I haven't seen anything since BASIC and Pascal that's been particularly good as a teaching language.
Java, which is commonly used in schools, is *awful* as a first language -- tons of focus on semantics and OOP, not much on data structures.
I strongly disagree with people that push Scheme as a first language. I don't think functional programming is incredibly intuitive.
On the up side, whatever you use these days has memory protection and preemptive scheduling. I remember learning C on the classic Mac OS -- make a mistake, and the OS instead of the app goes down.
Re:No Post is Too Late: Send the Iraqis to Allah
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Al-Jazeera is not a news organization in the Western sense. Al-Jazeera deliberately distorts the news.
As opposed to Western news organizations like CNN, which go out of their way to be [snort] objective and cover all sides of an issue?
Get real. You want unbiased content, go to Google News, and when something comes up between, say, the French and the Brits, read about it from both a French and Brit news source. Same goes for Pakistan/India, Israel/Palestine, and US/just about anyone else.
Why don't you shut up before you actually read and understand that rather poorly crafted article before opening your mouth.
Comments cut a bit too close to the quick, eh?
Charlie White is clearly a PC troll and his so called DV benchmark is mostly about After Effects (importing Photoshop or Illustrator files).
I have rarely seen someone independently spreading pro-Windows BS (aside from marketing folks), because most Windows users don't *care*. I *have* seen lots of Mac users, desperate to push some painful comparison aside, claim that someone is lying.
There are several points that render the benchmark meaningless:
Okay, this should be good.
(1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system;
Which says exactly zilch about the usefulness of said software as a benchmark, and very much about the value of said system. A multiprocessor system happens to suck at chewing through this dataset. This is not unusual. Multiprocessor systems tend to suck at working on most tasks -- it's incredibly rare that you're saturating both processors. What it says is that anyone who wants to work with AE gets screwed if they're using the dual-proc Mac versus the single-proc PC.
(2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market while Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake is taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom;
Uh, huh. Link, please.
(3) the price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
[snort] I have no idea what package he bought on the Dell, but I'm guessing that if he's dropping $3k, he's getting movie editing software (Dell sells DV workstations with bundled editing software for ~$2.5K, at any rate). Want the FC Pro that you're raving about? That'd be another $1k to your system price already. Want a monitor (to actually *look* at that video) and the 1 gig of RAM the Dell has? That's another $1k. As for Firewire 800 -- you do realize that it doesn't matter a bit, as neither system has a disk system that's anywhere *near* capable of saturating Firewire 800.
How on earth can Apple port OS X to Java?
The UI. The panel, the apps, the desktop. It was a reference to Java's piss-poor performance, not a serious suggestion.
OS X is written in C / C++/Objective C, and Java is just another language that may be used to access the Cocoa API.
Yup.
As a longtime c++ and Java programmer on both Unix and Windows, let me just tell you that OS X is simply the best designed OS in every possible way - stable, efficient, sexy and years ahead of Windoze or anything else on the market.
You do realize that any credibility you *might* have gotten from a claim to authority like that went completely out the window when you said "in every possible way". I'm being straightforward, if blunt. You're BSing as much as you can manage.
I reiterate: the Celeron is running at two and a half times the clock rate of the G4 at issue. The Celeron also has over twice the memory bandwidth of the G4. Clock cycle for clock cycle, a G4 may run faster than a Celeron, but in this case, the Celeron is much more powerful than the G4.
You could probably go scrounge up an ancient 700Mhz Celeron and do a clock-for-clock comparison, and you'd be right then.
you seem to be one of those who likes to build your PC from scratch and when you cannot build a Mac that way, they are suddenly more expensive.
There were more expensive to begin with, and the inability to save parts exacerbates the problem.
Compare a similarly configured Dell to an Apple and then tell how much more the Apple is.
douglasq, the numbers I fed you were *exactly* that. A prebuilt Dell versus an Apple. $499 for Dell's low end model, $999 for Apple. The Dell has twice as much memory and a far more powerful processor, though a slightly smaller hard drive.
Usually not much.
I'd say that twice as much is pretty significant.
As for white boxes, we had an office full of them and I have never seen so many hardware failures. You get what you pay for and for me that means a machine that has yet to have a part fail.
