1) I can use Microsoft Office (and do), Adobe et. al. as well as any number of Opensourced tools. That's why I ditched linux on the desktop back in 2002 for OSX. Last time I checked there wasn't any propitary file formats. I could watch videos with Quicktime or VLC or Mplayer or anything else I can install via MacPorts.
2) If you go back in time to when iTunes started, Apple pretty much had to use DRM in order to gain access to the music catalogs. But guess what, I can still burn and rip the songs back to MP3 and play the songs on upto 5 different computers/devices. Frankly they were the ones that were able to strike a balance between protecting digital rights, which the record companies wanted, and allowing fair use. On another note, I installed the codecs and have no problems listening to FLAC or Ogg encoded files.
3) While they may have gotten bad press lately over the DNS flap, overall, I've found Apple to have fixes to most critical flaws within days. Frankly they are not any better or worse than other OS's that I've dealt with. (Windows, FreeBSD, various flavors of Linux).
4) Maybe to you, but my time is worth about $60 an hour. With my Mac's, I'm not wasting time tracking down some linux tweak or running virus scans. If a client sends me a document in.docx, I open it with Office 2008. The time I save easily makes up for the initial cost difference. Where I'm working now were developing an application for Linux. All I will say is that the product versions are being shipped on Macs instead of Linux. When they did the pilot testing, they tried both Macs and Linux. Our target market was smaller businesses. Put everything on the Mac and they were far less weary of it than bringing in a Single Board Computer or PC loaded with Linux.
I've been working with a couple sharp folks who had developed some cool technology for their PhD work and wanted to market it commercially. One was a huge fan of RoR and cloud computing. We were specing out the development map of a commercial application of what they had been working on and I had one demand: recode everything in PHP and use the traditional method of load balanced networks and database clusters for scaling.
The entire month of June was him bitching about "WHy aren't we using S3!" and how well Ruby wold scale and the cloud would never go down, etc. etc..
My response was always, "I know the old method will scale and how it scales. Plus we can host that set up ourselves if need be."
Fortunately, the other developer had spent a few years working for IBM before going back for his PhD and understood the priniciple of "Go with what you know until something better comes around and is proven."
Well, then S3 went down. I never said anything, but since Monday, June 21st, he hasn't bitched about doing it the old fashion way. When S3 went down, something the first developer claimed could never happen,
i.e. the couple exceptions being Geleto, but still on the Render Farm level, Gelato is not being widely used in production environments. I've seen it being used in the animatic and rendering rough shots quickly, but final renders are still done the old fashion way on a render farm.
Render farms don't use OpenGL or DX for rendering in programs such as Lightwave/Maya/blender, the frames are rendered by the CPU not GPU. (there are a couple exceptions to this).
The only place the video comes into play is when you are running the 3D app and modelling of huge poly objects. I can slow Blender down to a crawl in big scenes on my older powerbook with only 64MB of video ram, but it runs smooth in my old G4 tower with 256MB of video ram, yet the render times on the same frame are about the same. (1.5Ghz vs. 2x1Ghz G4 CPU's., both with 1.25GB of Ram).
WHY THE HELL IS THIS STUFF ON LAPTOPS TO START WITH!
I'm sorry, but there are some information that belongs on servers managed by people that at least understand (hopefully) security and encryption. And then the only access to it from secured thin client terminals inside the office.
I just went through this with a client who was in the test phase of developing a server side application using FFMPEG to create MPEG-4 streams. They were getting ready to ship the product in the comming weeks when I was brought in to work on the next version of the video streaming app.
My first question to them was if they had their MPEG-LA license. The developers eyes widened at that point when they started into the, "But FFMPEG is opensource.".
Took about 20 minutes that yes the software is free free to use, but not to encode/decode MPEG-4. Next question from the programers were, "What about h.264". Again, go see MPEG-LA. Then they were asking if there were any other options. I mentioned Theora.
When I was testing Theora a couple months ago (Back in May), the quality vs. H264 was still not there. I'm sure they are making it better, but right now H.264 does offer a better picture on more devices.
So we'll use what works until something better comes along.
