so as to avoid them and thus avoid throwing the whole budget into the money pit. The client-side is for the time being unavoidable, you have to be aware of the shortcomings, quirks and deviations of Windows implementations of protocols and formats. But even then you're still working with normal (aka not from Redmond) tools.
The article is about developer tools. Yes you have to be aware of the shortcomings, quirks and deviations of Windows implementations of protocols and formats. However, on the development side, the only thing you have to know about them, to paraphrase the line from Alien2, is where they are. The further away you stay, the higher your profitability and employability.
All the "First taste is free" comments apart, can some slashdotters recommend an equivalent in the open source software that is as mature and robust as the three said software listed in the page. A *real* development environment, designer tools and a server are given away free by a corporation and suddenly some geeks want to comment on how this is not what they want and Windows source would be the holy grail.
Judging from some of the activity here, that's probably not a serious question. But let's pretend it is.
However, a lot of little Bill fans will get their feelings hurt.
Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows -- only. And it's near a few decades late in coming. A comprehensive answer could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit, CPAN and others.
However the press release does not say what the MS "tools" do or, more correctly, claim to do. Students would be more employable playing WoW. For those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're mostly open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2. None are MS.
MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for either MS or MS boosters in today's economy.
All the "First taste is free" comments apart, can some slashdotters recommend an equivalent in the open source software that is as mature and robust as the three said software listed in the page. A *real* development environment, designer tools and a server are given away free by a corporation and suddenly some geeks want to comment on how this is not what they want and Windows source would be the holy grail.
Let's pretend that's a serious question.
Well, the press release does not say what the "tools" do. However, for those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2.
The list could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit. Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows. And it's near a few decades late in coming.
MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for them.
Sure, we have all the tapes. Yep, stored exactly as specified, retensioned, the whole nine yards. Yep, 68 degrees, 38% humidity. Oh? No, you mean 68 degrees Fahrenheit? Oops, sorry about that.
That's just with the physical medium. Giving records the wrong or mispelled descriptor (aka tag or keyword) will hide them in a database or catalog nicely. Or it will prevent them from being earmarked for longer storage, etc.
One wonders if Microsoft officials do not recognize their own organization as a "single company". It's not. It transitioned to political movement sometime back. Pretty much every large institution and large business even gets MS boosters (fifth columnists) working against them for MS from the inside.
... Although there are claims of MS statehood, I prefer such ideas remain in the "jokingly funny" domain. Except that MS has been appointing "ambassadors" for some time now, again, usually with collusion from within. They're called "National Technology Officers".
...Instead of using buzzwords like "this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders", you could say something like "this is a good deal for your shareholders."
These MBA types may be all fat and bluster, but often let the truth slip out anyway. Don't read more into his statement than is there. Sure, if you were in charge, you'd be working on deals that would be good for your shareholders.
But that's not what he's about and that's not what this deal is about. "Value realization" is an obfuscated way of saying "extending our desktop monopoly to web searches" and "locking web users into our proprietary protocols and technologies".
You have to be careful then about which news articles you link to, or vote up, because some are serving ads for the beast. That goes double for sites that are owned by or affiliated with the beast.
"Drop-catching alone is not what has led to this problematic environment, but rather it is the abuse of the Add Grace Period in connection with drop-catching that appears to be the cause." That is actually a serious problem. Given that many ISPs, such as gisol, will retroactively change contract conditions and even assume full ownership of your domain name. Others will simply take your domain when you first register it. Normally, one option would be to let the domain expire and then grab it up, but these scum won't let the domain expire, but instead let one of the bottom feeders grab it before it becomes available to the original owner.
No. But you get the point. Each new system has brought decreased system efficiency (leading to higher hardware requirements) and interoperability and compatibility problems to name a few. That and the UI gets all changed around. However, people lump it, move on, and must simply pick up the slack on their own dime.
We'll have to see. Nokia has a lot of MSFTers where they can cause harm these days and has even both fought against Ogg and worse signed onto some very nasty contracts to spread MS DRM even on their FOSS systems. The money says go FOSS, but the ideologs infiltrating the company are more concerned about peddling MS than about profit.
Even other big companies like Apple see the profit, it's just the MSFTers and MBA getting their teeny minds in the way.
