At our shop we use nothing but Samsung and Seagate drives, and in my experience, the Samsungs are almost always quieter. The Seagates are certainly near-silent in comparison to Maxtors, or worse still, WD, but there's still some occassional seek noise.
My system at home has two 160GB Samsung drives in it (One PATA, one SATA and about a year and a half newer) and I can't remember *ever* hearing HD noise out of it. I'm using an Antec SLK-3700BQE case, and by far the biggest noise out of the system is my 60mm AMD retail box fan, which I'm looking at replacing with a lower RPM 80mm.
Working in a small PC repair shop, I feel a need to respond to this. We use BartPE simply because we need the spyware scanning tools in our work, but a BootCD certainly isn't a 'best' solution for data recovery.
In fact, every time we need to do any form of serious data recovery, it means I have to pull out our external USB HD anyway. If I can simply boot off the external drive in the first place, have the system run faster since it's working off a HD instead of a CD-ROM, and get my work done, all the better.
Don't get me wrong, both BartPE and Knoppix have been invaluable tools for me, but since I own a 3G iPod anyway, I'll definitely be looking into this.
Honestly, at this point, I'm banking more on a dual-core G4 in the PB than a G5. The main limiting factor, however, would be the FSB would need a serious boost in order to make it practical, but it'd seem to be a good boost for the Powerbook until the thermal issues with the G5 can be sorted out.
Apple may only control 2% of the market, but don't forget that a disproportionate amount of content creation gets done with that 2%. That's why this is news.
It could be related to your particular install. Personally, I've used Firefox on easily a dozen machines, and the only time it's been slow is with Ubuntu, and that was an IPv6 issue that was a bug in the distribution itself, not just Firefox.
I'm not saying you don't have a problem, I'm just saying, it's hard for a developer to fix a problem they can't see. I'm currently using a friend's Titanium Powerbook, and while Omniweb on the Mac is one of the best browsers on any platform in most regards (it's based on WebKit/KHTML), I find myself consistently falling back to Firefox because it's an order of magnitude faster. Asking my Mac-using friends, this seems to be fairly consistent across machines.
On the Windows side, the last time I gave Opera a try, it wasn't noticeably faster than Firefox. It sucks that you have issues, and I hope they eventually get resolved, but again, it's hard to fix something a developer can't duplicate on their system.
You just described what Mozilla either 1.5 or 1.6 was essentially supposed to be. Then the devs decided Firefox and Thunderbird weren't ready, and it got pushed back. I haven't kept up with whether there are still any plans to do so.
Quite simply, yes. On the other hand, I have 3 friends with Aluminum Powerbooks: one is a 1GHz, the other two are 1.5GHz. They constantly complain about the battery lifes being only about 2.5 hours.
I'm typing this on a 667 TiBook that belongs to one of them, and it gets about 4 hours on battery. But that's with an extended life 3rd party battery that *just* came out for a 3 year old machine.
On the other hand, I've yet to see a Centrino rated less than 4 hours, and they've all actually gotten it in real life. The iBooks tend to get a little better battery life, but I'd have a hard time considering an iBook a fair comparison to a full blown Centrino.
I wish the people who really believe in free software could just step back for a second and drop all this GPL, IP protection, Linux vs GNU/Linux crap and grasp the concept that unethical behavior really doesn't need to be enforced by some stupid license. Let public image be the judge for those people.
Have you made it out of high school? Because the fact is, the real world is big enough that things just don't work like that, sad as it may be.
The fact is, there are plenty of people out there who are unethical, immoral, whatever you want to call it, who will try to take advantage of you regardless of right or wrong. I wish it weren't the case, but you simply cannot rely on people's good will to 'do the right thing.'
Personally, I toy a bit with coding, but I've never written anything I'd consider substantial enough to release. That said, as a *user* I tend to prefer GPL'd software because it means that what was free to me (in both senses of the word) will remain so. In all honesty, I'd prefer that the authors of the software have at least some recourse in a case like this, which the terms of the GPL provides. The GPL is about ensuring that the *software* remains free, rather than relying on people's good will to do so.
If you really think GConf is evil you either A) Don't really understand GConf or B) Are completely clueless.