I was living in Germany when OS 10.2 came out. It was $80, for the student version in the US, and E169 for the retail upgrade in Germany. So I bought it and had my dad ship it over to me. When it arrived in Germany, I had to pay about E25 in import tariffs.
I've not been an overly big fan of the GPL for years, not because of the licensing. I found the GPL to be a fair license. I found it nice to work with for projects where it's saved me hours of not having to recode the wheel. I find the sharing of code back to be a fair cost of barter economics. But it's the politics of the bigwigs in the movement that has always kept me at an arms length and never fully embracing the GPL wing of the OSS movement. Folks like RMS want all software to be their way: the GPL way or the Highway. This is really no different than Microsoft or Apple wanting it their way or the highway. To them, I don't think it is no longer about freedom as it is choosing their way.
Frankly this was one of the reasons why I adopted FreeBSD as my server platform of choice years ago. I get the freedom without the politics. Instead of sending money to the FSF, I buy a set of CD's or DVD's with each release to support the FreeBSD and OpenBSD projects.
I've been hired to integrate several systems into 1 POS system. Originally that project was going to be run on Linux based systems. Come monday, it will be BSD. Or maybe even designed for OSX on Mac Mini's. After all, Java and PostgreSQL run on Mac.
NASA went on the Single Stage to Orbit pipe dream throughout the 1990's. What Spaceship 1 got right was a Dual Stage to Orbit platform where you have a large conventional aircraft haul the orbiter to 60k feet, drop it, then let the orbiter boost from there. It's still expensive, but far cheaper per pound than the current systems and it could be done with current technology.
Basically SS1 did what Mercury/Redstone did in the 1950's. Granted we didn't have the unknown factors that they faced back then, but still, they did it for $25M. That's R&D, construction, and successful flights for $25M. Even if it took $100M to scale it up, that's still cheaper than anything thing else going.
I used to do the same thing, reach for MySQL for web applications first simply because there are more hosting companies supporting MySQL for a large number of reasons. I reached for PostgreSQL for intranet or business application where clients could use the features, but maybe could not afford or wanted to spend the money on SQL Server or Oracle. But in the last couple years, I've noticed more hosting companies offering PG support as well. However this changed for me in the past six months when SUN purchased MySQL.
But SUN buying MySQL and then not really having any what I would call "firm plans" on what they were going to do with it was enough for me to look at PostgreSQL as the db of choice for the latest application I was hired to develop. At this point, PG development seems to be more of a known quantity.
I could be wrong and Sun might create something that is absolutely amazing and the best. thing. ever. But until then, I'll stick with what I know till something better comes along.
and while we at it, we need to seriously ban the dihydrogen monoxide that cyclists use. Did you know that Dihydrogen Monoxide releases more C02 into the air than any other source! Sersiouly, we got get after this stuff.
Actually, this jump in tax write off caused me and my dad to spent a bunch on money on capital improvements on our family farms. (About 600 acres total). If we had been limited to the $25k per year write off, it would not have been attractive to my old man. He may have lived long enough to see the write off, or maybe not. He's to that age where if the ROI doesn't come back in some form or fashion in Including spending about $80k on grain storage bins, 40x90 steel building to store our tractor and equipment (small tractor as we rent the farm to proper farmers, but we keep a small utility tractor mainly because my Dad is retired and the farms is his play toy. But we do use the tractor to spray for weed control along the farm roads, use the dirt scoop to even out the high and low spots, etc..)
The jump in the write off made it much more attractive to do. Especially since the old man can basically keep all the farm income shielded from taxes for a couple more years. Doesn't sound like much, but it keeps him in a lower tax bracket and that saves several thousand dollars a years.
But, in the mean time, the contractors who put up the buildings made money, the companies who made the steel buildings got sales, which kept their employees hired and paid.
We are about to go back into the watermelon business next year. One of the items on the list to buy is a pickup truck so we can haul small loads of watermelons (1 or 2 pallets) from the wearhouse we're building in the city so if an outlet is running low, we can run a fresh shipment out that day. It's not a bad summer time job while I'm in grad school, probably clear $35 - 40k.