Somewhat alarming is the implicit assumtion that computer systems "go down" (and not in the yummy sensual sense" many times per week, per day. That does seem to be the common perception, no doubt rooted in the lamentably widespread useage of Microsofft.
If history recognizes Gates for anything, it will be for making bad engineering acceptable.
However, the problem has an impact far outside of engineering circles. Pretty much everyone uses desktop computers and have been worn down into not just accepting but even expecting that tasks and tools do not work efficiently or even properly. Often that ends up causing a crisis-management state where everything is left until it becomes a crisis and crises pre-empt each other. Another way it ends up is in complacency and a lethargic apathy where the MS victims perceive, incorrectly, that all technology is equally poor and there is no use in taking a professional interest in the tools used in their jobs. Then, people being people, they apply that outlook on their work tools to the rest of life around them and voilà : the Microsoft effect.
Maybe that was the final drop what tipped the economy over the edge.
If the current thinking is indeed that the Linux servers were inappropriately accessed through stolen passwords, how is that a security flaw of Linux or Apache? Like he asked, how is using a legitimate password equal to cracking the server?
On the other hand, turning Windows clients into bots *IS* an example of that software's (and QuickTime's and Yahoo! Messenger's) insecurity and vulnerability! Using a legitimate password is not equal to cracking the server. But it must be made to look so because the PR firms the M$ movement uses must cast aspersions on Apache and Linux so as to draw attention away from the actual insecure and vulnerable system. Most PHBs never read past the headlines, so this is major spin for the M$ party.
1. No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP. Mozilla doesn't put out an MSI build. There are a few groups that do, such as Frontmotion, but there is always some delay for them to rebuild.
That's up to the distro, in this case Windows to keep the packages up to date. There's your problem.
... but you still somehow need to deploy them in an automatic fashion. I'm guessing, though, that a tool could be developed fairly easily that puts the updates in the correct directory so that FF sees them the next time it starts and then installs them automatically.
Package management is normally left up to the distro. So if the distro sucks, then it also has a sucky or absent package management system and no maintenance of major packages.
So the only obstacle the Firefox is facing is the anti-competitive nature of M$ Windows maintenance tools: the tools appear to only support M$ cruft, so when the 'reformat and reinstall' mantra is invoked -- poof -- gone are the competing products that staff had to wheel, deal, and wheedle to get into place. Eventually they run out of time and let the M$ have their way.
RHEL / Fedora, YellowDog, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. all have no problem keeping FireFox packages up to date. What's the problem with the IT staff mentioned in the article? I thought the reason to go with a big money vendor was to get the big money support the PHBs / MBAs are always talking out of their asses about. Can't the IT staff mentioned in the article press the vendor to do what it is ostensibly contracted to do for them?
Well I can't imagine it would be screaming fast, though there is little technical information on the
Sugar GUI. It would really be good to see even a simple comparison vs fluxbox or something similar. Fluxbox ran nicely on a 333 MHz PII w/128MB of RAM that I used to have. However, we had in the early 80's reasonably fast, if simple, GUIs that ran in <32 KB of RAM on 8-bit 1 MHz CPUs, so even smaller is possible.
The lightweight fvwm and other window managers are definitely simple enough, the question remains can the be made all simple, candy-looking. Again, though, what are the requirements for Sugar and how does it compare?
If the OLPC was supposed to be a $100 laptop but is sold for 200, then this new crazy laptop will cost 150. This is great news. Maybe they should develop a voting machine based on this technology, sell it to the government and give the laptops away for free to the OLPC.
Let's take that in context.
The enormity of the price overrun is attributable to M$ getting OLPC to increase the specs drastically until the hardware became at least theoretically possible to run M$ Cruftware. If M$ boosters cannot kill the OLPC, they have to at least slow it down by any means necessary. Failing to do so means that a market for notebooks opens up without their monopoly. Todate M$ business model has focussed largely on leveraging the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got for him from IBM. We have a few decades of experience to watching M$ products and services become less and less competitive. Preserving the monopoly is the only way to keep the cult going.
Further, if Linux takes over the new market, or even breaks into it, the old markets will want it, too. We're almost there, with manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo almost offering Linux pre-installed.
