Hmm, still requires xcode and for Snow Leopard/Lion, requires compilation as no binary available. So besides syntax, not seeing how this is much of an improvement over MacPorts.
This isn't anti-Apple bullshit, it's the truth: from the MacPorts FAQ:
Will my MacPorts install continue to work after installing a new major OS release or migrating to a new machine with a different CPU architecture?
In general the answer is no. See Migration for how to get things working again.
Ubuntu:
do-release-upgrade
...
apt-get install $package
There's a 99% chance that will Just Work (tm). The other 1%, well, likely something's not right to begin with (wrong apt sources, etc.) or it's an edge case.
Look, I love my Macbook, but I choose to run VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Ubuntu because I feel that while it does a great job of some things, it's poor at best at other things in comparison to other OSs. One of those things is having a core, reliable package management system: when it's time to release some new code and/or configuration changes for a client, I don't want to get burnt by a 3rd-party package system not working as expected.
Never found MacPorts to be nearly as friendly/comprehensive as a good ol' Ubuntu apt repository. It's also 3rd-party and at the mercy of Apple and requires a bunch of prerequisites.
...longer than a search query in Google. And then you reach for your terrible Bluetooth keyboard/dock with it's equally-terrible leatherette cover and try to juggle the thing on your lap, all the while wondering why you didn't just get a thin laptop or a netbook.
get a $2.99 a month VPS running whatever flavour of *nix you want. I have two of them. I use one for a proxy (for hulu.com access; I'm in Canada) and my personal websites. The other is for friends and family websites; both are from different providers, both run MaraDNS for redundancy (ns1 and ns2).
Matrix has been re-releasing the games at full pop ($49!) with minor-to-moderate bug fixes and a few enhancements. I can see how that can fly with newer games in expansion packs (with arguably more work in creating new assets, campaigns, etc.), but 10-15 year old games? They should just release the source code and stop milking cash out of an ancient game series.
I know this is an obvious troll but you really have no idea what you're talking about. For a consultant, you're at the mercy of the billable hour, of which there's a finite amount in any given week. What this means is that there's a real opportunity cost associated with every job you take on, and it has to be profitable for the business to function, just like any business, and that means margins: you need to bill out enough to cover your own salary, other people's salaries (we have bosses and accountants too), expenses (who do you think picks up the tab at lunch?), plus have enough leftover to turn a profit. Some consultancies turn more profits than others, like any other business, but a consultant's billable rate != consultant's hourly salary.
A friend of a mine recently left RIM. He was high-up/involved enough to know that RIM's losing all their big accounts because a) nobody's buying Blackberries on their own; everyone's buying an iPhone or an Android phone b) executives know this, so it's cheaper for them to have their staff buy the phone they want, and expense a percentage of their data/voice plans to the company instead.
I will say that from a stability/security/durability perspective, you can't beat Blackberries: being able to remotely brick a phone, knowing that their phones have been built with security in mind, and having personally dropped various Blackberries I've owned down flights of stairs, backed over it with my car, and stepped on it, only to have cracked the screen once, is proof of this, IMO.
I buy business machines from a local, privately-owned retailer: I get the same 3-year next day warranty that big boys give, quality Intel motherboards/CPUs with Kingston RAM; quality StarTech PSUs and cases, assembled by knowledgeable technicians.
If/when there's a hardware issue, I drop it off, they handle the RTM and have in-stock spares to get the machine up-and-running again quickly. Sure beats going through the usual scripted interrogation with a Dell rep on the other end of the line or having to ship it back.
EVERYBODY sells cheap Linux instances and it's not going to stop, but what I suspect is that Amazon will eventually restrict outgoing SMTP traffic to only the Simple Email Service hosts (much like ISPs do) in order to funnel/filter spam before it leaves their network.
Sigh. Blacklist Nazis.
I just put up three new EC2 instances tonight for my clients: one's running a maintenance tracker Website for a construction firm, the other's for a realtor, and the third is for a recruiting firm.
.
All of them send out email now using Postini's smarthosts to send mail but I'll definitely be looking into this new Amazon service as an alternative. However, If everyone blacklisted like you do, my legitimate (and very much wanted) email notifications would never get through.