We have a 10 year old Astro Van that could probably manage towing the trailer without a lot of problems, but we're waiting. We figure come december or January (depending if we need the write off this year), dealerships will be cutting hell of a deal on new/used pickups. (probably we'll be looking at used trucks for someone wanting to get rid of theirs at a firesale price.)
Now I'm not saying there aren't business owners out there who say, "Hey I can write this $100k off and buy a big shiny tow that says 'look at me'." There are. A lot of business owners can be arrogant as hell. Generally it's Type A's that start businesses.
But we aren't the only ones. I know a lot of small business owners who took advantage of the new tax laws to buy new equipment that otherwise they may not have purchased. Some expanded into new areas and when they did, generally had to hire an extra person or two to keep up.
People love to point at the flashy business owner (trust me, at lot of these people don't remain in business that long if they are spending $100k on flashy toy that has no practical application what so ever) and then snicker. Mostly out of jealously it seems. Which, if you made $100k and want to buy a hummer, more power to you, uut for everyone of them, there are a lot more successful business owners who go out, use the tax advantage to exactly what it was designed for: buy equipment, expand their business, and continue to add value to the economy.
MP3 maybe an ISO standard, but it is still a patented codec. If you want to ship an encoder/decoder you need to get a license. Also, the same if you stream. One of the reasons why AAC became popular. Only have to pay for a license if you are shipping an encoder/decoder.
It's like right now the only thing that is holding up shipping our next generation application to clients is we're waiting for the MPEG4/H.264 license in paper before we ship, even though the encoder is using FFMPEG.
I had been playing around with a couple different linux/BSD combos on a client's machine. Everytime I always installed KDE 3.5 or the distro loaded KDE 3.5 by default (PC-BSD, etc..)
The client took OpenSuSE 11 and installed it with KDE 4, thinking "Hey 4.0 is greater than 3.5".
My gut reaction was to cringe and he asked me why. And I told them that KDE 4.0 had issues and the other part of it was it was too new. It hadn't been out long enough in my book to switch.
And there have been some odd things happen with programs crashing and the way some systems function.
the problem with a lot of "Web Developers" is that a lot of them are from the graphics arts background. Especially in the flash arena. Most of my work these days is going in and putting out fires and fixing messes when graphics designers get over their heads. Typically I can come in with the right people and fix the situation.
That being said, I know plenty of programmers who are technically competent, but couldn't design their way out of a cardboard box when it comes to UI design or layout of a page. I can think of only about 4 people I know who are damn good in both arenas.
I certainly fall into the latter category. Technically, I can make things work, but make them look good, no thanks. That's why I work with graphics designers.
My problem with the GPL was I always got the feeling that eventually the powers that be behind it would try to create tentacles where by anything that GPLed software touched would have to be GPLed as well. To me, that seemed to be the end goal in the back of my mind that RMS et. al. were really wanting. And to a certain extent, that has happened with GPL v3. For instance what happened with the SMF bridge and Joomla.
I remember sitting in meetings with Lawyers years ago when developing a product. We were outlining an application and wanted to use some GPLed code as it's foundation. Would have saved weeks of development time and under what conditions. The killer was the fact we were hiring a couple programmers under contract 1099 status. Allowing them to take a copy home to work on would have been distributing and we'd have to make code available again and that was unacceptable to the project.
Well, end of that story is that everything ended up being developed on FBSD and PostgreSQL. And that's the reason why if left to my own devices, that's my development stack of choice. It is free as in speech and beer without any ambiguity.
What I have always liked about the BSD-license is that it is short, simple, and to the point. Just about anyone can read and understand it without a law degree.
Actually, it's more like, If they suck, you are free to create your own site to host your own pictures or create a site to host the images of others with whatever level of restriction you feel is necessary.
In other words, you're free to build a better mouse trap.