Let's just focus on the hardware for the sake of argument. Go through the customization and make sure you are comparing similar components on similar systems. The iMac comes out cheaper. Then add in VAT, and the iMac comes out much cheaper.
Furthermore, rummaging around on the Dell site shows no XPS that is an all-in-one unit. The description says all-in-one, but the pictures clearly show a separate box.
OS X is still an advantage. You can order the Dell with XP, so Vista won't be wasting your resources. Ordering with linux preinstalled, should be possible, but obviously not something Dell intends to make easy.
Have you tried Opera? It's really quite good. I use it on my older Linux laptop (128MB ram) because it's the only modern browser that can show pages without thrashing the drive. I also use Opera on powerful machines - I think it's the best browser out there in terms of both the feature set and the quality of workmanship.
Opera is excellent, especially in regards to its small footprint, standards support and speed. The big gotcha, though, is still its closed source nature. So I don't generally recommend it except in situations like that one (with 128MB RAM) where it's the only appropriate option.
However, that does not mean that it has to be difficult to install. You can install Opera from a repository and let APT, or a graphical front end like Adept or Synaptic, do all the work.
I'd like to see Opera find some kind of open source licensing model, even if it is a dual licensing plan like with Qt or MySQL. Alternately, I'd like to see Firefox trim down further. After all, it got started to avoid the everything+kitchensink problem of Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. I first read it as every one was looking for java/LAMP/etc... there were 5 looking for .NET, particularly ASP.NET. Though I would be surprised if even that many were looking for the non-standards rather than java/LAMP/etc. I'm seeing that even those few that did get suckered into trying .NET/ASP have not had a few years of watching their competitors' taillights receded into the distance and have figured out that MS is not a help.
It is possible that you found in your search only 5 regular shops. That could be happening in several ways. The most obvious is that MS shops won't talk or even give a hint about other technologies, the same goes for the employees. They won't mention non-MS jobs or technologies or voluntarily admit their existence. Once you get into that ring, it's darn hard to get 'outside' information. Another is that bad project managers are going to make many mistakes. So when their dream of implementing ASP/.NET goes over deadline and overbudget, they turn to the lessons learned in The Mythical Man-Month and do the exact opposite: throw more bodies at the project. That and those who got in early start to bail and 'need' to be replaced.
As mentioned, it's about developers wanting to stay fed. That means not only staying employed now, but also lining up your shots so that you sign onto the projects that succeed. Knowing MS crap becomes a liability. Otherwise, two years down the road, you have a worthless resume with a shortage of employable skills, but lots of .NET/ASP, and your list of failed projects. The people I know who went the .NET/ASP route are out of computers and unemployed, underemployed or working outside of computing. Those working with the normal technologies like java/LAMP/etc. have kept their cushy jobs and gotten raises or gotten even better jobs.
People who want to mess with simple stuff can get Picasa for free, from Google.
No. They can't. Look at the system requirements, there isn't a non-Windows version:I'm not sure what Google's up to, but it's not good in this case. We all know the technical problems with DirectX and the technical advantages of OpenGL, so why not just get over their Bill agenda and cough up a standard version that can run on Linux, OS X, BSD, Solaris, and so on? Sure the site links to a fake Linux version, but read the page. It's not a version for Linux. It's a Windows version which runs under WINE. So in addition to tying your images to proprietary DirectX, it's not open source.
So Google needs to turn elsewhere for digital photo organizer. digiKam and KPhotoAlbum could use a bit of help instead.
Same for the main article here. Google is not working towards a version of Photoshop that runs on linux. They are working on a version of WINE that runs Photoshop. There's a world of difference there. I've been using Photoshop since probably the first version and started paying attention to versions with 2 something. I think 7 was the last one I'll ever use. Why? First is because my needs are RGB-only and Gimp does it more conveniently for me. Second, I very rarely fire up OS X anymore and Photoshop is not available for the systems I do most of my work on. If there's a version of Photoshop that truly runs on any of my main systems, then I'll buy it in a heartbeat, just to vote with my wallet but only if it happens. This debate has dragged on for about 6 years and soon I'll just say forget it.