It really is a nice product. During a recent "outbreak" of Conficker (all machines were patched thankfully and not vulnerable), AVG did jack, MSE cleaned it up immediately. We're moving away from AVG for all deployments; too many missed viruses (see, "Every Fake Antivirus in the wild since 2009").
Was just about to write an identical comment. The summary read like someone who's never programmed before; I stopped reading after that and assumed the article was bunk. Sounds like I was right.
It's a decent product, takes some mucking about in the station settings to get it just right, but man, bloat-city. I can't believe how much crap they keep piling on: there's now an AVG "gadget" that floats on the desktop with amazingly intuitive features like a big "Fix" button. Umm, really? A gadget for anti-virus?
Also, this isn't the first issue: we had dozens of SBS 2003 servers run out of non-paged pool memory and crash. Guess what the culprit was? AVG's network IDS driver from AVG 8 that didn't properly uninstall after an upgrade and had to be manually removed. That was alot of fun troubleshooting. So we've decided not to renew any clients with it. It's a shame: it was so promising prior to version 8: it was lightweight, inexpensive, centrally-managed (essential for businesses), etc.
I game, but I'm about a year behind the curve on most games, sometimes two, because I'm generally busy doing other things. However, the benefit of this is pretty substantial: my "new" tower exactly two years ago (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) with video card (HD4850) was $800, and I'm just working through 2009 games now (Fallout 2, Dragon Age: Origins) that cost me less than half the price than the original retail sticker price. Not only that, but the games are fully patched, there's plenty of mods and community information out there about both games, so I can play through the story without wondering if it's going to crash, perform poorly, or hit a logic goof on some quest that ruins the rest of the game for me.
I love Linux/open source as much as the next guy, but c'mon: Small Business Server 2008 R2 on a Dell/IBM server with big SATA disks and hardware RAID1 and all the CALs you need would be about $5000 with tape backup.
Comes with Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, Remote Web Workplace (Outlook Web Access and terminal services/RDP to the desktops), quotas, roaming profiles, group policy, you can throw Blackberry Enterprise Express on it if they require smartphones. Simple to manage, reliable.
It's pretty hard to beat for a ~75 user network; have dozens of clients running SBS 2003 and 2008 and it's a no-brainer.
I'd stay away from web hosting in-house though: unless you have some back office integration concerns, there's no value to having your website running off your office's Internet connection (think DoS or web vulnerability and the added complexity of another server configured in a DMZ) for the average brochure website, a $10-20 a month web hosting package is more than sufficient.
Damn, that really blows: drop.io saved me a lot of giant attachment woes from my FTP-challenged clients out there. Any good alternatives? drop.io was great because the interface was simple (literally create a unique drop.io URL and click Upload) and didn't require registration.
I felt the exact same way until I stumbled across Project Reality, a Battlefield 2 mod. If you can get past the 2005 graphics (I don't find them bad at all, actually), you're in for surprise:
Honor system: you can't spawn rape. Kick/ban in effect; noobs can't fly aircraft or vehicles if they don't know what they're doing; there are training servers for that, kick/ban in effect.
Teamwork: No really, you can't win the game by yourself. The scoresheet rewards those who provide team assistance; a good medic or squad leader can easily have the top score. on that note, you have to join a squad; almost all require you to use VoIP. All heavy assets below to squads, first come first serve, so some noob can't take a chopper and crash it into the ocean every time it respawns; you need the heavy and logistics squads to run troop transport and drop supply crates -- you can't build a Forward Observation Base (FOB) where you can respawn without crates; you can't deploy TOW or.50 CAL emplacements without two supply crates.
Moderation: at least in the servers I play in, there's always at least one player/admin in the server at any one time enforcing everything I just mentioned. And no, they're not assholes, they do a great job keeping the game going.
I've played entire maps, completely engrossed and satisfied in the game (even when your side loses a round), without having fired a shot -- it's actually frightening moving up some dark streets with your squad trying to take an objective when you hear the "clankety clank" of a tracked vehicle and the Cobra attack chopper squad just got shot down.
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Hmm, still requires xcode and for Snow Leopard/Lion, requires compilation as no binary available. So besides syntax, not seeing how this is much of an improvement over MacPorts.
Fink could be interesting, thanks. Again, would probably not rely on that for production/client work, but could be useful for other utilities.
