How to buy hardware (this has been like that since the beginning of personal computing):
1. See what software you need to run, what problems you want to work with
2. See what hardware/OS setup allows you to do that
3. Get the best performance for the best conditions that you can get
I want to do statistics, work on images, run public domain or commercial software such as LaTeX or Gimp, and so obviously I am very happy with my Windows Vista Netbook that allows me to use compatible software.
If all I want to do is consume pre-packaged goods and just use Apple's software store than I am OK getting an iPod, iPhone, iPad. Nothing wrong with that. But if at step 1 I list other software, why even bother with Apple? Check what other platforms offer and get something else. If there are people that are happy buying iPads, there is obviously a market for these.
Besides, all you wave when jailbreaking these devices is the Apple warranty. After the device has been jailbroken / jailgebraked, you are relatively free to install other software. So purely technically speaking you are not at all bound or tied to the Apple store. You can do with the hardware whatever you see fit. I remember when Apple Powerbook G4s had a laughable wireless signal reception and so first thing to make these halfways useful was to swap the antenna - so, take it apart, change antenna, reassemble. That did not mean that Apple stopped me from having fun with wireless LAN - they just did not feel they had to be responsible for me making their computer at least halfways useful. If you study these issues before jumping into such a purchase you'll not be perplexed.
TexMaker is equally useful. You can run it on Mac, Windows or Linux - but it runs fastest on Linux.
Other than that, I am perfectly happy with normal text editors for input. Word 2007 is alright, but Notepad, Kate, gedit, pico / nano, Google Notebook, gmail, or any other of these will do. No need to go out and specifically buy another product for something that comes preinstalled on Linux or Windows.
We use FTP a lot. We also transfer large amounts of files using FTP. Not only Mac's terminal version of their FTP client, but also, the built-in Apple Macintosh OS X FTP solution appeared to cause Mac "blue screen" crashes if the amount of files we tried to transfer was sufficiently large. This has been a problem with a range of Mac FTP clients, Finder, terminal, or using Mac OS X as FTP server. I found that Mac OS X recently wrecked some harddisk content (10.5, so I went back to 10.4) but also, some cartridge content (Iomega REV 35, 10.4.11). OS X Finder seems to be crashing and restarting itself rather often. So I believe it is probably better to leave Apple to it, and re-analyse their products in maybe 6 to 12 months. One can probably achieve some stability on Macs, but these days it is a fight.
We saw this coming and have started to move stuff over to Linux and Windows since about 3 years now, and nowadays, the only machines that give us permanent troubles are Macs. I am not saying it is easy, or time saving, to set up stable Windows or Linux systems - but once these are set up, you can usually start working. We cannot justify buying new Macs due to their limited and expensive hardware, rather unreliable OS and very limited option to sufficiently run relevant software, but we still love the few Macs remaining on which we nowadays still run iTunes, or maybe Aperture. X11 based software runs much faster and far more proficiently on Linux anyway than on Mac and a lot of very useful commercial software is available for Windows.
So, in the meantime, I am not sure whether this should be called "Is Apple Killing Apple on the Desktop?".
Of course, Vista is non-standard software; however, what is the *point* of this? Manufacturers still telling their customers it'd be all plug and play?
It was always a good idea to run a router/firewall locally that allows for static IPs in order to avoid the DHCP mess in mixed / Windows environments. There is always some printer, or Windows machine, that can not deal with regular DHCP. There is no plug and play, but beyond that unfounded assumption, there is a lot left to explore.
If it is possible to even STAY in the market by wilfully switching on or off cell phone functions, it means one thing and one thing alone: Cell phones nowadays have no real killer application. There is no clear benefit on one over another phone. Were there a clear benefit, it would not be optional to switch it off. For example, no one would even remotely dream of stripping a cell phone of its telephone functionality. Or a car of its steering wheel. So basically this is showing them up as somewhat lost, somewhat clueless.
So, what do you really want your cell phone to do? That is the question to ask. And the answer will easily tell you what phone to get.