While modded funny, it really is insightful. I like my mac products. But if you go with the bleeding edge of apple you get cut. I know people who bought Quicksilver G4's with DVD-RAM drives saying how they would be the next big thing. It never caught on. That's why I didn't even consider an iPhone when they came out. (Well that coupled with the generally suckiness of AT&T coverage in this area)
I bought the first generation snow white iBook (the ones with the logic board issues). (I didn't have much a choice, getting ready to leave the country for a year. Fortunately I didn't have problems till 18 months later)
And Apple had been bad about RAM and HDD's for years. When I worked as a consultant on Mac systems, I always told my clients to order a machine with the base ram and HDD's. We could upgrade cheaper later.
When I bought my PowerMac G5 QuadCore, I got the base 512MB of Ram. Apple wanted nearly $4k for 8GB of ram (it may have even been closer to $5k at the time). I went to Crucial the same day I ordered the machine and ordered 8GB of Ram for about $1600. Ram got to my door a few days before the machine.
Most people who have been Apple users for a while know about these pitfalls. When I go with with people to buy their first mac, or help them order online, I can help them avoid some of those.
Just like I order my machines from MacMall. Especially the close out deals on the PowerBooks/MacBook Pros. I've saved $800 - $1000 before by getting the last model. Sometimes the only difference is about 200Mhz in processor speed and not the latest video card.
Now some people have it in their heads from Apple products way back when that you need buy "Mac Ram" or a "Mac Drive". I've noticed that Office Depot stocks ram that says, "For Mac" with a huge mark up compared to their generic ram, which is the same spec right next to it. (I still tell people to go to Crucial and get their RAM).
Honestly, that was the hardware I thought was bad too. Ran Memtest overnight last night, no errors came back.
And client is maybe too strong a word. It's the coffee shop that I spent way too much time at, but it's locally owned and I like it. So I help him out with technology things. He gives me free coffee.
And this has me perplexed enough to try and keep beating the dead horse, because it is acting like a bad ram chip. And it's not the first bad ram chip I've seen pass memory tests either.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll feed the troll:
With Apple:
1) I can use Microsoft Office (and do), Adobe et. al. as well as any number of Opensourced tools. That's why I ditched linux on the desktop back in 2002 for OSX. Last time I checked there wasn't any propitary file formats. I could watch videos with Quicktime or VLC or Mplayer or anything else I can install via MacPorts.
2) If you go back in time to when iTunes started, Apple pretty much had to use DRM in order to gain access to the music catalogs. But guess what, I can still burn and rip the songs back to MP3 and play the songs on upto 5 different computers/devices. Frankly they were the ones that were able to strike a balance between protecting digital rights, which the record companies wanted, and allowing fair use. On another note, I installed the codecs and have no problems listening to FLAC or Ogg encoded files.
3) While they may have gotten bad press lately over the DNS flap, overall, I've found Apple to have fixes to most critical flaws within days. Frankly they are not any better or worse than other OS's that I've dealt with. (Windows, FreeBSD, various flavors of Linux).
4) Maybe to you, but my time is worth about $60 an hour. With my Mac's, I'm not wasting time tracking down some linux tweak or running virus scans. If a client sends me a document in .docx, I open it with Office 2008. The time I save easily makes up for the initial cost difference. Where I'm working now were developing an application for Linux. All I will say is that the product versions are being shipped on Macs instead of Linux. When they did the pilot testing, they tried both Macs and Linux. Our target market was smaller businesses. Put everything on the Mac and they were far less weary of it than bringing in a Single Board Computer or PC loaded with Linux.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvVZRwlwebo
Try Ghost Recon 1
I've been working with a couple sharp folks who had developed some cool technology for their PhD work and wanted to market it commercially. One was a huge fan of RoR and cloud computing. We were specing out the development map of a commercial application of what they had been working on and I had one demand: recode everything in PHP and use the traditional method of load balanced networks and database clusters for scaling.
The entire month of June was him bitching about "WHy aren't we using S3!" and how well Ruby wold scale and the cloud would never go down, etc. etc..
My response was always, "I know the old method will scale and how it scales. Plus we can host that set up ourselves if need be."
Fortunately, the other developer had spent a few years working for IBM before going back for his PhD and understood the priniciple of "Go with what you know until something better comes around and is proven."
