No one wants to maintain TWO OSes; but at least Apple was smart enough to realize that it was the only practical solution.
True. For now. Sooner or later, it will presumably become possible to miniaturise the technology suffiently to do the job - I guess I'm just expecting too much, too soon.
My expectations are partly based on the fact that over the last couple of years, since I am no longer working with huge databases or doing the molecular modelling of my student days, my processing demands have taken a big drop, so I no longer need the horsepower of my big Linux desktop box, which is why this oldish second-hand MacBook has worked pretty well for me, except when playing around with graphics rendering.
The funny thing is MS Office isn't 100% compatible with itself. Older document versions don't always open the same.
They don't even always have to be older versions. Sometimes documents opened by the same version of MSOffice will be displayed differently. OOo and its variants are, if anything, more consistent than MSOffice, and it certainly is compatible with more formats.
But preservation of formatting just is not that critical in an editor. Anyone who really needs an (almost) unbreakable display format should use PDF or PS.
But all the big interest seems in making the iPad function as a secondary display for your computer, not the other way around.
I can think of a variety of ways in which the current iPad form factor might be useful to me, but they all involve the device working as a "real" computer, rather than just as a media or "app" box like the iPhone. Apple already markets quite a good OS in the form of OS X, which (ignoring flames from detractors) has the advantage of being Unixy enough for my purposes.
If Apple would consider dropping OS X on to the iPad and marketing some form of roll-out or foldable keyboard for it, I might seriously consider buying one. But as it stands, it seems Apple is pointing the MacBook Air in my direction, and that just looks like an inadequate laptop.
Indeed. I've probably made a mistake in the other direction: although I've been married for 21 years, I'm still very bad at buying flowers for my wife. But I like jewellery, and I enjoy buying it (and indeed making it) for her from time to time, when the mood takes me. If she had ever had the bad taste to hassle me for it, though, it's possible that we would never have stayed together for so long.
I have refrained from bying music online because of the inferior quality.
Likewise. Except that I buy music online that I am only going to listen to on my iPod (usually via the car stereo), where my expectations aren't that high with all that ambient noise.
but the thing that trips me up is that I always hope that these discussions will be somewhat rational and fact-based. Whenever Apple comes up it's as if most people here completely lose their intelligence
Welcome to the club. Macs are just another expression of Unix, which is why I find this old 2nd-hand MacBook so much more useful than my more powerful desktop Linux machines. Some of us have other things to do than fight wars along ideological fronts.
This doesn't mean I happen to love Apple's business model or Steve Jobs personally. Richard Stallman doubtless has his personality defects too, as most certainly does Steve Ballmer. Sooner or later, we have to come up with realistic boundaries around what we are prepared to work with. In my case those exclude Microsoft OSs simply because they give me a headache and make me cross. A Mac box is enough like other unices for me to be relatively comfortable with it.
You can buy those things somewhere else. Apple are not the only retailer selling hard drives, memory and monitors.
This is self-evidently true, but so what? I can understand the appeal of some Apple products, regardless of what one might think of their business model or of Steve Jobs personally. If you happen to be in the market for a sleek laptop with a non-clunky design that can run any standard unix shell out of the box, and is capable of running just about anything that can be compiled with gcc, the MacBook is hard to beat.
Ditto. My former primary machine, a Linux-based desktop box I built from high-end components in late 2006 still kicks ass, but now functions on a headless (via ssh) and occasional basis, since I have become mindful of the power it consumes. If it breaks, I might consider replacing it with a plug computer. However, I now get most of my work done on a hand-me-down mid-2007 MacBook that works just fine.
The Monster cable thing has become a meme, but it doesn't hurt to mention that the lamp cables that many manufacturers persist in supplying with their audio equipment are crap. Just spending a few extra dollars for proper cables does actually show noticeable benefits in sound reproduction.
Monster do actually sell cables in a sensible price bracket (as do many other manufacturers), and these products are excellent. However, that doesn't mean that spending twice as much (or 100x for that matter) will reward you with any noticeable improvement. Oh, and while I think of it: gold plated interconnects are made because gold resists corrosion, not because it is particularly good as an electrical conductor. Silver is a better conductor, but it oxidises readily.
I suspect you entertain a somewhat rose-tinted version of the situation here in Australia.