While I don't think GConf is necessarilly the best possible solution out there, it's certainly worlds better than the scattered mess we have now. There are few things that annoy me more than having to hunt down an app's config file and then figure out the syntax for that particular program.
How in the world organizing all these disparate config files into a sane, user-friendly front end is 'evil' is beyond me, unless you're just out for you mad hacker 'I don't need no stinkin' UIs' cred.
They rely too much on context, and I've run across more than one case of a misformatted text config file causing the parser to bork out. XML, on the other hand, removes much of the problems with context and position sensitivity you run into with pure text config files.
I do feel that XML allows for a file to bloat up rather badly, but compression on that sort of plain text file is so good these days that I don't really see any point in complaining about it.
Which, interestingly enough, is *EXACTLY* what the GConf framework so many people around here complain about is supposed to be. Well, except more sensible.
It's basically a front end to all the config files you'd have laying around anyway, and a standardized XML layout for them. The "registry-like" GConf app people complain about (which really isn't that bad if you use it) is simply one front end application for an entire framework.
It also has the huge plus of generally using rather name variable names and being completely human readable. I can usually find a setting, if it exists, fairly easily by working my way down the hierarchy.
Wow, could you fit any more FUD into a single post? First off the FreeBSD connection is in the userspace tools - as you mentioned, the kernel itself is based off Mach. As for not giving back, you couldn't be more wrong.
Is Darwin not giving back? You know, the entire underlying operating system, free and open source, given back to the community? Is open sourcing their entire ZeroConf implementation (aka Rendezvous/Bonjour) not giving back? What about all the improvements to KHTML they've given back? You know, the improvements Apple is donating back so fast that the KHTML literally doesn't have the manpower to merge them all back yet?
The fact is, Apple has been incredibly good about giving back improvements to Open Source that they've made to the community. Even with BSD licensed software where they technically don't have to give anything at all back if they don't want to, AFAIK they always have.
So while Apple certainly does some things I don't agree with, you need to seriously check your facts, and somebody needs to negate the insightful mod you've been given because you're anything but.
I'm not familiar enough with the low levels of it to give you any details, but I *can* tell you that on a 15" Titanium Powerbook that I'm currently borrowing from a friend to give Macs an honest try, that when running Ubuntu on it, the fonts looked essentially just as good as they did in OS X on the same machine. Even my friend who's a huge Mac zealot was impressed with how good it looked.
If anything right now, I've noticed that the text subsystem in OS X is by far the slowest part of the UI, and my understanding is that it's because it's the one part of the UI that isn't hardware accelerated.
At any, if you got to the options panel for anti-aliasing for both OS X and Gnome, you'll notice they both contain pretty much the same options and you get pretty much the same results. So evidently there's patent-infringing software in Ubuntu, which would surprise me given their stance on patented codecs, or they've found a non-infringing method to drawing good looking anti-aliased fonts.
Having read the shield law a couple of weeks ago, it appeared that California's shield law would *not* have covered Think Secret unless the judge decided to extend its coverage as it specifically names TV, Radio, and periodical print journalists.
I never was able to determine exactly how it'd apply to this case, but again, IANAL.
I think the difference here is from what you've described, you're clearly with a crappy employer, whereas from the description the submitter provided it sounds like he was in an other was good job, but left because he didn't like MS' development tools.
While that may be a good long term reason to leave a job, it's a poor reason to leave a job without a new one already lined up.
You know, I've got to completely agree with this. There are good reasons for quitting a job abruptly on moral grounds, but I wouldn't consider this one of them.
And the honest to god fact is that if you take an objective look at it, C# is actually a great little language, with the only major drawback, in my eyes, being Microsoft's level of control over it. This is why I consider the Mono project a distinctly Good Thing(TM). Companies *will* move to C# if it fits their needs, and if it can be prevented from becoming another way for MS to leverage their monopoly, all the better.
That said, leaving the job you had without something else in line because you don't like their tool of choice is incredibly stupid. Especially if your reasoning really is because you don't like using Microsoft tools. Personally, I would have stuck it out, seen how I ended up liking the tools in actual production use, and then based my decision off actual experience and not 'MS sucks' preconceived notions. Because while it may not be cool to say it on Slashdot, Microsoft's development tools really are some of the best out there, shortcomings of their other products aside.
If after all that, you'd decided you were unhappy, start looking for something else. But just leaving without having something else lined up is rather foolish.