Well, then S3 went down. I never said anything, but since Monday, June 21st, he hasn't bitched about doing it the old fashion way.
When S3 went down, something the first developer claimed could never happen,
i.e. the couple exceptions being Geleto, but still on the Render Farm level, Gelato is not being widely used in production environments. I've seen it being used in the animatic and rendering rough shots quickly, but final renders are still done the old fashion way on a render farm.
Render farms don't use OpenGL or DX for rendering in programs such as Lightwave/Maya/blender, the frames are rendered by the CPU not GPU. (there are a couple exceptions to this).
The only place the video comes into play is when you are running the 3D app and modelling of huge poly objects. I can slow Blender down to a crawl in big scenes on my older powerbook with only 64MB of video ram, but it runs smooth in my old G4 tower with 256MB of video ram, yet the render times on the same frame are about the same. (1.5Ghz vs. 2x1Ghz G4 CPU's., both with 1.25GB of Ram).
The few times I've been to Flordia, I've noticed that it tends to rain just about everyday around 5PM.
It's the day after DNF, so they can add a plug-in to view your scores in real time.
WHY THE HELL IS THIS STUFF ON LAPTOPS TO START WITH!
I'm sorry, but there are some information that belongs on servers managed by people that at least understand (hopefully) security and encryption. And then the only access to it from secured thin client terminals inside the office.
I just went through this with a client who was in the test phase of developing a server side application using FFMPEG to create MPEG-4 streams. They were getting ready to ship the product in the comming weeks when I was brought in to work on the next version of the video streaming app.
My first question to them was if they had their MPEG-LA license. The developers eyes widened at that point when they started into the, "But FFMPEG is opensource.".
Took about 20 minutes that yes the software is free free to use, but not to encode/decode MPEG-4. Next question from the programers were, "What about h.264". Again, go see MPEG-LA. Then they were asking if there were any other options. I mentioned Theora.
When I was testing Theora a couple months ago (Back in May), the quality vs. H264 was still not there. I'm sure they are making it better, but right now H.264 does offer a better picture on more devices.
So we'll use what works until something better comes along.
and hookers!!
In fact, screw the pony and blackjack!
I was living in Germany when OS 10.2 came out. It was $80, for the student version in the US, and E169 for the retail upgrade in Germany. So I bought it and had my dad ship it over to me. When it arrived in Germany, I had to pay about E25 in import tariffs.
I've not been an overly big fan of the GPL for years, not because of the licensing. I found the GPL to be a fair license. I found it nice to work with for projects where it's saved me hours of not having to recode the wheel. I find the sharing of code back to be a fair cost of barter economics. But it's the politics of the bigwigs in the movement that has always kept me at an arms length and never fully embracing the GPL wing of the OSS movement. Folks like RMS want all software to be their way: the GPL way or the Highway. This is really no different than Microsoft or Apple wanting it their way or the highway. To them, I don't think it is no longer about freedom as it is choosing their way.
Frankly this was one of the reasons why I adopted FreeBSD as my server platform of choice years ago. I get the freedom without the politics. Instead of sending money to the FSF, I buy a set of CD's or DVD's with each release to support the FreeBSD and OpenBSD projects.
I've been hired to integrate several systems into 1 POS system. Originally that project was going to be run on Linux based systems. Come monday, it will be BSD. Or maybe even designed for OSX on Mac Mini's. After all, Java and PostgreSQL run on Mac.
NASA went on the Single Stage to Orbit pipe dream throughout the 1990's. What Spaceship 1 got right was a Dual Stage to Orbit platform where you have a large conventional aircraft haul the orbiter to 60k feet, drop it, then let the orbiter boost from there. It's still expensive, but far cheaper per pound than the current systems and it could be done with current technology.
Basically SS1 did what Mercury/Redstone did in the 1950's. Granted we didn't have the unknown factors that they faced back then, but still, they did it for $25M. That's R&D, construction, and successful flights for $25M. Even if it took $100M to scale it up, that's still cheaper than anything thing else going.