I have an x86 box I built and a PowerMac 6100/60. The PowerMac's internal CD-ROM drive failed, and the x86 had one of its three hard drives fail. The Mac's internal battery has died twice, but I won't count that. I'd say they're on pretty even footing from a hardware reliability standpoint.
I have long maintained that a computer is only as fast as it seems to the end user.
Well, sure.
In my experience, Celerons have been woefully slow for DTP apps.
[shrug] I certainly can't argue with your opinion, insofar as it's subjective. I'm not sure which DTP apps you're talking about, though the only DTP app I can think of notorious for pushing systems is Photoshop, and Photoshop's been pretty extensively benchmarked, and runs faster on current x86 hardware.
I have even been in settings where a G3 was more effective than a P III of twice its Mhz speed.
That's probably true -- when running either (a) emulated Mac code, or (b) code where an AltiVec version exists, but not an equivalent SIMD version for the PC. Both are very, very, very rare, and in each case, I see the problem going much more the other way -- Mac users that want to run x86 apps via Virtual PC are far more common than x86 users who want to run something in Executor, and there is a lot more code using MMX and friends out there than there is AltiVec.
I'd like to hear what the setting is, because I really can't think of an example of importance where this holds.
Just don't make me use Windows.
I'm not trying to argue that you should. I'm just arguing on performance grounds.
a) What do I get for $499. A Celeron. What do I get in the eMac for $999. A G4. Worth it in my mind.
A Celeron running at two and a half times the clock rate of the same G4. PowerPCs are no longer the ultra-minimalistic power users that they used to be in the days of the 601, 603, 604, and G3 (granted, they still suck down less than most x86 chips). So power usage isn't much of a draw any more. The only reason I can see you wanting a G4 more than a Celeron is if you particularly dislike the x86 architecture, and I can't see many people making a buying decision based on that. I've done plenty of binary hacks for PowerPC software, so I'm one of the few people actually going through disassembly, and *I* don't even care that much -- variable width instructions, just doesn't matter that much.
I have upgraded the video, the RAM, the hard drive (and added two more), the monitor and the processor (G3 to G4).
You also can't upgrade much more -- and when you *do* want to buy new because you can't upgrade any more, you can't cannibalize an old system to save money on a new system. That was my point as regards inhibiliting new system purchases -- inability to cannibalize old systems adds cost to new system purchases.
c) Games? This is my work computer (even though it is in my living room). Who has time for games? I use a computer to make money. If I had time for games, I would use a PlayStation or Gamecube.
[chuckle] You sound a lot like my Linux brethren every time *our* favorite platform gets accused of not having enough games. "Who wants to play computer games *anyway*? I'd rather play on a PlayStation!" Seriously though, most Mac users *do* use their computer for some fun too, and the lack of the latest games means that there is less drive to upgrade hardware.
The survey doesnt reflect that Photoshop is only using *ONE* of the mac CPUs at any time during their tests, so it's quite understandable why it lags behind. However, If Adobe/3rdparties got their finger out and actually wrote their filters to take advantage of multi-cpu systems then you might be suprised at how well a dual-g4 does against an x86 system.
I haven't been following the Mac world for a while. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since Adobe was *always* the app vendor out in front when it came to multiproc support on the Mac, even when Mac multiprocessing architecture sucked balls (as on the Daystars).
However, you are ignoring a number of points. First, it is *not trivial* to write code for multiple processors, especially when retrofitting existing code or dealing with algorithms that simply don't parallelize well. So it doesn't really matter whether Photoshop *could* run faster -- it doesn't. And that's what most people are constrained by (that or games, which generally also don't parallelize well). It's quite possible that if all x86 authors went out and changed their calling conventions, hand-coded everything in assembly perfectly, and used their 3d card as a general-purpose matrix co-processor, their software would run much faster. But it doesn't, so it doesn't matter. The software matters too, not just the software.
Second, arguments that the Mac is performance comparable with x86 boxes are long, long dead. Even comparable with x86 boxes that cost half as much. Apple had a good thing going with the PowerPC, they trusted Motorola, and Motorola blew it. It's done, it happened, and now the PowerPC just doesn't compare. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Frankly, I don't give a damn so much about the Mac's CPU horsepower as I do about the disgusting, inefficient memory usage in OS X. OS X is without a doubt the most bloated piece of software I've ever run across. Apple might possibly make it worse by porting it to Java, but other than that, I can't imagine what else they might have done wrong. When you're blowing 128MB and swapping to display a desktop, somewhere there's a coder that needs to be shot.