Here we have two major parties: one that is openly fascist, where individual members are somewhat free to occasionally express their own opinions (for better or for worse), and the other currently ruling party that was originally founded on socially-progressive policies which have been long abandoned in the quest for the endorsement of the swinging voter. Furthermore, the Labor Party machinery is such that now the extreme right wing is in charge of it, they are in a position to enforce party rules to suppress all dissent within the ranks.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I was a Labor voter. But since the Labor party has lost its balls and is more concerned with getting the redneck vote than with pursuing issues of social or any other kind of justice, they have lost my support. And I have told them so. Apparently I'm not alone, so the ball's in their court.
Interesting point. But it's likely that he's better off in the UK than in his home country, where our Prime Minister has appointed herself as judge and jury by calling Assange a "criminal". She doesn't have the numbers to become his executioner, but doubtless she would hand that job over to the US in the blink of an eye.
If the EU citizens really believe the US sucks that bad, then maybe it truly is time for the US to withdraw from Europe, and return to an 1800s-style neutral policy.
Maybe. Or maybe the US could just stop being international thugs, and then maybe EU citizens might stop taking such a jaundiced view of them. Worth a try.
...and that was pretty good. I only have an old 2.16GHz MacBook, but the battery still kicks ass. My wife has the now-superseded MBP, and the battery in that is better still.
Although I still consider myself primarily a Linux user, I actually don't mind the Apple blend of unix-under-the-bonnet with the proprietary interface and apps. It's just that asswipe Steve Jobs who by rights should be bludgeoned in his bed.
I'm a bit curious as to how they are supposed to manage this properly. About half a dozen userIDs pop up if I search my own name under Facebook, and I don't even have an account. It doesn't help that most of these don't post a realistic image of themselves.
If you are called up for jury duty, I might suggest turning up wearing a T-shirt with "GUILTY" emblazoned on front and back. You might spend a day in jail for contempt of court, but I doubt if you'll be admitted to the jury panel.
Doesn't Libre/OpenOffice on Mac still use X11? Not that I have a particular gripe against that, but it doesn't qualify as a native Mac application. Just about anything that can be compiled with gcc can run on a Mac if you're content to use X11.
I haven't yet used LibreOffice, but I have been using OOo and NeoOffice (the Mac-native version of OOo) for years, and on the whole, I'm pretty happy with both. I'm a bit curious as to why TFA's author doesn't bother to mention NeoOffice.
One glaring error I did spot is on the 3rd page of TFA where it is mentioned that Libre now supports SVG. All versions of the code have in fact done so for some time.
No doubt we shall shortly see posts from the Microsoft shills bagging OOo and variants, but the simple truth is that for 99.9% of purposes, the FOSS offerings are perfectly adequate.
I wasn't going to post any more in this thread, but I couldn't let this go.
Real admins are just as capable of fucking up as any other human being. Yes, they will have backups (or a damn good explanation why they haven't been allowed to take them), but that's beside the point.
If you're manually changing stuff by hand, either as root or by sudo, either its a bizarre emergency situation or you're doin it wrong...
Why?
I run Slackware and BSD servers, and it is considered normal to edit their config files by hand, and it is certainly quicker and more efficient to do so.
You don't have to be inexperienced. Back in the early '90s, I already had 19 years' experience of various systems under my belt when I accidentally deleted the ":per" directory on a DG mainframe (roughly equivalent to/dev on a *nix box), then had an agonising 45 minutes watching users' processes disappearing off the PID list.
In that sort of situation, all you can do is just grit your teeth, take your cap in hand and face the muzack. Fortunately in this case, my boss had committed an even more egregious fuckup the week before, so my trangression was dismissed with nothing more than a "shit happens"...
I would say that any Mac OS X user would probably benefit from the use of grep from the command-line. It's a lot more useful than that crappy search thingy they provide with the GUI Finder.
It's the ready availability of the standard unix tools under OS X that keeps me using this freebie inherited MacBook, often in preference to my more powerful (and power-hungry) Linux-based desktop boxes.
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No one wants to maintain TWO OSes; but at least Apple was smart enough to realize that it was the only practical solution.
True. For now. Sooner or later, it will presumably become possible to miniaturise the technology suffiently to do the job - I guess I'm just expecting too much, too soon.