I do not require any web browsing functionality, and GPS is also no requirement. I do need the occasional free board game for short waits. Otherwise I am fine with the lower end of the current cell phone models, and I enjoy them for what they are: very affordable, lightweight, and no object for battles between phone companies.
The SE/30 featured an shielding cardboard that was coated with metal on the bottom; the motherboards pins would at time poke through, and if the machine was sitting vertically for a while, suddenly it could go - blam - and stop working and go into some type of hangup or crash. For two models, I could repeatedly get them going by shaking the machines upside down, but neither Apple, nor Apple dealers, acknowledged the issue. It may be that having parts installed - and having people disassemble and reassemble parts of the Mac - may have played a role.
All of the compact Macs featured floppy disk drives that, over a working period over more than 6 hours, would reliably and predictably cause floppy disk errors. So I'd start using a new OS floppy after 5 hours, and things would be o.k., or not do it and consistently get crashes from 7 hours on upwards. They had built in a bright CRT, and obviously, shielding was some issue there. Nevertheless, this was an obvious design flaw.
Or the iPod mini. The iPod mini featured some weird shielding problem whereas crackling noise would occur. It would disappear as soon as the components that are stuffed together (battery, main board, micro disk) were pulled from each other - then, no crackling noise would occur even when mechanically straining the 3.5mm jack. Another design problem where capacitor- and shielding-related issues determined the outcome.
Or, take the Powerbook G4 Aluminium "Narcolepsy" model Apple built and sold! A design flaw classic. Not admitted by Apple, ever. I guess they switched to Intel partly because there were so MANY of these sold, that switching to Intel may have been the only way to give the Powerbook G4 owners a good reason to buy a new Apple laptop rather than attempting to force Apple to fix their old one. Maybe one day, we will hear the insider story of that botched up piece of hardware?
Also, there were a number of Powermac G5 computers that all had severe logic board problems that I laid hands on - two of them DOA (Dead On Arrival), and on another one I just got it repaired for the cheap sum of around 800 dollars.
So, I think if anything is newsworthy it'd be publishing that Apple actually managed to assemble some parts without design problem. That'd be what Slashdot may want to focus on, not that Apple "yet again" was shown to have screwed up something we all knew they couldn't get right to begin with.
Anyone believe that they can get the iPhone right, at all?
My current RSS feed collection shows a lot of Vista related garbage. Get over it! Microsoft came out with another Windows version. That's it. End of story. Just because it's shiny doesn't mean you got to drool all over the planet because of that!
Estimated OS upgrade dates to actually look forward to:
I am also using LaTeX and working with software to calculate results, and after using Macintoshes since 1985 or so, then OS X when it came out, mostly for desktop publishing and some visualisation and statistics software, I started to switch to both Windows and Linux in the recent years.
First of all, any "relevant" software on the Mac invariably runs only under X11, or is cross-platform; really, any X11 stuff is best used under Linux (much wider choice, easier installation, sturdier environment). Windows is a industry norm that we must tolerate, so there is no way of not running it even though you may wish to avoid it. Also Windows offers far too many good specific applications in order to ignore it.
Seeing as for scientific math work, OS X is nice to have (but by far not a must), but good and cheap hardware and robust 64-bit are very good options (ever tried working on your 5 GB dataset on a Mac?), Linux is by far the best option today; if anything, Windows can run under VM Ware, on a cheap PC pizza box, or as dual boot. My preference is having Windows somewhere on a small PC - more convenient and accessible than dual boot or VM Ware.
So, stop being a newbie and::
1 - first set up regular and frequent backups. Have each machine run dual harddisks that you mirror once every day, every two days or every week (depending on how much stuff you get done). Do that first, it's really important. You see why in a second.