I used to do the same thing, reach for MySQL for web applications first simply because there are more hosting companies supporting MySQL for a large number of reasons. I reached for PostgreSQL for intranet or business application where clients could use the features, but maybe could not afford or wanted to spend the money on SQL Server or Oracle. But in the last couple years, I've noticed more hosting companies offering PG support as well. However this changed for me in the past six months when SUN purchased MySQL.
But SUN buying MySQL and then not really having any what I would call "firm plans" on what they were going to do with it was enough for me to look at PostgreSQL as the db of choice for the latest application I was hired to develop. At this point, PG development seems to be more of a known quantity.
I could be wrong and Sun might create something that is absolutely amazing and the best. thing. ever. But until then, I'll stick with what I know till something better comes along.
errr....wait a minute, that sounds exactly what U of I is building!
So, April 2009 and the digital conversion?
and while we at it, we need to seriously ban the dihydrogen monoxide that cyclists use. Did you know that Dihydrogen Monoxide releases more C02 into the air than any other source! Sersiouly, we got get after this stuff.
http://www.dhmo.org/
It was an eye opener.
Actually, this jump in tax write off caused me and my dad to spent a bunch on money on capital improvements on our family farms. (About 600 acres total). If we had been limited to the $25k per year write off, it would not have been attractive to my old man. He may have lived long enough to see the write off, or maybe not. He's to that age where if the ROI doesn't come back in some form or fashion in
Including spending about $80k on grain storage bins, 40x90 steel building to store our tractor and equipment (small tractor as we rent the farm to proper farmers, but we keep a small utility tractor mainly because my Dad is retired and the farms is his play toy. But we do use the tractor to spray for weed control along the farm roads, use the dirt scoop to even out the high and low spots, etc..)
The jump in the write off made it much more attractive to do. Especially since the old man can basically keep all the farm income shielded from taxes for a couple more years. Doesn't sound like much, but it keeps him in a lower tax bracket and that saves several thousand dollars a years.
But, in the mean time, the contractors who put up the buildings made money, the companies who made the steel buildings got sales, which kept their employees hired and paid.
We are about to go back into the watermelon business next year. One of the items on the list to buy is a pickup truck so we can haul small loads of watermelons (1 or 2 pallets) from the wearhouse we're building in the city so if an outlet is running low, we can run a fresh shipment out that day. It's not a bad summer time job while I'm in grad school, probably clear $35 - 40k.
We have a 10 year old Astro Van that could probably manage towing the trailer without a lot of problems, but we're waiting. We figure come december or January (depending if we need the write off this year), dealerships will be cutting hell of a deal on new/used pickups. (probably we'll be looking at used trucks for someone wanting to get rid of theirs at a firesale price.)
Now I'm not saying there aren't business owners out there who say, "Hey I can write this $100k off and buy a big shiny tow that says 'look at me'." There are. A lot of business owners can be arrogant as hell. Generally it's Type A's that start businesses.
But we aren't the only ones. I know a lot of small business owners who took advantage of the new tax laws to buy new equipment that otherwise they may not have purchased. Some expanded into new areas and when they did, generally had to hire an extra person or two to keep up.
People love to point at the flashy business owner (trust me, at lot of these people don't remain in business that long if they are spending $100k on flashy toy that has no practical application what so ever) and then snicker. Mostly out of jealously it seems. Which, if you made $100k and want to buy a hummer, more power to you, uut for everyone of them, there are a lot more successful business owners who go out, use the tax advantage to exactly what it was designed for: buy equipment, expand their business, and continue to add value to the economy.
MP3 maybe an ISO standard, but it is still a patented codec. If you want to ship an encoder/decoder you need to get a license. Also, the same if you stream. One of the reasons why AAC became popular. Only have to pay for a license if you are shipping an encoder/decoder.
It's like right now the only thing that is holding up shipping our next generation application to clients is we're waiting for the MPEG4/H.264 license in paper before we ship, even though the encoder is using FFMPEG.
Industry standard != free from patents.
I had been playing around with a couple different linux/BSD combos on a client's machine. Everytime I always installed KDE 3.5 or the distro loaded KDE 3.5 by default (PC-BSD, etc..)
