An eMac is perfectly usable for development work. Xcode runs well, and a plethora of text editors obviously work fine. I usually use XEmacs and XCode for mine. Check out Ars Technica's Apple forum (www.arstechnica.com, follow the link to the forums) if you want to ask specific, pointed questions about the suitability of a particular Mac. Still, the eMac is a nice machine.
Whether you'll be happy with the performance depends to some degree on what you're doing; if you're compiling huge programs, the dual G5 is nice. Keep in mind that the dual processors mean that the machine will remain very responsive while one processor compiles, or encodes music, or whatever other CPU-intensive tasks you throw at it. Obviously it costs a lot more money, but it will also hold its resale value better. Generally, I think you're better off buying the cheapest DP machine you can and buying/using an external monitor, which will allow for much better general performance and more expandability. If you're solely interested in C/C++ development, though, you'll be fine on any Mac Apple sells.
The world doesn't end, but 2M computer illiterates responding to SPAM, being infected with viruses that propagate SPAM, DDOS attacks and other computer nasties doesn't just hurt the local users -- it hurts everyone on the 'net by making it less usable. User ignorance can result in wasted bandwidth that leads ISP to draconian usage policies. Unpatched machines that become infected with worms are a huge headache for Internet users everywhere.
Meanwhile, if an illiterate user installs a keystroke logger and loses his credit card number, he then has to contact his credit issuer, at tremendous hassle to himself and the bank, and he may incur great losses on the credit card that the bank then has to write off. Meanwhile, someone else will have to clean up the mess on his computer.
The example may be somewhat hyperbolic, but such things do happen. I'm not trying to be patronizing or an asshole or anything else, but I live in the real world and in the real world ignorance has consequences. Please don't interpret this as a call for the requirement for an internet license or never messing around with computers; that, after all, is how one learns. The point is that, in a public environment like the internet, users don't exist in a bubble and what they do affects the rest of us. So when another user harms others through ignorance, the harmed party has some right to be irritated.
Parent machines, child machines, school machines, people-without-BMWs-and-gazillion-dollar-house-mac hines: I think this small, capable box is going to get a ton of people to consider and actually buy Macs who wouldn't otherwise.
All the pieces of the puzzle are dropping into place: iTunes + iPod to introduce Apple and remind people they exist; stores to sell Apple products; a relatively fast, stable, secure and easy operating system; good peripheral support. Finally, the last piece: a low-cost desktop machine to really compete with the major PC vendors. Bravo!
Forget the year of Linux on the desktop -- this may be the year of Apple on the desktop.
Lest we also forget, politicians perenially propose national ID cards or various other schemes for creating vast databases of every man, woman and child. Today it would be possible to more or less successfully create a program to track everyone. And IBM would surely be more than happy to help a government implement such a program.
I couldn't agree more. These days I'd bank on more RAM, dual processors (for the kind of work I do) and faster HDs than a single big, fast processor. Oh, and as I indicated in a reply to an earlier post, I'd go for quiet too.
Still, a small percentage of the computing world needs the fastest chips possible, and today's bleeding edge, "who needs that much, anyway?" chip is tomorrow's bargain basement chip. It's a matter, as with many things in life, of priority and need.
Intel and AMD make chips, not computers, so if you're looking for silent you're sending smoke signals to the wrong Gods. Besides, Intel already makes powerful but not power-hungry chip -- the Pentium M. If you want it, you just have to settle for a laptop, at least for the time being.
If you want silent, Apple makes a wide range of quiet machines. They run Linux if you're into that sort of thing. I can't hear the PowerBook on my desk even though I'm encoding a video file in the background.
If you're a DIY guy intent on building a desktop system, you could do worse than a pair of Pentium IIIs in a big case with passive cooling and SCSI HDs and loads of RAM for speed (as long as you're not totally CPU-bound, which most people aren't). A friend has that setup and it's nice for day-to-day work, even if I denigrate his OS choice.
If you don't want noise, there are plenty of options -- just not in P4 and Operator land. And not from Dell. Not that there's anything wrong with Dell or P4s or Opertons if that's you're thing, but one must decide on priorities.
The parent post precisely describes why Wikipedia shouldn't be considered a reliable post. The obvious vandalism isn't the worst part, because most readers will be able to discern it. Subtle vandalism is more insidious and ultimately compromises the integrity of articles sufficiently to make it useless to those uninformed about a particular subject -- which is the whole reason to have an encyclopedia in the first place.
