I just sold my fujitsu S6010 laptop for a new 12" powerbook, and i must say it was a great choice.
For rougly the same price as my fujitsu i got about 640mb of ram, a dvd burner, and a 40 gig hd. Then again this is also with my educational discount so that knocked about $150 off the total price.
Still they are coming down in price quite rapidly. I remember when i saw the 15" TiBooks and shuddered at the expensive, yet gorgeous, laptops that i couldn't afford.
Last time I checked there were several million mac users who range from professional graphic artists, web designers, professionals in the teaching and medical field, the occasional average Joe, and now a new player to the mac field: geeks.
Also to boot the mac has way more software than people give it credit for. It doesn't have half the games as windows, but that's not it's strong point. And with fink and an X11 server i instantly have a BSD machine that can run thousands of qt/gtk apps.
Their desktops are probably loosing tons of market, but they still make the best laptops on the planet.
that contains beauty. Programming is very artistic if you look at it from the right perspective. (Perhaps the obfusicated coding contest is a bad example:)
This is the motivation behind many OS programmers. The people who love to code are the ones who don't need money to do it. They code because they love to.
We need to start chopping some of the legacy fat out of systems now a days.
It's kind of annoying still seeing things like standard x86 startup screens.
It seems like intel has been on a rampage of reform lately. With the Intanium2 (in hopes of getting rid of the ancient x86 chipset architecture), the Centrino (to give laptops better battery life), and now this bios change.
but this is posted every time the topic comes up. NVidia can't release the drivers because of legal reasons. There are things in the code that they do not own, thus cannot release.
Not to mention right now, the Nvidia cards win hands down on driver quality, which is a good advantage over ATI cards.
Id software can practically drive the industry sometimes, and without decent driver support for the platform Id would have a hard time putting out games like doom III or Quake III for the linux platform.
I purchased a laptop from Fujitsu. Naturally it came with Windows XP, so I requested a refund. After nearly 2 weeks of back and forth emails of me requesting a refund, and pointing them to various websites about the issue, and my claims against the EULA to use windows I got nowhere.
Their argument was i agreed to THEIR EULA which states i can't get a refund, when i purchased it. Either they were ignorant or refused to give a refund under any circumstance. I would have contacted a lawyer but it just isn't worth my time.
It's not exactly free for gateway to wire every single machine to the net, including the the extra cost of maxing out the cpu. It DOES take more power when your cpu is at 100% compared to 0%. More power == higher electricity bills.
Grand idea i suppose, but it's going to cost them a pretty penny just to hook all of them up.
Linux:
More complicated
Worse overall for games
Requires more time and effort to figure out simple things
Has a huge learning curve
And after those things i still switched from windows to linux. why? am i nuts? No. i enjoy using my computer. i enjoy knowing that all the software i have on my system is free. i haven't pirated some company to get it. i like knowing that there are other people like me who think that software shouldn't have to cost money and that computer science is an art form. i don't care if i can't play the most up to date games: that's what john carmack and nvidia are for. i don't care if i can't watch the newest movie trailers, that's what divx is for.
I want a computer that i truely own, and control. not the defacto standard given to me with no choices, no options, and no freedom.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If all games and software were written for linux instead of windows, and windows was trying to gain popularity it would find a hard time trying to do so. it's an uphill battle. but linux is gaining ground. it's showing up in the news more and more. it's coming to walmart pcs. it's reaching new levels of usability with mandrake and redhat. for those who truely believe in the OSS movement, we are the future. we are the people who make a difference in a company: who push our bosses to realize the benefits of supporting this platform, etc.
to say that not enough software is released for the platform is only fueling the issue. do what i did. drop windows. just switch, and make due with what you can. think of windows software as non existant, and if it *must* be run, use vmware or winex.
When you have intelligent IDEs like IntelliJ's IDEA. I understand what a make file is from my c++ programming, and if that's essentially what Ant does, I have no use for it. IDEA automatically only compiles the files I've changed, or if i want, rebuilds everything. Not to mention it obviously recurses into every directory in my project and compiles everything. So in light of all that, why would Ant prove of any use to me if i don't use command line java writing tools?
I remember when i first heard about this guy on Big Thinkers. He had some far fetched ideas about completely tossing the desktop out of the window.. I like some of his concepts with desktop management, but at the time of the broadcast of the show, he mentioned tossing the concept of normal *files* and folders too. It seems that might have changed a bit, as it was too radical.
my highschool had TONS of apple machines, and we even got more after i left. Not to mention the vocational school i went to after highschool had even more?! macs. i'm sure apple has given schools hardware discounts as well, otherwise they would have never gotten imacs over pcs.
then again, i remember talking to the sysadmin one day only to hear him ranting about the difficulty of administrating nt4 as opposed to the mac machines.
i'm a cs major, and good programmers are good designers. software engineering is more of the corporate world's attempt to produce more software in less time with fewer bugs that cram more features in. it doesn't focus on the structure of alogirthms, the effiency needed to produce realtime and embeded systems like computer science might emphasise more.