Neither mono nor .Net cut it and are part of the Kudzu that MS brings to the "ecosystem" The farther you keep your services away from that crap, the better your return on investment. As stated, there is no advantage to knowing any more about them than where they are, so as to avoid them and thus avoid throwing the whole budget into the money pit. The client-side is for the time being unavoidable, you have to be aware of the shortcomings, quirks and deviations of Windows implementations of protocols and formats. But even then you're still working with normal (aka not from Redmond) tools.
The article is about developer tools. Yes you have to be aware of the shortcomings, quirks and deviations of Windows implementations of protocols and formats. However, on the development side, the only thing you have to know about them, to paraphrase the line from Alien2, is where they are. The further away you stay, the higher your profitability and employability.
Judging from some of the activity here, that's probably not a serious question. But let's pretend it is. However, a lot of little Bill fans will get their feelings hurt.
Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows -- only. And it's near a few decades late in coming. A comprehensive answer could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit, CPAN and others.
However the press release does not say what the MS "tools" do or, more correctly, claim to do. Students would be more employable playing WoW. For those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're mostly open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2. None are MS.
IDEs
Databases
GUI toolkits
MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for either MS or MS boosters in today's economy.
I call BS. Further, I smell marketeering. That must be this quarter's talking point from MS.
MS devel tools are rarely used outside of MBA-heavy shops. Getting too deep into the MS kudzu is a ticket for unemployment.
Let's pretend that's a serious question. Well, the press release does not say what the "tools" do. However, for those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2.
IDEs
Databases
GUI toolkits
The list could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit. Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows. And it's near a few decades late in coming.
MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for them.
... When you mess with the Presidential Records Act, you're messing with the entire National Archives system.Except that the Bush administration replaced the head of NARA with a more obedient, political appointee. Presumably that is to ensure that key records find ways not to be around when requested.
Sure, we have all the tapes. Yep, stored exactly as specified, retensioned, the whole nine yards. Yep, 68 degrees, 38% humidity. Oh? No, you mean 68 degrees Fahrenheit? Oops, sorry about that.
That's just with the physical medium. Giving records the wrong or mispelled descriptor (aka tag or keyword) will hide them in a database or catalog nicely. Or it will prevent them from being earmarked for longer storage, etc.
... Although there are claims of MS statehood, I prefer such ideas remain in the "jokingly funny" domain. Except that MS has been appointing "ambassadors" for some time now, again, usually with collusion from within. They're called "National Technology Officers".
...Instead of using buzzwords like "this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders", you could say something like "this is a good deal for your shareholders."These MBA types may be all fat and bluster, but often let the truth slip out anyway. Don't read more into his statement than is there. Sure, if you were in charge, you'd be working on deals that would be good for your shareholders.
But that's not what he's about and that's not what this deal is about. "Value realization" is an obfuscated way of saying "extending our desktop monopoly to web searches" and "locking web users into our proprietary protocols and technologies".
You have to be careful then about which news articles you link to, or vote up, because some are serving ads for the beast. That goes double for sites that are owned by or affiliated with the beast.
No. But you get the point. Each new system has brought decreased system efficiency (leading to higher hardware requirements) and interoperability and compatibility problems to name a few. That and the UI gets all changed around. However, people lump it, move on, and must simply pick up the slack on their own dime.
We'll have to see. Nokia has a lot of MSFTers where they can cause harm these days and has even both fought against Ogg and worse signed onto some very nasty contracts to spread MS DRM even on their FOSS systems. The money says go FOSS, but the ideologs infiltrating the company are more concerned about peddling MS than about profit.
Even other big companies like Apple see the profit, it's just the MSFTers and MBA getting their teeny minds in the way.
How long till the Microsoft effect kicks in and people simply lower their expectations and get used to it?
It's a pattern: W95 -> W98, W98 -> NT3, NT4 ->2000, 2000->XP, and XP->SP2. Battered spouse syndrome?
If history recognizes Gates for anything, it will be for making bad engineering acceptable.
However, the problem has an impact far outside of engineering circles. Pretty much everyone uses desktop computers and have been worn down into not just accepting but even expecting that tasks and tools do not work efficiently or even properly. Often that ends up causing a crisis-management state where everything is left until it becomes a crisis and crises pre-empt each other. Another way it ends up is in complacency and a lethargic apathy where the MS victims perceive, incorrectly, that all technology is equally poor and there is no use in taking a professional interest in the tools used in their jobs. Then, people being people, they apply that outlook on their work tools to the rest of life around them and voilà : the Microsoft effect.