Will my MacPorts install continue to work after installing a new major OS release or migrating to a new machine with a different CPU architecture? In general the answer is no. See Migration for how to get things working again.
Ubuntu:
do-release-upgrade
...
apt-get install $package
There's a 99% chance that will Just Work (tm). The other 1%, well, likely something's not right to begin with (wrong apt sources, etc.) or it's an edge case.
Look, I love my Macbook, but I choose to run VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Ubuntu because I feel that while it does a great job of some things, it's poor at best at other things in comparison to other OSs. One of those things is having a core, reliable package management system: when it's time to release some new code and/or configuration changes for a client, I don't want to get burnt by a 3rd-party package system not working as expected.
Never found MacPorts to be nearly as friendly/comprehensive as a good ol' Ubuntu apt repository. It's also 3rd-party and at the mercy of Apple and requires a bunch of prerequisites.
Because nothing beats Linux for package management. Miss not having a repo of open source at my disposal; the App Store will never touch it.
...longer than a search query in Google. And then you reach for your terrible Bluetooth keyboard/dock with it's equally-terrible leatherette cover and try to juggle the thing on your lap, all the while wondering why you didn't just get a thin laptop or a netbook.
get a $2.99 a month VPS running whatever flavour of *nix you want. I have two of them. I use one for a proxy (for hulu.com access; I'm in Canada) and my personal websites. The other is for friends and family websites; both are from different providers, both run MaraDNS for redundancy (ns1 and ns2).
Matrix has been re-releasing the games at full pop ($49!) with minor-to-moderate bug fixes and a few enhancements. I can see how that can fly with newer games in expansion packs (with arguably more work in creating new assets, campaigns, etc.), but 10-15 year old games? They should just release the source code and stop milking cash out of an ancient game series.
And as if that's enough money to shut them up too. They'll be zero-day'ed before the check clears.
I know this is an obvious troll but you really have no idea what you're talking about. For a consultant, you're at the mercy of the billable hour, of which there's a finite amount in any given week. What this means is that there's a real opportunity cost associated with every job you take on, and it has to be profitable for the business to function, just like any business, and that means margins: you need to bill out enough to cover your own salary, other people's salaries (we have bosses and accountants too), expenses (who do you think picks up the tab at lunch?), plus have enough leftover to turn a profit. Some consultancies turn more profits than others, like any other business, but a consultant's billable rate != consultant's hourly salary.
A friend of a mine recently left RIM. He was high-up/involved enough to know that RIM's losing all their big accounts because a) nobody's buying Blackberries on their own; everyone's buying an iPhone or an Android phone b) executives know this, so it's cheaper for them to have their staff buy the phone they want, and expense a percentage of their data/voice plans to the company instead.
I will say that from a stability/security/durability perspective, you can't beat Blackberries: being able to remotely brick a phone, knowing that their phones have been built with security in mind, and having personally dropped various Blackberries I've owned down flights of stairs, backed over it with my car, and stepped on it, only to have cracked the screen once, is proof of this, IMO.
*whooosh*
I buy business machines from a local, privately-owned retailer: I get the same 3-year next day warranty that big boys give, quality Intel motherboards/CPUs with Kingston RAM; quality StarTech PSUs and cases, assembled by knowledgeable technicians.
If/when there's a hardware issue, I drop it off, they handle the RTM and have in-stock spares to get the machine up-and-running again quickly. Sure beats going through the usual scripted interrogation with a Dell rep on the other end of the line or having to ship it back.
Best of all, no bloatware.
Why not just grab a fit-PC2? http://www.fit-pc.com/web/
EVERYBODY sells cheap Linux instances and it's not going to stop, but what I suspect is that Amazon will eventually restrict outgoing SMTP traffic to only the Simple Email Service hosts (much like ISPs do) in order to funnel/filter spam before it leaves their network.
Sigh. Blacklist Nazis. I just put up three new EC2 instances tonight for my clients: one's running a maintenance tracker Website for a construction firm, the other's for a realtor, and the third is for a recruiting firm. . All of them send out email now using Postini's smarthosts to send mail but I'll definitely be looking into this new Amazon service as an alternative. However, If everyone blacklisted like you do, my legitimate (and very much wanted) email notifications would never get through.