Personally, Y!M leaves me feeling totally underwhelmed. Where AIM has things like file transfer and DirectIM down pat, Y!M crashes about every other time I try to send somebody a file, particularly if the other person is firewalled. And that's the Windows client, which is actually the most solid. The Linux client, as noted by another poster is terrible, and really, the Mac OS X client (as I've discovered while borrowing a friend's PowerBook) is actually somewhat worse.
And while it suffers stability issues, the Y!M team seems to be falling victim to serious feature creep, choosing to add in new things that 'sort of' work, while functionality that should be a core consideration has remained in a horrible state for at least the past year.
It really annoys me because Y!M has the potential to be a decent service.It covers a midground somewhere between the elegant simplicity of AIM and the garish eyesore that is MSN, while giving you the option to turn off some of the cutesier features (something I've been unable to do with MSN).
So it's nice, but as it stands now, it'd take everyone I know mass migrating to it all at once to get me to reluctantly use it on a regular basis.
ICQ and AIM interoperate these days, and they've both been owned by AOL for quite some time, so you do have 'something to do' with them.
Personally, I like AIM because it's traditionally been the 'simplest' of the clients (though they've made some awful eyesore additions in the last couple of versions). A text box that I can talk to friends with, minus all the cutesy eye-sore crap found in MSN or Y!M. I used to use ICQ nearly exclusively back in the day, but pretty much all of my friends migrated away from it some time ago, so AIM is the only client I leave running on a regular basis anymore.
On the other hand, I work at a small shop, and of the (relatively few) notebooks we sell, they've been almost exclusively Acer, and I can't recall a single one ever coming back that wasn't a software problem that the customer had caused.
Not trying to negate your experience, just saying that my experience, involving well more than two units, has been that they're solid machines.
So yeah, read reviews.:)
Re:This gives them complete price coverage
on
Apple Updates iPod
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· Score: 1
Depending on how old it is, the GPU could've been the limiting factor in your experience. I say this as I'm typing on a 667MHz TiBook that I'm borrowing from a friend, with an original Radeon. I've had it about 2 weeks now, and other than a very occasional slow down in the text subsystem (which isn't accelerated, as I understand it) it's been fairly snappy for a machine as old as it is. You mentioned context menus in particular (which honestly, I've almost never used. Maybe for copy and paste a few times, but the interface really does work well with the single button + keyboard shortcuts), and ctrl-clicking here brings them up instantly - on a machine with less than half the CPU power of a Mini with a much slower GPU.
Remember, the UI in OS X can be 3D accelerated, offloading much of the work from the CPU to the GPU. Your friend's G4 just may have been old enough that it was still using a Rage 128. Given enough RAM, (512 is a bare minimum, IMO, 1GB'd be nice if you don't mind popping the case open to install it yourself) the Mini should be a perfectly snappy machine as a basic desktop. I've only managed to cause this one to stutter a few times in two weeks, and it's nearly 3 years old and half as powerful as the Mini.
I'm not disagreeing with that, merely that I fail to see how the acceptance of something that's directly contradictory to what's supposed to be the highest law of the land is a good thing.
One of my all-time favorite shows, Boomtown (which I've been rewatching on DVD thanks to Netflix) had just this happen in at least one episode. An officer reaches an hand through a car window, puts it to the back of a man's head and pulls the trigger. While the impact itself isn't shown, they do show blood splattering on the windshield. The show actually 'got away with' rather graphic violence quite a few times.
Great show, definitely envelope pushing in content and story terms, and it was originally broadcast on NBC, though granted, in the 9:30 or so timeslot.
Here's the thing though: When you're a student, the social stigma of the school's administration *IS* law for you. And while it may be against the rules for them to compell you to recite the pledge, it doesn't mean they won't try. I grew up with a school system that took quite a bit of legal pressure to finally realize this.
Given the fact that the "Under God" phrase is borderline unconstitutional in the first place, I fail to see how supporting its removal so school officials will stop bullying children is such a bad thing.
You've just hit exactly on why I agreed with the lawsuit. While you may technically be 'free to disagree', as long as the phrase is a part of the pledge, there's such a stigma around *not* saying it that it may as well be cumpulsory.