Maybe that was the final drop what tipped the economy over the edge.
On the other hand, turning Windows clients into bots *IS* an example of that software's (and QuickTime's and Yahoo! Messenger's) insecurity and vulnerability! Using a legitimate password is not equal to cracking the server. But it must be made to look so because the PR firms the M$ movement uses must cast aspersions on Apache and Linux so as to draw attention away from the actual insecure and vulnerable system. Most PHBs never read past the headlines, so this is major spin for the M$ party.
And if MS Windows is involved, then it escalates to willful negligence.
That's up to the distro, in this case Windows to keep the packages up to date. There's your problem.
... but you still somehow need to deploy them in an automatic fashion. I'm guessing, though, that a tool could be developed fairly easily that puts the updates in the correct directory so that FF sees them the next time it starts and then installs them automatically.Package management is normally left up to the distro. So if the distro sucks, then it also has a sucky or absent package management system and no maintenance of major packages.
So the only obstacle the Firefox is facing is the anti-competitive nature of M$ Windows maintenance tools: the tools appear to only support M$ cruft, so when the 'reformat and reinstall' mantra is invoked -- poof -- gone are the competing products that staff had to wheel, deal, and wheedle to get into place. Eventually they run out of time and let the M$ have their way.
RHEL / Fedora, YellowDog, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. all have no problem keeping FireFox packages up to date. What's the problem with the IT staff mentioned in the article? I thought the reason to go with a big money vendor was to get the big money support the PHBs / MBAs are always talking out of their asses about. Can't the IT staff mentioned in the article press the vendor to do what it is ostensibly contracted to do for them?
Well I can't imagine it would be screaming fast, though there is little technical information on the Sugar GUI. It would really be good to see even a simple comparison vs fluxbox or something similar. Fluxbox ran nicely on a 333 MHz PII w/128MB of RAM that I used to have. However, we had in the early 80's reasonably fast, if simple, GUIs that ran in <32 KB of RAM on 8-bit 1 MHz CPUs, so even smaller is possible.
The lightweight fvwm and other window managers are definitely simple enough, the question remains can the be made all simple, candy-looking. Again, though, what are the requirements for Sugar and how does it compare?
Let's take that in context.
The enormity of the price overrun is attributable to M$ getting OLPC to increase the specs drastically until the hardware became at least theoretically possible to run M$ Cruftware. If M$ boosters cannot kill the OLPC, they have to at least slow it down by any means necessary. Failing to do so means that a market for notebooks opens up without their monopoly. Todate M$ business model has focussed largely on leveraging the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got for him from IBM. We have a few decades of experience to watching M$ products and services become less and less competitive. Preserving the monopoly is the only way to keep the cult going.
Further, if Linux takes over the new market, or even breaks into it, the old markets will want it, too. We're almost there, with manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo almost offering Linux pre-installed.
Let's just focus on the hardware for the sake of argument. Go through the customization and make sure you are comparing similar components on similar systems. The iMac comes out cheaper. Then add in VAT, and the iMac comes out much cheaper.
Furthermore, rummaging around on the Dell site shows no XPS that is an all-in-one unit. The description says all-in-one, but the pictures clearly show a separate box.
OS X is still an advantage. You can order the Dell with XP, so Vista won't be wasting your resources. Ordering with linux preinstalled, should be possible, but obviously not something Dell intends to make easy.
Opera is excellent, especially in regards to its small footprint, standards support and speed. The big gotcha, though, is still its closed source nature. So I don't generally recommend it except in situations like that one (with 128MB RAM) where it's the only appropriate option.
However, that does not mean that it has to be difficult to install. You can install Opera from a repository and let APT, or a graphical front end like Adept or Synaptic, do all the work.
I'd like to see Opera find some kind of open source licensing model, even if it is a dual licensing plan like with Qt or MySQL. Alternately, I'd like to see Firefox trim down further. After all, it got started to avoid the everything+kitchensink problem of Mozilla.
grokdocs and groklaw are also places to begin.