My expectations are partly based on the fact that over the last couple of years, since I am no longer working with huge databases or doing the molecular modelling of my student days, my processing demands have taken a big drop, so I no longer need the horsepower of my big Linux desktop box, which is why this oldish second-hand MacBook has worked pretty well for me, except when playing around with graphics rendering.
The funny thing is MS Office isn't 100% compatible with itself. Older document versions don't always open the same.
They don't even always have to be older versions. Sometimes documents opened by the same version of MSOffice will be displayed differently. OOo and its variants are, if anything, more consistent than MSOffice, and it certainly is compatible with more formats.
But preservation of formatting just is not that critical in an editor. Anyone who really needs an (almost) unbreakable display format should use PDF or PS.
But all the big interest seems in making the iPad function as a secondary display for your computer, not the other way around.
I can think of a variety of ways in which the current iPad form factor might be useful to me, but they all involve the device working as a "real" computer, rather than just as a media or "app" box like the iPhone. Apple already markets quite a good OS in the form of OS X, which (ignoring flames from detractors) has the advantage of being Unixy enough for my purposes.
If Apple would consider dropping OS X on to the iPad and marketing some form of roll-out or foldable keyboard for it, I might seriously consider buying one. But as it stands, it seems Apple is pointing the MacBook Air in my direction, and that just looks like an inadequate laptop.
Indeed. I've probably made a mistake in the other direction: although I've been married for 21 years, I'm still very bad at buying flowers for my wife. But I like jewellery, and I enjoy buying it (and indeed making it) for her from time to time, when the mood takes me. If she had ever had the bad taste to hassle me for it, though, it's possible that we would never have stayed together for so long.
I have refrained from bying music online because of the inferior quality.
Likewise. Except that I buy music online that I am only going to listen to on my iPod (usually via the car stereo), where my expectations aren't that high with all that ambient noise.
but the thing that trips me up is that I always hope that these discussions will be somewhat rational and fact-based. Whenever Apple comes up it's as if most people here completely lose their intelligence
Welcome to the club. Macs are just another expression of Unix, which is why I find this old 2nd-hand MacBook so much more useful than my more powerful desktop Linux machines. Some of us have other things to do than fight wars along ideological fronts.
This doesn't mean I happen to love Apple's business model or Steve Jobs personally. Richard Stallman doubtless has his personality defects too, as most certainly does Steve Ballmer. Sooner or later, we have to come up with realistic boundaries around what we are prepared to work with. In my case those exclude Microsoft OSs simply because they give me a headache and make me cross. A Mac box is enough like other unices for me to be relatively comfortable with it.
You can buy those things somewhere else. Apple are not the only retailer selling hard drives, memory and monitors.
This is self-evidently true, but so what? I can understand the appeal of some Apple products, regardless of what one might think of their business model or of Steve Jobs personally. If you happen to be in the market for a sleek laptop with a non-clunky design that can run any standard unix shell out of the box, and is capable of running just about anything that can be compiled with gcc, the MacBook is hard to beat.
Ditto. My former primary machine, a Linux-based desktop box I built from high-end components in late 2006 still kicks ass, but now functions on a headless (via ssh) and occasional basis, since I have become mindful of the power it consumes. If it breaks, I might consider replacing it with a plug computer. However, I now get most of my work done on a hand-me-down mid-2007 MacBook that works just fine.
The Monster cable thing has become a meme, but it doesn't hurt to mention that the lamp cables that many manufacturers persist in supplying with their audio equipment are crap. Just spending a few extra dollars for proper cables does actually show noticeable benefits in sound reproduction.
Monster do actually sell cables in a sensible price bracket (as do many other manufacturers), and these products are excellent. However, that doesn't mean that spending twice as much (or 100x for that matter) will reward you with any noticeable improvement. Oh, and while I think of it: gold plated interconnects are made because gold resists corrosion, not because it is particularly good as an electrical conductor. Silver is a better conductor, but it oxidises readily.
I suspect you entertain a somewhat rose-tinted version of the situation here in Australia.