Like the columnist, I'm excited about Wikipedia as an idea and unimpressed with its implementation. Without having real editors, however, it's hard to take it seriously.
I feel the same way. I run OS X because it's a great OS that comes pre-installed on a light, powerful laptop. On it, I use commerical software like Mail.app, MSO:Mac and FCE. I also use free software like Firefox, iTerm and Cyberduck.
I also use software that doesn't fit easily into either category -- Xcode is Mac-only, yet it uses GCC. OS X itself is based on the open source Darwin kernel.
In short, I use software that makes my life easier and me more efficient. Sometimes that means proprietary software, sometimes free software. If there were a Linux distro as attractive, easy-to-use, well supported in terms of third-party apps and powerful as OS X -- and it must be all three -- I'd use it in a second. Sadly, to my knowledge that OS doesn't exist.
As I understand it, if you're only using a program in your organization, the GPL allows you not to share the source code you write. It's only when you distribute the program outside your organization that you have to share the code.
Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice the convenience of flash animations, or of photoshop, for a free (as in beer) solution. I'm cheap. The fact that the free (as in beer and in freedom) software often is excellent quality, FreeBSD being my favorite, doesn't hurt either.
The question is, how much do you value your time? If you value your time at $30 per hour, and have to spend an extra hour or two per week tweaking your system or writing code because the software you want isn't there, are you actually being efficient -- or just cheap?
There are other factors, of course, like political considerations and the enjoyment one derives from writing code. Some non-free OSes, like Windows, may have their own time costs. But the difficulty/inability to buy pre-built boxes with a free OS may make the nominal "free" software cost considerably more at the end of the day.
That's what people are referring to when talking about TCO. Please note that I'm not trying to argue a particular system has a higher or lower TCO, or that there aren't many fine reasons for using FOSS software, but only raising the issue because sometimes one can be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
MS Word jumped straight from version 2 to version 6.
Much as I like to bash Microsoft and see them based, this isn't fair. The Mac version went up to 5.1, which MS ported, and thus christened the new Windows version 6.
Apple and Intel under deliver by a few hundred Mhz?
It's not the failure to delivery by 500 Mhz -- or, in other words, make a product more than 20% faster than their current high-end -- it's the grandiose promise in conjunction wtih the sheepish failure to deliver that makes Apple in particular deserve that vapor award.
While Apple appears to be better than average in the Consumer Reports guide you link to, I think it's amazing the return rates are so high in general. Even Apple needs around 5% of its machines to be returned because they're inoperable. Gateway (and Micron - ok, I've heard of them but they're not household names) has an amazing failure rate.
Exactly. I read Mac forums sometimes and/. fairly regularly, and I see all kinds of Mac hardware love posted, but without any actual, systematic data, talk is just that. The industry press, meanwhile, hasn't developed any meaningful way of measuring hardware reliability, which the useless PCWorld story demonstrates.
The industry needs to clean up its act.
I agree, but at the same time it's hard for me to perceive companies opening their true failure/return rates to outsiders. The most reliable way I can imagine for hardware reliability is to have some standardized way for all large computer manufactuerers to report defects. That, however, is a fairy dream that's unlikely to happen for political and business reasons, which leaves the computer end-user in the dark concerning true measures of what hardware is better. And that's a shame.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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· Score: 1
As long as you're going to tell the story of Mel, we should also review what makes a Real Programmer, and why they don't use Pascal (which, it almost goes without saying, means they would really abhor Java).
You may be thinking of Turgon, Elven king of Gondolin, or Turin, a man who helped the Elves. There are also numberous proper nouns that end in "ion".
Actually, I'd rather enjoy chips named after characters and events in the LOTR world. Intel could name its next chips after the fell creatures of Morgoth; AMD could name its chips after various humans; IBM could take Elvish names. Then we could read better flame wars, in which fanboys posit that, since Fingolfin rode alone and scarred Morgoth, IBM PPC rules; meanwhile, Intel fanboys could counter that, since Fingolfin ended up dead, that might not be such a wise comparison.