There are no built in Atheros drivers, but a company named OrangeWare makes 3rd party drivers that they sell for $15. It sucks to have to drop the extra cash, but just letting you know in case you've already got money invested in hardware.:)
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At our shop we use nothing but Samsung and Seagate drives, and in my experience, the Samsungs are almost always quieter. The Seagates are certainly near-silent in comparison to Maxtors, or worse still, WD, but there's still some occassional seek noise.
My system at home has two 160GB Samsung drives in it (One PATA, one SATA and about a year and a half newer) and I can't remember *ever* hearing HD noise out of it. I'm using an Antec SLK-3700BQE case, and by far the biggest noise out of the system is my 60mm AMD retail box fan, which I'm looking at replacing with a lower RPM 80mm.
Working in a small PC repair shop, I feel a need to respond to this. We use BartPE simply because we need the spyware scanning tools in our work, but a BootCD certainly isn't a 'best' solution for data recovery.
In fact, every time we need to do any form of serious data recovery, it means I have to pull out our external USB HD anyway. If I can simply boot off the external drive in the first place, have the system run faster since it's working off a HD instead of a CD-ROM, and get my work done, all the better.
Don't get me wrong, both BartPE and Knoppix have been invaluable tools for me, but since I own a 3G iPod anyway, I'll definitely be looking into this.
Honestly, at this point, I'm banking more on a dual-core G4 in the PB than a G5. The main limiting factor, however, would be the FSB would need a serious boost in order to make it practical, but it'd seem to be a good boost for the Powerbook until the thermal issues with the G5 can be sorted out.
Apple may only control 2% of the market, but don't forget that a disproportionate amount of content creation gets done with that 2%. That's why this is news.
It could be related to your particular install. Personally, I've used Firefox on easily a dozen machines, and the only time it's been slow is with Ubuntu, and that was an IPv6 issue that was a bug in the distribution itself, not just Firefox.
I'm not saying you don't have a problem, I'm just saying, it's hard for a developer to fix a problem they can't see. I'm currently using a friend's Titanium Powerbook, and while Omniweb on the Mac is one of the best browsers on any platform in most regards (it's based on WebKit/KHTML), I find myself consistently falling back to Firefox because it's an order of magnitude faster. Asking my Mac-using friends, this seems to be fairly consistent across machines.
On the Windows side, the last time I gave Opera a try, it wasn't noticeably faster than Firefox. It sucks that you have issues, and I hope they eventually get resolved, but again, it's hard to fix something a developer can't duplicate on their system.
You just described what Mozilla either 1.5 or 1.6 was essentially supposed to be. Then the devs decided Firefox and Thunderbird weren't ready, and it got pushed back. I haven't kept up with whether there are still any plans to do so.
Quite simply, yes. On the other hand, I have 3 friends with Aluminum Powerbooks: one is a 1GHz, the other two are 1.5GHz. They constantly complain about the battery lifes being only about 2.5 hours.
I'm typing this on a 667 TiBook that belongs to one of them, and it gets about 4 hours on battery. But that's with an extended life 3rd party battery that *just* came out for a 3 year old machine.
On the other hand, I've yet to see a Centrino rated less than 4 hours, and they've all actually gotten it in real life. The iBooks tend to get a little better battery life, but I'd have a hard time considering an iBook a fair comparison to a full blown Centrino.
Have you made it out of high school? Because the fact is, the real world is big enough that things just don't work like that, sad as it may be.
The fact is, there are plenty of people out there who are unethical, immoral, whatever you want to call it, who will try to take advantage of you regardless of right or wrong. I wish it weren't the case, but you simply cannot rely on people's good will to 'do the right thing.'
Personally, I toy a bit with coding, but I've never written anything I'd consider substantial enough to release. That said, as a *user* I tend to prefer GPL'd software because it means that what was free to me (in both senses of the word) will remain so. In all honesty, I'd prefer that the authors of the software have at least some recourse in a case like this, which the terms of the GPL provides. The GPL is about ensuring that the *software* remains free, rather than relying on people's good will to do so.
If you really think GConf is evil you either A) Don't really understand GConf or B) Are completely clueless.
While I don't think GConf is necessarilly the best possible solution out there, it's certainly worlds better than the scattered mess we have now. There are few things that annoy me more than having to hunt down an app's config file and then figure out the syntax for that particular program.