You're probably right on the PDF inclusion thing. I figured Adobe'd be peeved when I saw the thing too.
However, you're trying to marginalize Adobe slapping Apple, and that's simply not the case.
Adobe controls the content creation market. That's just how it is. Illustrator + Photoshop are an unstoppable pair. Page layout has never been their core market, so even if Quark does come up with something worthwhile (they've certainly been waiting long enough to do so), it won't hurt them that badly.
Apple needs Adobe much, much more than Adobe needs Apple.
Mac users hang onto their machines and use them productively for longer than the average PC/PC user. I use this 5 year old Mac to run Jaguar and all the latest Adobe and Macromedia apps and then some.
And the cynic in me has to point out that there are three significant *negative* contributing factors to using the same, unchanged box for years:
(a) Macs cost more. A new Mac is a larger investment than a new PC. At the low end (where most sales these days are happening) a new Mac can be almost twice as much as a new x86 box. This tends to make users buy new computers less often. A Dimension 2350 from Dell, for instance, has twice as much RAM, a processor that's over twice as fast as the eMac, and costs $499 instead of $999.
Remember when the iMac came out? It was far more sanely priced than Macs up until that point. There was a *huge* spike in sales of "second computers" to existing Mac users. Mac users are currently overwhelmingly price-constrained in purchasing new Macs.
(b) Macs tend to be much less upgradeable. You don't save your case, your monitor, your video card, your sound card, your Ethernet card and your hard drive, and build a new computer around what's left. As a result, you're stuck with "throwing out" what you already purchased if you upgrade.
(c) Lack of games on the Mac. Most people upgrading their computer do because games are squeezing it, not because Office runs slowly. And yes, even on the Mac, there are more home users than there are graphic pros doing lots of Gaussian blurs.
On a lighter note for Apple, the grandparent poster was hideously wrong in trying to claim that Apple is losing a customer for each new customer they get. That's nuts. Assume that new users go to Macs and PCs in equal proportion (not a bad win for Apple, since they have to convince people to go with a less common, more expensive platform). Furthermore, assume not a single existing Mac users switches. In that case, market share remains absolutely flat, yet Apple is gaining users. As long as none of those users buys a new computer for five years, for five years the "new user ratio" will rise. Apple can do just fine with a flat market share.
That's still interesting, though your criticism is *excellent* -- currently, most of them focus primarily on Windows. Next year, assuming the survey is accurate, most of them focus primarily on Linux.
We can probably say something along the lines of "people that start using Linux tend to move towards focusing primarily on Linux".
That's a good sign, since Linux tends to creep into companies, rather than enter in a massive changeover. Lots of people are interested in adding Linux support to their products -- considerably fewer are interested in suddenly dropping their existing platform.
When I used a Mac, I was quite impressed by the quality of the shareware out there. The ratio of good software to crap -- and some of it is *very* good, without even a commercial equivalent, like USB Overdrive -- is much higher on the Mac than Windows. I think some of it may be Visual Basic. It's really easy for a non-programmer to sit down and roll out a complete piece of junk, and have delusions of actually making money on it.
I've found that, when it comes to both shareware and interesting binary hacks, the Mac has a much healthier community than Windows.
On the other hand, the Linux open-source community is even better...
Escape Velocity had the best nagger EVER. A middling-powerful ship called "Captain Hector" would buzz you every couple of systems and radio in "Don't Forget To Register!".
I dunno. Spiderweb Software has the long-lived Shareware Demon throughout its Exile series...
Microsoft assumes that you don't have the source to what you want to run. As a result, they ship all the major versions of their libraries -- MFCXX.DLL. DirectX is backwards compatible, and application vendors generally ship copies of what libraries they need.
That same set of assumptions isn't true for the Linux world. Grab binary program foo that "works on Red Hat" and try and run it on another distro, and see what happens. Or wait until the current library version is no longer around, and a new one is in its place. Look at a couple of places that distribute binary-format software for Linux -- they'll have four, five, in the case of NVidia, over fifteen different copies of their software.
And you often can't statically link because of GPL restrictions, so *that's* out...
Re:Bash is the One True Shell, ksh is very close
on
Which Shell Do You Prefer?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not bad, but here are my own feelings.