I'm not trying to troll, i'm just saying that most my CS friends are in it for the fun, the knowledge, and getting computers to crunch bits. where most my software engineering friends are microsoft praisers who think that c# is the greatest invention since the stone age since it has delegates and get/set{} operators now (to make their design better?).
Is that India has one of the highest number of programmers in the world (i'm not going to question their education in comparison to some of the programmers in the US, because i think that is irrelevant. good coders are good coders). The fact that they made this push in colleges, where people LEARN to program in the first place, might put a spin on the number of applications being released Linux. I've browsed sites like planet-source-code and rent-a-coder, and it's amazing the number of indian programmers i see on those sites.
Open source software has been in my mind more of a philsophical debate than one of software production. It seems like computer science mimics things a lot in regular science. A new *thing* is discovered, and becomes a widely used standard incorporated into other programs (aka inventions) and it becomes part of the market place.
According to the article: Proponents claim that OSS software stacks up well against commercially developed software both in quality and in the level of support that users receive...
In many ways this is true, but coming from me, someone who is trying to switch from windows to linux, help is a lot harder to come by than they claim. I've relied much on my friends who have used linux to help me get my system running, and without their help I would have spent weeks on google, newsgroups, forums, doc, and man pages just to get things as simple as my audio drivers for my laptop working.
Support for OSS is minimal at best, and that's to be expected. When you have to pay for software, someone is payed to answer phone calls, to write thorough docs.. because it is their JOB. I know a lot of people, such as those 10-15 dedicated developers like the article says, can do a lot when it comes do documentation and support, but companies beat them hands down in this department. That is a big problem, there needs to be a better system. The irony there is if you make linux easier to use you lose the power of customizing your kernel, or optimizing programs by compiling them on your machine, etc.
If something isn't done though, OSS software will always take more time to setup than commercial software.
Slashdot Mirror
I just sold my fujitsu S6010 laptop for a new 12" powerbook, and i must say it was a great choice. For rougly the same price as my fujitsu i got about 640mb of ram, a dvd burner, and a 40 gig hd. Then again this is also with my educational discount so that knocked about $150 off the total price.
Still they are coming down in price quite rapidly. I remember when i saw the 15" TiBooks and shuddered at the expensive, yet gorgeous, laptops that i couldn't afford.
Last time I checked there were several million mac users who range from professional graphic artists, web designers, professionals in the teaching and medical field, the occasional average Joe, and now a new player to the mac field: geeks.
Also to boot the mac has way more software than people give it credit for. It doesn't have half the games as windows, but that's not it's strong point. And with fink and an X11 server i instantly have a BSD machine that can run thousands of qt/gtk apps.
Their desktops are probably loosing tons of market, but they still make the best laptops on the planet.
that contains beauty. Programming is very artistic if you look at it from the right perspective. (Perhaps the obfusicated coding contest is a bad example :)
This is the motivation behind many OS programmers. The people who love to code are the ones who don't need money to do it. They code because they love to.
That's funny. i've been using my new powerbook for only 1 week and i can already tell it's faster, and easier to use than linux will be in awhile.
OSX is a marriage between application and art, and it truely shows if you give it a chance.
We need to start chopping some of the legacy fat out of systems now a days.
It's kind of annoying still seeing things like standard x86 startup screens.
It seems like intel has been on a rampage of reform lately. With the Intanium2 (in hopes of getting rid of the ancient x86 chipset architecture), the Centrino (to give laptops better battery life), and now this bios change.
i purchased one of the new 12" powerbooks
they are worth every penny. beautifuly OSX with the apps of BSD. it's a win win situation.
Wow I didn't know any old WorldsAway people read Slashdot either.
You might have remembered me as Tito.
It still answered some questions and anomolies about the universe and changed the way we think about the world.
windowsrefund.net
I'm participating, tell your friends.
Not that i'm trying to be an ass,
but this is posted every time the topic comes up. NVidia can't release the drivers because of legal reasons. There are things in the code that they do not own, thus cannot release.
Not to mention right now, the Nvidia cards win hands down on driver quality, which is a good advantage over ATI cards.
Id software can practically drive the industry sometimes, and without decent driver support for the platform Id would have a hard time putting out games like doom III or Quake III for the linux platform.
I agree with you, except for this one itsy bitsy problem: Microsoft is a monopoly.
If their "Package" included Mandrake, Redhat, BSD, or some other alternate operating system then no one here would be demanding a refund i imagine.
I purchased a laptop from Fujitsu. Naturally it came with Windows XP, so I requested a refund. After nearly 2 weeks of back and forth emails of me requesting a refund, and pointing them to various websites about the issue, and my claims against the EULA to use windows I got nowhere.
Their argument was i agreed to THEIR EULA which states i can't get a refund, when i purchased it. Either they were ignorant or refused to give a refund under any circumstance. I would have contacted a lawyer but it just isn't worth my time.