How in the world organizing all these disparate config files into a sane, user-friendly front end is 'evil' is beyond me, unless you're just out for you mad hacker 'I don't need no stinkin' UIs' cred.
They rely too much on context, and I've run across more than one case of a misformatted text config file causing the parser to bork out. XML, on the other hand, removes much of the problems with context and position sensitivity you run into with pure text config files.
I do feel that XML allows for a file to bloat up rather badly, but compression on that sort of plain text file is so good these days that I don't really see any point in complaining about it.
Which, interestingly enough, is *EXACTLY* what the GConf framework so many people around here complain about is supposed to be. Well, except more sensible.
It's basically a front end to all the config files you'd have laying around anyway, and a standardized XML layout for them. The "registry-like" GConf app people complain about (which really isn't that bad if you use it) is simply one front end application for an entire framework.
It also has the huge plus of generally using rather name variable names and being completely human readable. I can usually find a setting, if it exists, fairly easily by working my way down the hierarchy.
Wow, could you fit any more FUD into a single post? First off the FreeBSD connection is in the userspace tools - as you mentioned, the kernel itself is based off Mach. As for not giving back, you couldn't be more wrong.
Is Darwin not giving back? You know, the entire underlying operating system, free and open source, given back to the community? Is open sourcing their entire ZeroConf implementation (aka Rendezvous/Bonjour) not giving back? What about all the improvements to KHTML they've given back? You know, the improvements Apple is donating back so fast that the KHTML literally doesn't have the manpower to merge them all back yet?
The fact is, Apple has been incredibly good about giving back improvements to Open Source that they've made to the community. Even with BSD licensed software where they technically don't have to give anything at all back if they don't want to, AFAIK they always have.
So while Apple certainly does some things I don't agree with, you need to seriously check your facts, and somebody needs to negate the insightful mod you've been given because you're anything but.
I'm not familiar enough with the low levels of it to give you any details, but I *can* tell you that on a 15" Titanium Powerbook that I'm currently borrowing from a friend to give Macs an honest try, that when running Ubuntu on it, the fonts looked essentially just as good as they did in OS X on the same machine. Even my friend who's a huge Mac zealot was impressed with how good it looked.
If anything right now, I've noticed that the text subsystem in OS X is by far the slowest part of the UI, and my understanding is that it's because it's the one part of the UI that isn't hardware accelerated.
At any, if you got to the options panel for anti-aliasing for both OS X and Gnome, you'll notice they both contain pretty much the same options and you get pretty much the same results. So evidently there's patent-infringing software in Ubuntu, which would surprise me given their stance on patented codecs, or they've found a non-infringing method to drawing good looking anti-aliased fonts.
Having read the shield law a couple of weeks ago, it appeared that California's shield law would *not* have covered Think Secret unless the judge decided to extend its coverage as it specifically names TV, Radio, and periodical print journalists.
I never was able to determine exactly how it'd apply to this case, but again, IANAL.
I think the difference here is from what you've described, you're clearly with a crappy employer, whereas from the description the submitter provided it sounds like he was in an other was good job, but left because he didn't like MS' development tools.
While that may be a good long term reason to leave a job, it's a poor reason to leave a job without a new one already lined up.
You know, I've got to completely agree with this. There are good reasons for quitting a job abruptly on moral grounds, but I wouldn't consider this one of them.
And the honest to god fact is that if you take an objective look at it, C# is actually a great little language, with the only major drawback, in my eyes, being Microsoft's level of control over it. This is why I consider the Mono project a distinctly Good Thing(TM). Companies *will* move to C# if it fits their needs, and if it can be prevented from becoming another way for MS to leverage their monopoly, all the better.
That said, leaving the job you had without something else in line because you don't like their tool of choice is incredibly stupid. Especially if your reasoning really is because you don't like using Microsoft tools. Personally, I would have stuck it out, seen how I ended up liking the tools in actual production use, and then based my decision off actual experience and not 'MS sucks' preconceived notions. Because while it may not be cool to say it on Slashdot, Microsoft's development tools really are some of the best out there, shortcomings of their other products aside.
If after all that, you'd decided you were unhappy, start looking for something else. But just leaving without having something else lined up is rather foolish.