I've never even used sh (just bash...)
csh/tcsh are significantly less popular than the others -- their main users are BSD fans.
zsh is relatively heavyweight, but I really like it. If there's a feature, zsh has it. I particularly like colorized tab completion. It's got a lot of bash and ksh's features combined. It's true that it's less common than bash.
bash is the most common, easily. It's a pretty safe choice.
I haven't been too impressed with other shells. perl shell isn't that great for actual use, the Plan 9 shells like rc lack job control.
There is one good reason. Linux has truly piss-poor support for binaries. A Windows binary will keep working for years. A Linux binary will be broken within two or three years.
Try running installing Immortals of Kohan and running the updater with glibc 2.3 installed. Segfault!
To be fair, this is really a Linux issue, not a NWN issue, but it still means that you may not be able to play the game in a few years.
Mmm...less people using cell phones. Fewer people driving totally carelessly near me ("Blah blah blah Jean did *WHAT*"...SCREECH CRASH). Fewer people interrupting lectures and movies. Fewer people talking to air on the sidewalk, in the grocery store. Fewer conversations being interrupted by Joe Schmoe answering his cell. More spectrum for wireless networks.
Hell, I'd love to see jamming devices installed all over.
No, I'm saying (and I did say) if you break your word, you will be punished. The UN said full well, "Saddam keep your word or we will forcibly remove you from power." Saddam didn't keep his word, neither did the UN. At least the US kept their part of the bargain.
And the US is promptly started off with an attempt to assassinate him.
It's just that apparently blogger lets you have an (invalid) hostname with an underscore. Apparently I can recompile my nameserver and proxy web server with support for it, but instead I just read it through The Cloak
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen anything since BASIC and Pascal that's been particularly good as a teaching language.
Java, which is commonly used in schools, is *awful* as a first language -- tons of focus on semantics and OOP, not much on data structures.
I strongly disagree with people that push Scheme as a first language. I don't think functional programming is incredibly intuitive.
On the up side, whatever you use these days has memory protection and preemptive scheduling. I remember learning C on the classic Mac OS -- make a mistake, and the OS instead of the app goes down.
Al-Jazeera is not a news organization in the Western sense. Al-Jazeera deliberately distorts the news.
As opposed to Western news organizations like CNN, which go out of their way to be [snort] objective and cover all sides of an issue?
Get real. You want unbiased content, go to Google News, and when something comes up between, say, the French and the Brits, read about it from both a French and Brit news source. Same goes for Pakistan/India, Israel/Palestine, and US/just about anyone else.
What add-ons are you thinking of?
Back in the day, Macs shipped with SCSI standard, but no longer.
Macs frequently have Firewire, but aside from DV, I'm not sure it's going to be that useful, and Firewire cards aren't that expensive.
Ethernet is almost standard on PCs these days. Both PCs and Macs have cheapo internal modems almost as a standard item.
Why don't you shut up before you actually read and understand that rather poorly crafted article before opening your mouth.
/Objective C, and Java is just another language that may be used to access the Cocoa API.
Comments cut a bit too close to the quick, eh?
Charlie White is clearly a PC troll and his so called DV benchmark is mostly about After Effects (importing Photoshop or Illustrator files).
I have rarely seen someone independently spreading pro-Windows BS (aside from marketing folks), because most Windows users don't *care*. I *have* seen lots of Mac users, desperate to push some painful comparison aside, claim that someone is lying.
There are several points that render the benchmark meaningless:
Okay, this should be good.
(1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system;
Which says exactly zilch about the usefulness of said software as a benchmark, and very much about the value of said system. A multiprocessor system happens to suck at chewing through this dataset. This is not unusual. Multiprocessor systems tend to suck at working on most tasks -- it's incredibly rare that you're saturating both processors. What it says is that anyone who wants to work with AE gets screwed if they're using the dual-proc Mac versus the single-proc PC.
(2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market while Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake is taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom;
Uh, huh. Link, please.
(3) the price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
[snort] I have no idea what package he bought on the Dell, but I'm guessing that if he's dropping $3k, he's getting movie editing software (Dell sells DV workstations with bundled editing software for ~$2.5K, at any rate). Want the FC Pro that you're raving about? That'd be another $1k to your system price already. Want a monitor (to actually *look* at that video) and the 1 gig of RAM the Dell has? That's another $1k. As for Firewire 800 -- you do realize that it doesn't matter a bit, as neither system has a disk system that's anywhere *near* capable of saturating Firewire 800.