Perhaps. The problem with your post and Mr. Partridge's post, though, is that both deal in anecdote, which isn't nearly as useful as data. Unfortunately, hard data in computer reliability isn't easy to find. PCWorld runs an annual survey that doesn't apparently include Apple in all measures. Still, they don't include the full criteria used to judge, don't say what the mean, median and standard deviations were in each category and rely on surveys of their subscribers, which probably does not reflect the general population. (I imagine there aren't a large number of Linux or Mac users, for example). All we learn is the useless "Lynd Bacon & Associates then used statistical analysis, including multivariate statistics and psychometrics, to determine which companies performed significantly better or worse than average over a number of measures."
Consumer Reports is probably at least a little more reliable, and their survey likes Apple desktops. I'm not a subscriber so I can't see their laptop rating or methodology, so that report probably isn't fully reliable either, but I imagine it at least has a larger cross-section of people than PCWorld.
If anyone else knows where to find better data about PC quality, I'd be delighted to follow a link.
I think this is a catch-22. If Microsoft feels threated by an OSX office suite then killing Microsoft Office for OSX would only drive people to use it the alternative more.
I doubt it. Killing MSO:Mac would cause me to use Windows machines, because, as I've stated elsewhere, it isn't practical for me to have a computer without MSO. I wish it weren't so, but that's the breaks because everyone else uses it.
100% of prison inmates live in prison. The people who don't like Office, aren't using it. Simple.
Well, I'm one the people who don't like MSO and uses it. I like Lotus WordPro vastly more than Word and Organizer vastly more than Outlook. Nonetheless, the Word network effect is so powerful that I have to use Word because everyone else uses it, and IBM won't spend any more money on Lotus Smartsuite development because they can't sell any copies of it. They can't sell any copies of it because MS made deals with OEMs to bundle Office as part of getting a better deal on Windows (see the USDOJ anti-trust case).
The net result is that these days, there are two possibilities among office suites: MSO and OO.org. That's because MS has made it impossible for any other office suite to survive -- unless it's free. Much as I like the idea of OO.org, its implementation leaves much to be desired. I use MSO because these days I have no other choice.
My point is that Apple can't afford to risk Redmond's wrath (now there's some alliteration for you). That means they may have to reinvent the wheel to some degree.
With this "iWork" or whatever it is, Apple is probably producing something that is little to no threat to MSO, which is actually in Apple's best interest, for the reasons in my grandparent post.
I'd love to see Apple work on OO.org too, but it's not going to happen because OO.org is the serious competitor to MSO these days. If Apple throws its weight behind OO.org, the day after MS cancels MSO:Mac, at which point Apple loses a lot of its customer base, including me, because for business reasons it's not practical to have a computer without MSO. As much as I'd like to have a world in which alternatives to MSO exist, I also live in a world of practical realities that I balance against what I like to see.
Apple's not going to do critical damage to itself by pissing off MS sufficiently to get MS to cancel MSO:Mac. Their number one question for switchers is "Can I use MSO?" Apple knows how important MSO:Mac is, which is why they can't support MS's chief rival.
OO.org, much as I like it, makes MSO:Mac look lithe and graceful by comparison. In addition, OO.org lacks the features and ease-of-use of MSO:Mac, as well as the speed. The only thing it has going for it for most users is price, but even at $0 I still pay for MSO:Mac because I need what it offers.
Games are a problem of how many people uses it on a desktop, nothing else.
Games are mostly a function of marketshare, but also ease-of-programming and some other factors. Since DirectX makes game programming much easier, and because almost everyone in the industry knows it, big games tend to use it -- and it's Windows only. That's a real barrier to porting games to other platforms. Obviously, if other platforms get sufficiently high marketshare that barrier will be overcome, but it is still something to be considered.
Other smaller factors come into play too, like who's using what machine. I'd guess that OS X is, right now at the beginning of 2005, more important for gaming than Linux because a) more OS X home users, and very few servers and b) as much as I hate to say it, I'd bet that more OS X users are accustomed to buying shrink-wrapped software.
None of your arguments have any bearing on the main point of mine, which is that whether you want to call it stealing or "duplicating the things other people worked hard to create without their permission," it's still wrong. Your slippery slope scenario doesn't change the fundamental issue either.