After you did that,
2 - make sure you have more than one computer for the same job. This gives you redundancy. No computer - as you will find out eventually - will be available when you truly need it, so redundancy is required. Components INVARIABLY fail. If anything is a constant, hardware and software failure is. With regular data backup (forgot 1 already?), you will have no problems switching over to another machine once there is a slight problem on a particular machine. If your budget is X, you will buy a machine for 0.4 X, another for 0.3 X, for each one get more RAM than fast CPU speed, but read the benchmark reports for your specific applications really well. Or even better try to run your own benchmarks (floating point array math may be faster on AMD 64 bit processors than on Intels), and spend the remaining 0.3 X on backup solutions. That won't get you the fastest or latest machine but a pro setup that'll keep you trucking, and you'll be more than ready for the next step.
After you did that:
3 - The best Linux for beginners is the one that works out of the box. Since that is dependent on the type of hardware you have and since there is no way of telling ahead, there is NO way of telling which distro to get. It means that you have to try out - live CDs, or just full-on installation cycles (the latter is better). If I was you, I'd get the latest Fedora, the latest Suse and the latest Ubuntu and start testing them systematically. Remember: after step 1 you can not lose data, and after step 2 you have another machine to run mission critical stuff and check Google for Linux problems. You should take your time trying to get the best Linux system setup for your machine, but also try to find out conditions that may make it fail. Document what you did, so you will know what to do or not do later. With recent versions, the Linux distributions that I mentioned seem to be really easy and straightforward to set up. I would not trust a system setup that I had no chance of giving full load tests, tweak tests, for about a week or so, and that I did not have a chance to re-install for at least two or three times over, with different options, some may be risky.
You may only have the capacity to really evaluate Linux if you have a separate machine to test it and install it on - which is required to get it to run real sturdy, and that requires you being proficient. Dual boot is not bad, if you don't require lots of harddisk space; but being able to spend longer time on a learning curve helps you getting the hang of things rather
Running real benchmarks for real IDL code (ittvis.com) may confirm my averaged and tested and retested results that Intels are indeed slower than AMD for floating point, multi-core (parallel) array operations (some people use these in scientific computing). So whatever else this "Intel versus AMD" assumption is, I guess, some people *have the potential to be* woefully uninformed. You go, you choose, and you set up the belief-system you choose to get lost in:-)
You need a killer app to drive the market. Sexual content drove the internet; digital music drove the iPod; Macintosh Operating System, currently in the version of OS X, drives Apple Macintosh, and now the question is, what drives phones?
Clever and intelligent interfaces are extremely important. No phone will work with music, unless it has Apple's easy iPod control wheel/buttons and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack; and no phone has that so far. The expensive thing is to come up with the research necessary to integrate all that into something that really works.
You can talk about 'possible to use' all day long. As long as the design of the device does not really suggest you to use it, you can forget about any iTunes phone - you'll still turn up the car stereo: push the button and turn. That's what I want. Push the button. Then turn.
what took them so long? and who's next?
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 1
mensa is not about defining, or testing, real intelligence. that should be obvious to any normally intelligent being, and most posts in this discussion reflect that. if you believe that, do you also believe other advertising?
mensans bank on the illusion of creating an iq-society that, allegedly, contains the "top 2%" of the society. one real purpose is to run scams of all sorts. logically, you will also meet people there that have an interest in some exploitative aspects - and if that is what you expect, you will not be disappointed. "now that we are so intelligent and now that we can admit how intelligent we really are, we should not have to use these fingers and injure them while.. ouch.. working".
mensa - as was allegedly published in a controversial article in some local mensa newsletter (was it los angeles?) - has one very serious focus on the "exploitation of the lower 98%".
with regard to technology, many mensans themselves fall into two broad categories: the ones that run latest technology, run their own meta search scripts, and use google, slashdot, citeseer et cetera to their advantage - and the ones that are not interested in any technology unless their grandkid runs it for them. none of them are in any way interesting for microsoft to invest in.
mensans by and large are probably not a really bright lot. they're not slow, admitted - but it took them until 2005 in order to get that search engine scam in place, and that's rather late. but they expect a lot, and they make sure they can run exploits. that's what you are looking for when you look at mensans.
i don't know many people who can get paid for simply putting a search engine on some web site. that's the true spirit of exploiting the lower 98. maybe they will have a little virtual oil lamp on their website that is sponsored by halliburton? and maybe they will support president bush, schwarzenegger and the republicans with paid advertising? don't be upset about that either - it's not about intelligence - it's about getting paid for it.