How on earth can Apple port OS X to Java?
The UI. The panel, the apps, the desktop. It was a reference to Java's piss-poor performance, not a serious suggestion.
OS X is written in C / C++
Yup.
As a longtime c++ and Java programmer on both Unix and Windows, let me just tell you that OS X is simply the best designed OS in every possible way - stable, efficient, sexy and years ahead of Windoze or anything else on the market.
You do realize that any credibility you *might* have gotten from a claim to authority like that went completely out the window when you said "in every possible way". I'm being straightforward, if blunt. You're BSing as much as you can manage.
I reiterate: the Celeron is running at two and a half times the clock rate of the G4 at issue. The Celeron also has over twice the memory bandwidth of the G4. Clock cycle for clock cycle, a G4 may run faster than a Celeron, but in this case, the Celeron is much more powerful than the G4.
You could probably go scrounge up an ancient 700Mhz Celeron and do a clock-for-clock comparison, and you'd be right then.
you seem to be one of those who likes to build your PC from scratch and when you cannot build a Mac that way, they are suddenly more expensive.
There were more expensive to begin with, and the inability to save parts exacerbates the problem.
Compare a similarly configured Dell to an Apple and then tell how much more the Apple is.
douglasq, the numbers I fed you were *exactly* that. A prebuilt Dell versus an Apple. $499 for Dell's low end model, $999 for Apple. The Dell has twice as much memory and a far more powerful processor, though a slightly smaller hard drive.
Usually not much.
I'd say that twice as much is pretty significant.
As for white boxes, we had an office full of them and I have never seen so many hardware failures. You get what you pay for and for me that means a machine that has yet to have a part fail.
I have an x86 box I built and a PowerMac 6100/60. The PowerMac's internal CD-ROM drive failed, and the x86 had one of its three hard drives fail. The Mac's internal battery has died twice, but I won't count that. I'd say they're on pretty even footing from a hardware reliability standpoint.
I have long maintained that a computer is only as fast as it seems to the end user.
Well, sure.
In my experience, Celerons have been woefully slow for DTP apps.
[shrug] I certainly can't argue with your opinion, insofar as it's subjective. I'm not sure which DTP apps you're talking about, though the only DTP app I can think of notorious for pushing systems is Photoshop, and Photoshop's been pretty extensively benchmarked, and runs faster on current x86 hardware.
I have even been in settings where a G3 was more effective than a P III of twice its Mhz speed.
That's probably true -- when running either (a) emulated Mac code, or (b) code where an AltiVec version exists, but not an equivalent SIMD version for the PC. Both are very, very, very rare, and in each case, I see the problem going much more the other way -- Mac users that want to run x86 apps via Virtual PC are far more common than x86 users who want to run something in Executor, and there is a lot more code using MMX and friends out there than there is AltiVec.
I'd like to hear what the setting is, because I really can't think of an example of importance where this holds.
Just don't make me use Windows.
I'm not trying to argue that you should. I'm just arguing on performance grounds.
a) What do I get for $499. A Celeron. What do I get in the eMac for $999. A G4. Worth it in my mind.
A Celeron running at two and a half times the clock rate of the same G4. PowerPCs are no longer the ultra-minimalistic power users that they used to be in the days of the 601, 603, 604, and G3 (granted, they still suck down less than most x86 chips). So power usage isn't much of a draw any more. The only reason I can see you wanting a G4 more than a Celeron is if you particularly dislike the x86 architecture, and I can't see many people making a buying decision based on that. I've done plenty of binary hacks for PowerPC software, so I'm one of the few people actually going through disassembly, and *I* don't even care that much -- variable width instructions, just doesn't matter that much.
I have upgraded the video, the RAM, the hard drive (and added two more), the monitor and the processor (G3 to G4).
You also can't upgrade much more -- and when you *do* want to buy new because you can't upgrade any more, you can't cannibalize an old system to save money on a new system. That was my point as regards inhibiliting new system purchases -- inability to cannibalize old systems adds cost to new system purchases.
c) Games? This is my work computer (even though it is in my living room). Who has time for games? I use a computer to make money. If I had time for games, I would use a PlayStation or Gamecube.