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Whether you'll be happy with the performance depends to some degree on what you're doing; if you're compiling huge programs, the dual G5 is nice. Keep in mind that the dual processors mean that the machine will remain very responsive while one processor compiles, or encodes music, or whatever other CPU-intensive tasks you throw at it. Obviously it costs a lot more money, but it will also hold its resale value better. Generally, I think you're better off buying the cheapest DP machine you can and buying/using an external monitor, which will allow for much better general performance and more expandability. If you're solely interested in C/C++ development, though, you'll be fine on any Mac Apple sells.
Meanwhile, if an illiterate user installs a keystroke logger and loses his credit card number, he then has to contact his credit issuer, at tremendous hassle to himself and the bank, and he may incur great losses on the credit card that the bank then has to write off. Meanwhile, someone else will have to clean up the mess on his computer.
The example may be somewhat hyperbolic, but such things do happen. I'm not trying to be patronizing or an asshole or anything else, but I live in the real world and in the real world ignorance has consequences. Please don't interpret this as a call for the requirement for an internet license or never messing around with computers; that, after all, is how one learns. The point is that, in a public environment like the internet, users don't exist in a bubble and what they do affects the rest of us. So when another user harms others through ignorance, the harmed party has some right to be irritated.
All the pieces of the puzzle are dropping into place: iTunes + iPod to introduce Apple and remind people they exist; stores to sell Apple products; a relatively fast, stable, secure and easy operating system; good peripheral support. Finally, the last piece: a low-cost desktop machine to really compete with the major PC vendors. Bravo!
Forget the year of Linux on the desktop -- this may be the year of Apple on the desktop.
Will MS Word be Pages compatible?
Ah yes, that's right. The one mouse button. It is at least getting harder to bash Apple products.
Lest we also forget, politicians perenially propose national ID cards or various other schemes for creating vast databases of every man, woman and child. Today it would be possible to more or less successfully create a program to track everyone. And IBM would surely be more than happy to help a government implement such a program.
Still, a small percentage of the computing world needs the fastest chips possible, and today's bleeding edge, "who needs that much, anyway?" chip is tomorrow's bargain basement chip. It's a matter, as with many things in life, of priority and need.
If you want silent, Apple makes a wide range of quiet machines. They run Linux if you're into that sort of thing. I can't hear the PowerBook on my desk even though I'm encoding a video file in the background.
If you're a DIY guy intent on building a desktop system, you could do worse than a pair of Pentium IIIs in a big case with passive cooling and SCSI HDs and loads of RAM for speed (as long as you're not totally CPU-bound, which most people aren't). A friend has that setup and it's nice for day-to-day work, even if I denigrate his OS choice.
If you don't want noise, there are plenty of options -- just not in P4 and Operator land. And not from Dell. Not that there's anything wrong with Dell or P4s or Opertons if that's you're thing, but one must decide on priorities.
Like the columnist, I'm excited about Wikipedia as an idea and unimpressed with its implementation. Without having real editors, however, it's hard to take it seriously.
I also use software that doesn't fit easily into either category -- Xcode is Mac-only, yet it uses GCC. OS X itself is based on the open source Darwin kernel.
In short, I use software that makes my life easier and me more efficient. Sometimes that means proprietary software, sometimes free software. If there were a Linux distro as attractive, easy-to-use, well supported in terms of third-party apps and powerful as OS X -- and it must be all three -- I'd use it in a second. Sadly, to my knowledge that OS doesn't exist.
As I understand it, if you're only using a program in your organization, the GPL allows you not to share the source code you write. It's only when you distribute the program outside your organization that you have to share the code.
The question is, how much do you value your time? If you value your time at $30 per hour, and have to spend an extra hour or two per week tweaking your system or writing code because the software you want isn't there, are you actually being efficient -- or just cheap?
There are other factors, of course, like political considerations and the enjoyment one derives from writing code. Some non-free OSes, like Windows, may have their own time costs. But the difficulty/inability to buy pre-built boxes with a free OS may make the nominal "free" software cost considerably more at the end of the day.
That's what people are referring to when talking about TCO. Please note that I'm not trying to argue a particular system has a higher or lower TCO, or that there aren't many fine reasons for using FOSS software, but only raising the issue because sometimes one can be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Much as I like to bash Microsoft and see them based, this isn't fair. The Mac version went up to 5.1, which MS ported, and thus christened the new Windows version 6.