The client took OpenSuSE 11 and installed it with KDE 4, thinking "Hey 4.0 is greater than 3.5".
My gut reaction was to cringe and he asked me why. And I told them that KDE 4.0 had issues and the other part of it was it was too new. It hadn't been out long enough in my book to switch.
And there have been some odd things happen with programs crashing and the way some systems function.
the problem with a lot of "Web Developers" is that a lot of them are from the graphics arts background. Especially in the flash arena. Most of my work these days is going in and putting out fires and fixing messes when graphics designers get over their heads. Typically I can come in with the right people and fix the situation.
That being said, I know plenty of programmers who are technically competent, but couldn't design their way out of a cardboard box when it comes to UI design or layout of a page. I can think of only about 4 people I know who are damn good in both arenas.
I certainly fall into the latter category. Technically, I can make things work, but make them look good, no thanks. That's why I work with graphics designers.
My problem with the GPL was I always got the feeling that eventually the powers that be behind it would try to create tentacles where by anything that GPLed software touched would have to be GPLed as well. To me, that seemed to be the end goal in the back of my mind that RMS et. al. were really wanting. And to a certain extent, that has happened with GPL v3. For instance what happened with the SMF bridge and Joomla.
I remember sitting in meetings with Lawyers years ago when developing a product. We were outlining an application and wanted to use some GPLed code as it's foundation. Would have saved weeks of development time and under what conditions. The killer was the fact we were hiring a couple programmers under contract 1099 status. Allowing them to take a copy home to work on would have been distributing and we'd have to make code available again and that was unacceptable to the project.
Well, end of that story is that everything ended up being developed on FBSD and PostgreSQL. And that's the reason why if left to my own devices, that's my development stack of choice. It is free as in speech and beer without any ambiguity.
What I have always liked about the BSD-license is that it is short, simple, and to the point. Just about anyone can read and understand it without a law degree.
Actually, it's more like, If they suck, you are free to create your own site to host your own pictures or create a site to host the images of others with whatever level of restriction you feel is necessary.
In other words, you're free to build a better mouse trap.
While modded funny, it really is insightful. I like my mac products. But if you go with the bleeding edge of apple you get cut. I know people who bought Quicksilver G4's with DVD-RAM drives saying how they would be the next big thing. It never caught on. That's why I didn't even consider an iPhone when they came out. (Well that coupled with the generally suckiness of AT&T coverage in this area)
I bought the first generation snow white iBook (the ones with the logic board issues). (I didn't have much a choice, getting ready to leave the country for a year. Fortunately I didn't have problems till 18 months later)
And Apple had been bad about RAM and HDD's for years. When I worked as a consultant on Mac systems, I always told my clients to order a machine with the base ram and HDD's. We could upgrade cheaper later.
When I bought my PowerMac G5 QuadCore, I got the base 512MB of Ram. Apple wanted nearly $4k for 8GB of ram (it may have even been closer to $5k at the time). I went to Crucial the same day I ordered the machine and ordered 8GB of Ram for about $1600. Ram got to my door a few days before the machine.
Most people who have been Apple users for a while know about these pitfalls. When I go with with people to buy their first mac, or help them order online, I can help them avoid some of those.
Just like I order my machines from MacMall. Especially the close out deals on the PowerBooks/MacBook Pros. I've saved $800 - $1000 before by getting the last model. Sometimes the only difference is about 200Mhz in processor speed and not the latest video card.
Now some people have it in their heads from Apple products way back when that you need buy "Mac Ram" or a "Mac Drive". I've noticed that Office Depot stocks ram that says, "For Mac" with a huge mark up compared to their generic ram, which is the same spec right next to it. (I still tell people to go to Crucial and get their RAM).
Honestly, that was the hardware I thought was bad too. Ran Memtest overnight last night, no errors came back.
And client is maybe too strong a word. It's the coffee shop that I spent way too much time at, but it's locally owned and I like it. So I help him out with technology things. He gives me free coffee.
And this has me perplexed enough to try and keep beating the dead horse, because it is acting like a bad ram chip. And it's not the first bad ram chip I've seen pass memory tests either.