[chuckle] You sound a lot like my Linux brethren every time *our* favorite platform gets accused of not having enough games. "Who wants to play computer games *anyway*? I'd rather play on a PlayStation!" Seriously though, most Mac users *do* use their computer for some fun too, and the lack of the latest games means that there is less drive to upgrade hardware.
The survey doesnt reflect that Photoshop is only using *ONE* of the mac CPUs at any time during their tests, so it's quite understandable why it lags behind. However, If Adobe/3rdparties got their finger out and actually wrote their filters to take advantage of multi-cpu systems then you might be suprised at how well a dual-g4 does against an x86 system.
I haven't been following the Mac world for a while. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since Adobe was *always* the app vendor out in front when it came to multiproc support on the Mac, even when Mac multiprocessing architecture sucked balls (as on the Daystars).
However, you are ignoring a number of points. First, it is *not trivial* to write code for multiple processors, especially when retrofitting existing code or dealing with algorithms that simply don't parallelize well. So it doesn't really matter whether Photoshop *could* run faster -- it doesn't. And that's what most people are constrained by (that or games, which generally also don't parallelize well). It's quite possible that if all x86 authors went out and changed their calling conventions, hand-coded everything in assembly perfectly, and used their 3d card as a general-purpose matrix co-processor, their software would run much faster. But it doesn't, so it doesn't matter. The software matters too, not just the software.
Second, arguments that the Mac is performance comparable with x86 boxes are long, long dead. Even comparable with x86 boxes that cost half as much. Apple had a good thing going with the PowerPC, they trusted Motorola, and Motorola blew it. It's done, it happened, and now the PowerPC just doesn't compare. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Frankly, I don't give a damn so much about the Mac's CPU horsepower as I do about the disgusting, inefficient memory usage in OS X. OS X is without a doubt the most bloated piece of software I've ever run across. Apple might possibly make it worse by porting it to Java, but other than that, I can't imagine what else they might have done wrong. When you're blowing 128MB and swapping to display a desktop, somewhere there's a coder that needs to be shot.
You're probably right on the PDF inclusion thing. I figured Adobe'd be peeved when I saw the thing too.
However, you're trying to marginalize Adobe slapping Apple, and that's simply not the case.
Adobe controls the content creation market. That's just how it is. Illustrator + Photoshop are an unstoppable pair. Page layout has never been their core market, so even if Quark does come up with something worthwhile (they've certainly been waiting long enough to do so), it won't hurt them that badly.
Apple needs Adobe much, much more than Adobe needs Apple.
Mac users hang onto their machines and use them productively for longer than the average PC/PC user. I use this 5 year old Mac to run Jaguar and all the latest Adobe and Macromedia apps and then some.
And the cynic in me has to point out that there are three significant *negative* contributing factors to using the same, unchanged box for years:
(a) Macs cost more. A new Mac is a larger investment than a new PC. At the low end (where most sales these days are happening) a new Mac can be almost twice as much as a new x86 box. This tends to make users buy new computers less often. A Dimension 2350 from Dell, for instance, has twice as much RAM, a processor that's over twice as fast as the eMac, and costs $499 instead of $999.
Remember when the iMac came out? It was far more sanely priced than Macs up until that point. There was a *huge* spike in sales of "second computers" to existing Mac users. Mac users are currently overwhelmingly price-constrained in purchasing new Macs.
(b) Macs tend to be much less upgradeable. You don't save your case, your monitor, your video card, your sound card, your Ethernet card and your hard drive, and build a new computer around what's left. As a result, you're stuck with "throwing out" what you already purchased if you upgrade.
(c) Lack of games on the Mac. Most people upgrading their computer do because games are squeezing it, not because Office runs slowly. And yes, even on the Mac, there are more home users than there are graphic pros doing lots of Gaussian blurs.
On a lighter note for Apple, the grandparent poster was hideously wrong in trying to claim that Apple is losing a customer for each new customer they get. That's nuts. Assume that new users go to Macs and PCs in equal proportion (not a bad win for Apple, since they have to convince people to go with a less common, more expensive platform). Furthermore, assume not a single existing Mac users switches. In that case, market share remains absolutely flat, yet Apple is gaining users. As long as none of those users buys a new computer for five years, for five years the "new user ratio" will rise. Apple can do just fine with a flat market share.