It's not the failure to delivery by 500 Mhz -- or, in other words, make a product more than 20% faster than their current high-end -- it's the grandiose promise in conjunction wtih the sheepish failure to deliver that makes Apple in particular deserve that vapor award.
Exactly. I read Mac forums sometimes and /. fairly regularly, and I see all kinds of Mac hardware love posted, but without any actual, systematic data, talk is just that. The industry press, meanwhile, hasn't developed any meaningful way of measuring hardware reliability, which the useless PCWorld story demonstrates.
The industry needs to clean up its act.
I agree, but at the same time it's hard for me to perceive companies opening their true failure/return rates to outsiders. The most reliable way I can imagine for hardware reliability is to have some standardized way for all large computer manufactuerers to report defects. That, however, is a fairy dream that's unlikely to happen for political and business reasons, which leaves the computer end-user in the dark concerning true measures of what hardware is better. And that's a shame.
As long as you're going to tell the story of Mel, we should also review what makes a Real Programmer, and why they don't use Pascal (which, it almost goes without saying, means they would really abhor Java).
Actually, I'd rather enjoy chips named after characters and events in the LOTR world. Intel could name its next chips after the fell creatures of Morgoth; AMD could name its chips after various humans; IBM could take Elvish names. Then we could read better flame wars, in which fanboys posit that, since Fingolfin rode alone and scarred Morgoth, IBM PPC rules; meanwhile, Intel fanboys could counter that, since Fingolfin ended up dead, that might not be such a wise comparison.
Consumer Reports is probably at least a little more reliable, and their survey likes Apple desktops. I'm not a subscriber so I can't see their laptop rating or methodology, so that report probably isn't fully reliable either, but I imagine it at least has a larger cross-section of people than PCWorld.
If anyone else knows where to find better data about PC quality, I'd be delighted to follow a link.
I doubt it. Killing MSO:Mac would cause me to use Windows machines, because, as I've stated elsewhere, it isn't practical for me to have a computer without MSO. I wish it weren't so, but that's the breaks because everyone else uses it.
Well, I'm one the people who don't like MSO and uses it. I like Lotus WordPro vastly more than Word and Organizer vastly more than Outlook. Nonetheless, the Word network effect is so powerful that I have to use Word because everyone else uses it, and IBM won't spend any more money on Lotus Smartsuite development because they can't sell any copies of it. They can't sell any copies of it because MS made deals with OEMs to bundle Office as part of getting a better deal on Windows (see the USDOJ anti-trust case).
The net result is that these days, there are two possibilities among office suites: MSO and OO.org. That's because MS has made it impossible for any other office suite to survive -- unless it's free. Much as I like the idea of OO.org, its implementation leaves much to be desired. I use MSO because these days I have no other choice.
With this "iWork" or whatever it is, Apple is probably producing something that is little to no threat to MSO, which is actually in Apple's best interest, for the reasons in my grandparent post.
Apple's not going to do critical damage to itself by pissing off MS sufficiently to get MS to cancel MSO:Mac. Their number one question for switchers is "Can I use MSO?" Apple knows how important MSO:Mac is, which is why they can't support MS's chief rival.
OO.org, much as I like it, makes MSO:Mac look lithe and graceful by comparison. In addition, OO.org lacks the features and ease-of-use of MSO:Mac, as well as the speed. The only thing it has going for it for most users is price, but even at $0 I still pay for MSO:Mac because I need what it offers.
Games are a problem of how many people uses it on a desktop, nothing else.
Games are mostly a function of marketshare, but also ease-of-programming and some other factors. Since DirectX makes game programming much easier, and because almost everyone in the industry knows it, big games tend to use it -- and it's Windows only. That's a real barrier to porting games to other platforms. Obviously, if other platforms get sufficiently high marketshare that barrier will be overcome, but it is still something to be considered.
Other smaller factors come into play too, like who's using what machine. I'd guess that OS X is, right now at the beginning of 2005, more important for gaming than Linux because a) more OS X home users, and very few servers and b) as much as I hate to say it, I'd bet that more OS X users are accustomed to buying shrink-wrapped software.
None of your arguments have any bearing on the main point of mine, which is that whether you want to call it stealing or "duplicating the things other people worked hard to create without their permission," it's still wrong. Your slippery slope scenario doesn't change the fundamental issue either.