Here we have two major parties: one that is openly fascist, where individual members are somewhat free to occasionally express their own opinions (for better or for worse), and the other currently ruling party that was originally founded on socially-progressive policies which have been long abandoned in the quest for the endorsement of the swinging voter. Furthermore, the Labor Party machinery is such that now the extreme right wing is in charge of it, they are in a position to enforce party rules to suppress all dissent within the ranks.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I was a Labor voter. But since the Labor party has lost its balls and is more concerned with getting the redneck vote than with pursuing issues of social or any other kind of justice, they have lost my support. And I have told them so. Apparently I'm not alone, so the ball's in their court.
Interesting point. But it's likely that he's better off in the UK than in his home country, where our Prime Minister has appointed herself as judge and jury by calling Assange a "criminal". She doesn't have the numbers to become his executioner, but doubtless she would hand that job over to the US in the blink of an eye.
If the EU citizens really believe the US sucks that bad, then maybe it truly is time for the US to withdraw from Europe, and return to an 1800s-style neutral policy.
Maybe. Or maybe the US could just stop being international thugs, and then maybe EU citizens might stop taking such a jaundiced view of them. Worth a try.
...and that was pretty good. I only have an old 2.16GHz MacBook, but the battery still kicks ass. My wife has the now-superseded MBP, and the battery in that is better still.
Although I still consider myself primarily a Linux user, I actually don't mind the Apple blend of unix-under-the-bonnet with the proprietary interface and apps. It's just that asswipe Steve Jobs who by rights should be bludgeoned in his bed.
I'm a bit curious as to how they are supposed to manage this properly. About half a dozen userIDs pop up if I search my own name under Facebook, and I don't even have an account. It doesn't help that most of these don't post a realistic image of themselves.
If you are called up for jury duty, I might suggest turning up wearing a T-shirt with "GUILTY" emblazoned on front and back. You might spend a day in jail for contempt of court, but I doubt if you'll be admitted to the jury panel.
Build some more atomic weapons.
That's a really silly idea. They shouldn't build any more atomic weapons until they've used up the ones they've got.
There is no malice from the Government - it's a case where they're too flipping stupid to be malicious.
But then, of course, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Doesn't Libre/OpenOffice on Mac still use X11? Not that I have a particular gripe against that, but it doesn't qualify as a native Mac application. Just about anything that can be compiled with gcc can run on a Mac if you're content to use X11.
I haven't yet used LibreOffice, but I have been using OOo and NeoOffice (the Mac-native version of OOo) for years, and on the whole, I'm pretty happy with both. I'm a bit curious as to why TFA's author doesn't bother to mention NeoOffice. One glaring error I did spot is on the 3rd page of TFA where it is mentioned that Libre now supports SVG. All versions of the code have in fact done so for some time.
No doubt we shall shortly see posts from the Microsoft shills bagging OOo and variants, but the simple truth is that for 99.9% of purposes, the FOSS offerings are perfectly adequate.
If your admins cant be trusted with root, then get a product called Centrify...
If your admins can't be trusted with root, then they should be replaced with admins who can.
Real admins don't make mistakes.
I wasn't going to post any more in this thread, but I couldn't let this go.
Real admins are just as capable of fucking up as any other human being. Yes, they will have backups (or a damn good explanation why they haven't been allowed to take them), but that's beside the point.
If you're manually changing stuff by hand, either as root or by sudo, either its a bizarre emergency situation or you're doin it wrong...
Why?
I run Slackware and BSD servers, and it is considered normal to edit their config files by hand, and it is certainly quicker and more efficient to do so.
You don't have to be inexperienced. Back in the early '90s, I already had 19 years' experience of various systems under my belt when I accidentally deleted the ":per" directory on a DG mainframe (roughly equivalent to /dev on a *nix box), then had an agonising 45 minutes watching users' processes disappearing off the PID list.
In that sort of situation, all you can do is just grit your teeth, take your cap in hand and face the muzack. Fortunately in this case, my boss had committed an even more egregious fuckup the week before, so my trangression was dismissed with nothing more than a "shit happens"...
I would say that any Mac OS X user would probably benefit from the use of grep from the command-line. It's a lot more useful than that crappy search thingy they provide with the GUI Finder.
It's the ready availability of the standard unix tools under OS X that keeps me using this freebie inherited MacBook, often in preference to my more powerful (and power-hungry) Linux-based desktop boxes.
You don't need su root, just "su". And you exit with ^D.
Exactly. And if your system enforces use of sudo, you just use "sudo su" to drop into a root shell.