That's still interesting, though your criticism is *excellent* -- currently, most of them focus primarily on Windows. Next year, assuming the survey is accurate, most of them focus primarily on Linux.
We can probably say something along the lines of "people that start using Linux tend to move towards focusing primarily on Linux".
That's a good sign, since Linux tends to creep into companies, rather than enter in a massive changeover. Lots of people are interested in adding Linux support to their products -- considerably fewer are interested in suddenly dropping their existing platform.
When I used a Mac, I was quite impressed by the quality of the shareware out there. The ratio of good software to crap -- and some of it is *very* good, without even a commercial equivalent, like USB Overdrive -- is much higher on the Mac than Windows. I think some of it may be Visual Basic. It's really easy for a non-programmer to sit down and roll out a complete piece of junk, and have delusions of actually making money on it.
I've found that, when it comes to both shareware and interesting binary hacks, the Mac has a much healthier community than Windows.
On the other hand, the Linux open-source community is even better...
And I *do* buy stuff after cracking it, and trying it out properly
A good 5% of the stuff you regularly use, I assume?
Escape Velocity had the best nagger EVER. A middling-powerful ship called "Captain Hector" would buzz you every couple of systems and radio in "Don't Forget To Register!".
I dunno. Spiderweb Software has the long-lived Shareware Demon throughout its Exile series...
That's not the real Miguel. Lots of people on Slashdot have fake names, "Billy Gates".
Microsoft assumes that you don't have the source to what you want to run. As a result, they ship all the major versions of their libraries -- MFCXX.DLL. DirectX is backwards compatible, and application vendors generally ship copies of what libraries they need.
That same set of assumptions isn't true for the Linux world. Grab binary program foo that "works on Red Hat" and try and run it on another distro, and see what happens. Or wait until the current library version is no longer around, and a new one is in its place. Look at a couple of places that distribute binary-format software for Linux -- they'll have four, five, in the case of NVidia, over fifteen different copies of their software.
And you often can't statically link because of GPL restrictions, so *that's* out...
Not bad, but here are my own feelings.
I've never even used sh (just bash...)
csh/tcsh are significantly less popular than the others -- their main users are BSD fans.
zsh is relatively heavyweight, but I really like it. If there's a feature, zsh has it. I particularly like colorized tab completion. It's got a lot of bash and ksh's features combined. It's true that it's less common than bash.
bash is the most common, easily. It's a pretty safe choice.
I haven't been too impressed with other shells. perl shell isn't that great for actual use, the Plan 9 shells like rc lack job control.
There is one good reason. Linux has truly piss-poor support for binaries. A Windows binary will keep working for years. A Linux binary will be broken within two or three years.
Try running installing Immortals of Kohan and running the updater with glibc 2.3 installed. Segfault!
To be fair, this is really a Linux issue, not a NWN issue, but it still means that you may not be able to play the game in a few years.
I think Valenti was equating rape and copyright infringement.
Though I agree that Bioware really does deserve the purchase, and that pirating this particular piece of software is pretty awful.
Mmm...less people using cell phones. Fewer people driving totally carelessly near me ("Blah blah blah Jean did *WHAT*"...SCREECH CRASH). Fewer people interrupting lectures and movies. Fewer people talking to air on the sidewalk, in the grocery store. Fewer conversations being interrupted by Joe Schmoe answering his cell. More spectrum for wireless networks.
Hell, I'd love to see jamming devices installed all over.
No, I'm saying (and I did say) if you break your word, you will be punished. The UN said full well, "Saddam keep your word or we will forcibly remove you from power." Saddam didn't keep his word, neither did the UN. At least the US kept their part of the bargain.
And the US is promptly started off with an attempt to assassinate him.
Oh, you're right.
It's just that apparently blogger lets you have an (invalid) hostname with an underscore. Apparently I can recompile my nameserver and proxy web server with support for it, but instead I just read it through The Cloak
Make good on your word or be punished; now he is being punished.
So what you're saying is that if you break your word you should be killed?
What on earth is *wrong* with you?
I mean does every single person on slashdot eat and shit US propaganda?
They don't. It's just the fifteen-year-olds who revel in the feeling of power and the veterans.
Unfortunately, they happen to be quite vocal.