It's not exactly free for gateway to wire every single machine to the net, including the the extra cost of maxing out the cpu. It DOES take more power when your cpu is at 100% compared to 0%. More power == higher electricity bills.
Grand idea i suppose, but it's going to cost them a pretty penny just to hook all of them up.
no, it should be BACKslash
I'm not using windows anymore.
Linux:
More complicated
Worse overall for games
Requires more time and effort to figure out simple things
Has a huge learning curve
And after those things i still switched from windows to linux. why? am i nuts? No. i enjoy using my computer. i enjoy knowing that all the software i have on my system is free. i haven't pirated some company to get it. i like knowing that there are other people like me who think that software shouldn't have to cost money and that computer science is an art form. i don't care if i can't play the most up to date games: that's what john carmack and nvidia are for. i don't care if i can't watch the newest movie trailers, that's what divx is for.
I want a computer that i truely own, and control. not the defacto standard given to me with no choices, no options, and no freedom.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If all games and software were written for linux instead of windows, and windows was trying to gain popularity it would find a hard time trying to do so. it's an uphill battle. but linux is gaining ground. it's showing up in the news more and more. it's coming to walmart pcs. it's reaching new levels of usability with mandrake and redhat. for those who truely believe in the OSS movement, we are the future. we are the people who make a difference in a company: who push our bosses to realize the benefits of supporting this platform, etc.
to say that not enough software is released for the platform is only fueling the issue. do what i did. drop windows. just switch, and make due with what you can. think of windows software as non existant, and if it *must* be run, use vmware or winex.
That's why i don't use windows.
When you have intelligent IDEs like IntelliJ's IDEA. I understand what a make file is from my c++ programming, and if that's essentially what Ant does, I have no use for it. IDEA automatically only compiles the files I've changed, or if i want, rebuilds everything. Not to mention it obviously recurses into every directory in my project and compiles everything. So in light of all that, why would Ant prove of any use to me if i don't use command line java writing tools?
I remember when i first heard about this guy on Big Thinkers. He had some far fetched ideas about completely tossing the desktop out of the window.. I like some of his concepts with desktop management, but at the time of the broadcast of the show, he mentioned tossing the concept of normal *files* and folders too. It seems that might have changed a bit, as it was too radical.
Now that's how you ensure job security!
my highschool had TONS of apple machines, and we even got more after i left. Not to mention the vocational school i went to after highschool had even more?! macs. i'm sure apple has given schools hardware discounts as well, otherwise they would have never gotten imacs over pcs.
then again, i remember talking to the sysadmin one day only to hear him ranting about the difficulty of administrating nt4 as opposed to the mac machines.
i'm a cs major, and good programmers are good designers. software engineering is more of the corporate world's attempt to produce more software in less time with fewer bugs that cram more features in. it doesn't focus on the structure of alogirthms, the effiency needed to produce realtime and embeded systems like computer science might emphasise more.
I'm not trying to troll, i'm just saying that most my CS friends are in it for the fun, the knowledge, and getting computers to crunch bits. where most my software engineering friends are microsoft praisers who think that c# is the greatest invention since the stone age since it has delegates and get/set{} operators now (to make their design better?).
Is that India has one of the highest number of programmers in the world (i'm not going to question their education in comparison to some of the programmers in the US, because i think that is irrelevant. good coders are good coders). The fact that they made this push in colleges, where people LEARN to program in the first place, might put a spin on the number of applications being released Linux. I've browsed sites like planet-source-code and rent-a-coder, and it's amazing the number of indian programmers i see on those sites.
Open source software has been in my mind more of a philsophical debate than one of software production. It seems like computer science mimics things a lot in regular science. A new *thing* is discovered, and becomes a widely used standard incorporated into other programs (aka inventions) and it becomes part of the market place.
According to the article: Proponents claim that OSS software stacks up well against commercially developed software both in quality and in the level of support that users receive...
In many ways this is true, but coming from me, someone who is trying to switch from windows to linux, help is a lot harder to come by than they claim. I've relied much on my friends who have used linux to help me get my system running, and without their help I would have spent weeks on google, newsgroups, forums, doc, and man pages just to get things as simple as my audio drivers for my laptop working.
Support for OSS is minimal at best, and that's to be expected. When you have to pay for software, someone is payed to answer phone calls, to write thorough docs.. because it is their JOB. I know a lot of people, such as those 10-15 dedicated developers like the article says, can do a lot when it comes do documentation and support, but companies beat them hands down in this department. That is a big problem, there needs to be a better system. The irony there is if you make linux easier to use you lose the power of customizing your kernel, or optimizing programs by compiling them on your machine, etc.
If something isn't done though, OSS software will always take more time to setup than commercial software.
Yes i'm going to write the next xml book, XML in COBAL.
sorry for the lame joke.. just that i see XML everywhere nowadays.
This THE definitive php book. it is so definitive, it redefines the definition of what definitive means.