Mac OS X saves a lot of time through it's user interface once you are used to it. Far more time than OS 9 - through all of it's logic - or Windows offer.
The option of having many Finder windows - to the same location or different locations - and the option of navigating entirely within 1 window instead of having to navigate using the "whole Finder desktop" allows for time to be saved. I can focus on one window, use the keyboard extensively, and get to where I want fast.
The dock allows for fast navigation. I can get an idea of the identity of any minimized window without clicking - which can not be said for Windows, and definitely not for OS 9.
The Aqua windows theme is one of the most ergonomical themes I have encountered in a long while and despite ShapeShifter, I go back to it all the time. Sure, some aspects of CDE would be cool to have - front window with unique color, for example - but still: Close, minimize, resize, scroll: I can click on the correct window button on OS X within a much smaller amount of blink in the eyes than OS 9 or Windows; I always mix up the middle windows button because I forget whether a window is minimized or maximized. If you time how fast you get to the scrollbar - you'll see it first in Aqua. If you have to search for your buttons anyway because you just happen to take your time, you will not notice the difference that much.
Unix commands save a lot of time - and they are for the computer user, not for the newbie. If you use a command to deal with a lot of files, if you do networking - any of these "picture" computers, OS 9 or Windows - are not as sleek as Mac OS X technically is. You are done faster on OS X setting yourself up as client for a Solaris or AIX workstation than you are using Windows or OS 9.
Being able to run Unix software under X11 is also a time saver - no need to use another machine saves a lot of time sometimes.
Typical Unix features such as the renice command (set process priorities) allows the user to have full speed happening while operating a user interface, and background calculations to run at a full speed while the user reads, thinks, or just does not fully interact with the computer. This combination turns out to be a very important time saver: I do not have to wait for the machine, but the machine can resume full speed at the second I stop using the CPU.
Memory management lets you forget fiddling with manual settings of applications such as OS 9. You save time because OS X lets you set all that.
Web applications are somewhat faster than anything else. Instead of having to run special software for server solutions, OS X allows you to easily set up Apache, PHP and MySQL under the hood of a fully graphical desktop OS so you can run your groupware reliably and fast. That was not at all the case with OS 9.
Some dedicated applications simply remove clutter. The Mail application, the Adress Book application, iCal, and others are so simple to use that this feature alone saves a lot of time.
Ever hooked up a Powerbook to a beamer or external display? With the pull-down-monitor menu, this is an easy - and therefore, fast - task. All that is needed is to use that menu - and the external display or beamer will be recognised within seconds. An extremely important time saver for presentations.
I'd wish for more: User and File System management as AIX has - fully 64-bit address space - simple add-on-control panel for processor sharing just as in AIX or VMS. Such features may follow.
All in all, OS X is much more of an elegant time saver than many people can admit, as many features are sleek and not intrusive.
But already, many OS X features are raw time savers for experienced computer users.
Apple *must* release a full 64-bit OS so customers can take advantage of the G5's main selling point (the 64-bit processor/s), and the sooner, the better. They should have released that OS including a 64-bit-supporting X11, XCode and some multi-platform-grid-software (such as Pooch or XGrid) in autumn 2003 and their only option is to catch up as soon as possible. That type of technology will be surely at the center of the Tiger update.
As long as you have your application package to install, it doesn't matter on what OS you install it; Windows XP, Linux or Mac OS X. Most installations require the user to follow 'some installation steps' anyway, and the more interesting options usually take a bit longer.