Personally, Y!M leaves me feeling totally underwhelmed. Where AIM has things like file transfer and DirectIM down pat, Y!M crashes about every other time I try to send somebody a file, particularly if the other person is firewalled. And that's the Windows client, which is actually the most solid. The Linux client, as noted by another poster is terrible, and really, the Mac OS X client (as I've discovered while borrowing a friend's PowerBook) is actually somewhat worse.
And while it suffers stability issues, the Y!M team seems to be falling victim to serious feature creep, choosing to add in new things that 'sort of' work, while functionality that should be a core consideration has remained in a horrible state for at least the past year.
It really annoys me because Y!M has the potential to be a decent service.It covers a midground somewhere between the elegant simplicity of AIM and the garish eyesore that is MSN, while giving you the option to turn off some of the cutesier features (something I've been unable to do with MSN).
So it's nice, but as it stands now, it'd take everyone I know mass migrating to it all at once to get me to reluctantly use it on a regular basis.
ICQ and AIM interoperate these days, and they've both been owned by AOL for quite some time, so you do have 'something to do' with them.
Personally, I like AIM because it's traditionally been the 'simplest' of the clients (though they've made some awful eyesore additions in the last couple of versions). A text box that I can talk to friends with, minus all the cutesy eye-sore crap found in MSN or Y!M. I used to use ICQ nearly exclusively back in the day, but pretty much all of my friends migrated away from it some time ago, so AIM is the only client I leave running on a regular basis anymore.
On the other hand, I work at a small shop, and of the (relatively few) notebooks we sell, they've been almost exclusively Acer, and I can't recall a single one ever coming back that wasn't a software problem that the customer had caused.
:)
Not trying to negate your experience, just saying that my experience, involving well more than two units, has been that they're solid machines.
So yeah, read reviews.
Depending on how old it is, the GPU could've been the limiting factor in your experience. I say this as I'm typing on a 667MHz TiBook that I'm borrowing from a friend, with an original Radeon. I've had it about 2 weeks now, and other than a very occasional slow down in the text subsystem (which isn't accelerated, as I understand it) it's been fairly snappy for a machine as old as it is. You mentioned context menus in particular (which honestly, I've almost never used. Maybe for copy and paste a few times, but the interface really does work well with the single button + keyboard shortcuts), and ctrl-clicking here brings them up instantly - on a machine with less than half the CPU power of a Mini with a much slower GPU.
Remember, the UI in OS X can be 3D accelerated, offloading much of the work from the CPU to the GPU. Your friend's G4 just may have been old enough that it was still using a Rage 128. Given enough RAM, (512 is a bare minimum, IMO, 1GB'd be nice if you don't mind popping the case open to install it yourself) the Mini should be a perfectly snappy machine as a basic desktop. I've only managed to cause this one to stutter a few times in two weeks, and it's nearly 3 years old and half as powerful as the Mini.
I'm not disagreeing with that, merely that I fail to see how the acceptance of something that's directly contradictory to what's supposed to be the highest law of the land is a good thing.
One of my all-time favorite shows, Boomtown (which I've been rewatching on DVD thanks to Netflix) had just this happen in at least one episode. An officer reaches an hand through a car window, puts it to the back of a man's head and pulls the trigger. While the impact itself isn't shown, they do show blood splattering on the windshield. The show actually 'got away with' rather graphic violence quite a few times.
Great show, definitely envelope pushing in content and story terms, and it was originally broadcast on NBC, though granted, in the 9:30 or so timeslot.
Here's the thing though: When you're a student, the social stigma of the school's administration *IS* law for you. And while it may be against the rules for them to compell you to recite the pledge, it doesn't mean they won't try. I grew up with a school system that took quite a bit of legal pressure to finally realize this.
Given the fact that the "Under God" phrase is borderline unconstitutional in the first place, I fail to see how supporting its removal so school officials will stop bullying children is such a bad thing.
You've just hit exactly on why I agreed with the lawsuit. While you may technically be 'free to disagree', as long as the phrase is a part of the pledge, there's such a stigma around *not* saying it that it may as well be cumpulsory.
There are no built in Atheros drivers, but a company named OrangeWare makes 3rd party drivers that they sell for $15. It sucks to have to drop the extra cash, but just letting you know in case you've already got money invested in hardware. :)