It really is a nice product. During a recent "outbreak" of Conficker (all machines were patched thankfully and not vulnerable), AVG did jack, MSE cleaned it up immediately. We're moving away from AVG for all deployments; too many missed viruses (see, "Every Fake Antivirus in the wild since 2009").
Was just about to write an identical comment. The summary read like someone who's never programmed before; I stopped reading after that and assumed the article was bunk. Sounds like I was right.
It's a decent product, takes some mucking about in the station settings to get it just right, but man, bloat-city. I can't believe how much crap they keep piling on: there's now an AVG "gadget" that floats on the desktop with amazingly intuitive features like a big "Fix" button. Umm, really? A gadget for anti-virus?
Also, this isn't the first issue: we had dozens of SBS 2003 servers run out of non-paged pool memory and crash. Guess what the culprit was? AVG's network IDS driver from AVG 8 that didn't properly uninstall after an upgrade and had to be manually removed. That was alot of fun troubleshooting. So we've decided not to renew any clients with it. It's a shame: it was so promising prior to version 8: it was lightweight, inexpensive, centrally-managed (essential for businesses), etc.
I game, but I'm about a year behind the curve on most games, sometimes two, because I'm generally busy doing other things. However, the benefit of this is pretty substantial: my "new" tower exactly two years ago (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) with video card (HD4850) was $800, and I'm just working through 2009 games now (Fallout 2, Dragon Age: Origins) that cost me less than half the price than the original retail sticker price. Not only that, but the games are fully patched, there's plenty of mods and community information out there about both games, so I can play through the story without wondering if it's going to crash, perform poorly, or hit a logic goof on some quest that ruins the rest of the game for me.
I love Linux/open source as much as the next guy, but c'mon: Small Business Server 2008 R2 on a Dell/IBM server with big SATA disks and hardware RAID1 and all the CALs you need would be about $5000 with tape backup.
Comes with Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, Remote Web Workplace (Outlook Web Access and terminal services/RDP to the desktops), quotas, roaming profiles, group policy, you can throw Blackberry Enterprise Express on it if they require smartphones. Simple to manage, reliable.
It's pretty hard to beat for a ~75 user network; have dozens of clients running SBS 2003 and 2008 and it's a no-brainer.
I'd stay away from web hosting in-house though: unless you have some back office integration concerns, there's no value to having your website running off your office's Internet connection (think DoS or web vulnerability and the added complexity of another server configured in a DMZ) for the average brochure website, a $10-20 a month web hosting package is more than sufficient.
Damn, that really blows: drop.io saved me a lot of giant attachment woes from my FTP-challenged clients out there. Any good alternatives? drop.io was great because the interface was simple (literally create a unique drop.io URL and click Upload) and didn't require registration.
I felt the exact same way until I stumbled across Project Reality, a Battlefield 2 mod. If you can get past the 2005 graphics (I don't find them bad at all, actually), you're in for surprise:
.50 CAL emplacements without two supply crates.
Honor system: you can't spawn rape. Kick/ban in effect; noobs can't fly aircraft or vehicles if they don't know what they're doing; there are training servers for that, kick/ban in effect.
Teamwork: No really, you can't win the game by yourself. The scoresheet rewards those who provide team assistance; a good medic or squad leader can easily have the top score. on that note, you have to join a squad; almost all require you to use VoIP. All heavy assets below to squads, first come first serve, so some noob can't take a chopper and crash it into the ocean every time it respawns; you need the heavy and logistics squads to run troop transport and drop supply crates -- you can't build a Forward Observation Base (FOB) where you can respawn without crates; you can't deploy TOW or
Moderation: at least in the servers I play in, there's always at least one player/admin in the server at any one time enforcing everything I just mentioned. And no, they're not assholes, they do a great job keeping the game going.
I've played entire maps, completely engrossed and satisfied in the game (even when your side loses a round), without having fired a shot -- it's actually frightening moving up some dark streets with your squad trying to take an objective when you hear the "clankety clank" of a tracked vehicle and the Cobra attack chopper squad just got shot down.
Which was released over a year ago. For those of you wanting to do syslog email alerts, grab the latest .deb from Debian Squeeze.
Egress filtering at the perimeter FTW. It's amazing what people let *out* of their networks...