You will end up with more than one platform on your desk anyway, so you can take advantage of some more options than just being locked on one OS - remember, an OS is not a belief system, it's a means to an end. While Windows XP may not be as stable as Mac OS X, the choice of specialized software products is excellent and makes up for a lot; and while Linux may not be as simple to set up, it's free, it runs on cheap hardware and for the most part it is very stable. OS X is a very stable GUI for a powerful system and has a lot of recent, very hip applications and a very useful file browser (Finder). Even on OS X, you will also spend some more time installing your X11-packages, sometimes manually, sometimes using Fink, at which point you're doing the same you'd be doing on Linux. I don't know whether it's a big difference whether you run Mozilla on Windows, Linux or Mac.
If Apple had a 64-bit OS now, the G5 could easily be on the road to becoming the 'iPod mini' of the entry-level workstations. If they wait for too long until the unleash the full power of the G5, we will eventually have switched to some Hewlett Packard RISC workstations - and I am sure that Sun will drop prices on their workstations a bit, too.
So: I believe that Tiger will be fully 64-bit. If it is not, it's simply bad business.
Slashdot Mirror
How to buy hardware (this has been like that since the beginning of personal computing): 1. See what software you need to run, what problems you want to work with 2. See what hardware/OS setup allows you to do that 3. Get the best performance for the best conditions that you can get I want to do statistics, work on images, run public domain or commercial software such as LaTeX or Gimp, and so obviously I am very happy with my Windows Vista Netbook that allows me to use compatible software. If all I want to do is consume pre-packaged goods and just use Apple's software store than I am OK getting an iPod, iPhone, iPad. Nothing wrong with that. But if at step 1 I list other software, why even bother with Apple? Check what other platforms offer and get something else. If there are people that are happy buying iPads, there is obviously a market for these. Besides, all you wave when jailbreaking these devices is the Apple warranty. After the device has been jailbroken / jailgebraked, you are relatively free to install other software. So purely technically speaking you are not at all bound or tied to the Apple store. You can do with the hardware whatever you see fit. I remember when Apple Powerbook G4s had a laughable wireless signal reception and so first thing to make these halfways useful was to swap the antenna - so, take it apart, change antenna, reassemble. That did not mean that Apple stopped me from having fun with wireless LAN - they just did not feel they had to be responsible for me making their computer at least halfways useful. If you study these issues before jumping into such a purchase you'll not be perplexed.
TexMaker is equally useful. You can run it on Mac, Windows or Linux - but it runs fastest on Linux.
Other than that, I am perfectly happy with normal text editors for input. Word 2007 is alright, but Notepad, Kate, gedit, pico / nano, Google Notebook, gmail, or any other of these will do. No need to go out and specifically buy another product for something that comes preinstalled on Linux or Windows.
We use FTP a lot. We also transfer large amounts of files using FTP. Not only Mac's terminal version of their FTP client, but also, the built-in Apple Macintosh OS X FTP solution appeared to cause Mac "blue screen" crashes if the amount of files we tried to transfer was sufficiently large. This has been a problem with a range of Mac FTP clients, Finder, terminal, or using Mac OS X as FTP server. I found that Mac OS X recently wrecked some harddisk content (10.5, so I went back to 10.4) but also, some cartridge content (Iomega REV 35, 10.4.11). OS X Finder seems to be crashing and restarting itself rather often. So I believe it is probably better to leave Apple to it, and re-analyse their products in maybe 6 to 12 months. One can probably achieve some stability on Macs, but these days it is a fight.
We saw this coming and have started to move stuff over to Linux and Windows since about 3 years now, and nowadays, the only machines that give us permanent troubles are Macs. I am not saying it is easy, or time saving, to set up stable Windows or Linux systems - but once these are set up, you can usually start working. We cannot justify buying new Macs due to their limited and expensive hardware, rather unreliable OS and very limited option to sufficiently run relevant software, but we still love the few Macs remaining on which we nowadays still run iTunes, or maybe Aperture. X11 based software runs much faster and far more proficiently on Linux anyway than on Mac and a lot of very useful commercial software is available for Windows.
So, in the meantime, I am not sure whether this should be called "Is Apple Killing Apple on the Desktop?".
Of course, Vista is non-standard software; however, what is the *point* of this? Manufacturers still telling their customers it'd be all plug and play? It was always a good idea to run a router/firewall locally that allows for static IPs in order to avoid the DHCP mess in mixed / Windows environments. There is always some printer, or Windows machine, that can not deal with regular DHCP. There is no plug and play, but beyond that unfounded assumption, there is a lot left to explore.
If it is possible to even STAY in the market by wilfully switching on or off cell phone functions, it means one thing and one thing alone: Cell phones nowadays have no real killer application. There is no clear benefit on one over another phone. Were there a clear benefit, it would not be optional to switch it off. For example, no one would even remotely dream of stripping a cell phone of its telephone functionality. Or a car of its steering wheel. So basically this is showing them up as somewhat lost, somewhat clueless.
So, what do you really want your cell phone to do? That is the question to ask. And the answer will easily tell you what phone to get.
I do not require any web browsing functionality, and GPS is also no requirement. I do need the occasional free board game for short waits. Otherwise I am fine with the lower end of the current cell phone models, and I enjoy them for what they are: very affordable, lightweight, and no object for battles between phone companies.
We love Apple for their design flaws, don't we!!
The SE/30 featured an shielding cardboard that was coated with metal on the bottom; the motherboards pins would at time poke through, and if the machine was sitting vertically for a while, suddenly it could go - blam - and stop working and go into some type of hangup or crash. For two models, I could repeatedly get them going by shaking the machines upside down, but neither Apple, nor Apple dealers, acknowledged the issue. It may be that having parts installed - and having people disassemble and reassemble parts of the Mac - may have played a role.
All of the compact Macs featured floppy disk drives that, over a working period over more than 6 hours, would reliably and predictably cause floppy disk errors. So I'd start using a new OS floppy after 5 hours, and things would be o.k., or not do it and consistently get crashes from 7 hours on upwards. They had built in a bright CRT, and obviously, shielding was some issue there. Nevertheless, this was an obvious design flaw.
Or the iPod mini. The iPod mini featured some weird shielding problem whereas crackling noise would occur. It would disappear as soon as the components that are stuffed together (battery, main board, micro disk) were pulled from each other - then, no crackling noise would occur even when mechanically straining the 3.5mm jack. Another design problem where capacitor- and shielding-related issues determined the outcome.
Or, take the Powerbook G4 Aluminium "Narcolepsy" model Apple built and sold! A design flaw classic. Not admitted by Apple, ever. I guess they switched to Intel partly because there were so MANY of these sold, that switching to Intel may have been the only way to give the Powerbook G4 owners a good reason to buy a new Apple laptop rather than attempting to force Apple to fix their old one. Maybe one day, we will hear the insider story of that botched up piece of hardware?
Also, there were a number of Powermac G5 computers that all had severe logic board problems that I laid hands on - two of them DOA (Dead On Arrival), and on another one I just got it repaired for the cheap sum of around 800 dollars.
So, I think if anything is newsworthy it'd be publishing that Apple actually managed to assemble some parts without design problem. That'd be what Slashdot may want to focus on, not that Apple "yet again" was shown to have screwed up something we all knew they couldn't get right to begin with.
Anyone believe that they can get the iPhone right, at all?
My current RSS feed collection shows a lot of Vista related garbage. Get over it! Microsoft came out with another Windows version. That's it. End of story. Just because it's shiny doesn't mean you got to drool all over the planet because of that!
Estimated OS upgrade dates to actually look forward to:
Mac OS X 10.5: April 2007?
Suse Linux 10.3: September 2007?
Ubuntu Linux Feisty Fawn: April 2007?
Fedora 7: April 2007?
.... stop being a newbie.
I am also using LaTeX and working with software to calculate results, and after using Macintoshes since 1985 or so, then OS X when it came out, mostly for desktop publishing and some visualisation and statistics software, I started to switch to both Windows and Linux in the recent years.
First of all, any "relevant" software on the Mac invariably runs only under X11, or is cross-platform; really, any X11 stuff is best used under Linux (much wider choice, easier installation, sturdier environment). Windows is a industry norm that we must tolerate, so there is no way of not running it even though you may wish to avoid it. Also Windows offers far too many good specific applications in order to ignore it.
Seeing as for scientific math work, OS X is nice to have (but by far not a must), but good and cheap hardware and robust 64-bit are very good options (ever tried working on your 5 GB dataset on a Mac?), Linux is by far the best option today; if anything, Windows can run under VM Ware, on a cheap PC pizza box, or as dual boot. My preference is having Windows somewhere on a small PC - more convenient and accessible than dual boot or VM Ware.
So, stop being a newbie and::
1 - first set up regular and frequent backups. Have each machine run dual harddisks that you mirror once every day, every two days or every week (depending on how much stuff you get done). Do that first, it's really important. You see why in a second.
After you did that,
2 - make sure you have more than one computer for the same job. This gives you redundancy. No computer - as you will find out eventually - will be available when you truly need it, so redundancy is required. Components INVARIABLY fail. If anything is a constant, hardware and software failure is. With regular data backup (forgot 1 already?), you will have no problems switching over to another machine once there is a slight problem on a particular machine. If your budget is X, you will buy a machine for 0.4 X, another for 0.3 X, for each one get more RAM than fast CPU speed, but read the benchmark reports for your specific applications really well. Or even better try to run your own benchmarks (floating point array math may be faster on AMD 64 bit processors than on Intels), and spend the remaining 0.3 X on backup solutions. That won't get you the fastest or latest machine but a pro setup that'll keep you trucking, and you'll be more than ready for the next step.
After you did that:
3 - The best Linux for beginners is the one that works out of the box. Since that is dependent on the type of hardware you have and since there is no way of telling ahead, there is NO way of telling which distro to get. It means that you have to try out - live CDs, or just full-on installation cycles (the latter is better). If I was you, I'd get the latest Fedora, the latest Suse and the latest Ubuntu and start testing them systematically. Remember: after step 1 you can not lose data, and after step 2 you have another machine to run mission critical stuff and check Google for Linux problems. You should take your time trying to get the best Linux system setup for your machine, but also try to find out conditions that may make it fail. Document what you did, so you will know what to do or not do later. With recent versions, the Linux distributions that I mentioned seem to be really easy and straightforward to set up. I would not trust a system setup that I had no chance of giving full load tests, tweak tests, for about a week or so, and that I did not have a chance to re-install for at least two or three times over, with different options, some may be risky.
You may only have the capacity to really evaluate Linux if you have a separate machine to test it and install it on - which is required to get it to run real sturdy, and that requires you being proficient. Dual boot is not bad, if you don't require lots of harddisk space; but being able to spend longer time on a learning curve helps you getting the hang of things rather
Running real benchmarks for real IDL code (ittvis.com) may confirm my averaged and tested and retested results that Intels are indeed slower than AMD for floating point, multi-core (parallel) array operations (some people use these in scientific computing). So whatever else this "Intel versus AMD" assumption is, I guess, some people *have the potential to be* woefully uninformed. You go, you choose, and you set up the belief-system you choose to get lost in :-)
You need a killer app to drive the market. Sexual content drove the internet; digital music drove the iPod; Macintosh Operating System, currently in the version of OS X, drives Apple Macintosh, and now the question is, what drives phones? Clever and intelligent interfaces are extremely important. No phone will work with music, unless it has Apple's easy iPod control wheel/buttons and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack; and no phone has that so far. The expensive thing is to come up with the research necessary to integrate all that into something that really works. You can talk about 'possible to use' all day long. As long as the design of the device does not really suggest you to use it, you can forget about any iTunes phone - you'll still turn up the car stereo: push the button and turn. That's what I want. Push the button. Then turn.
mensa is not about defining, or testing, real intelligence. that should be obvious to any normally intelligent being, and most posts in this discussion reflect that. if you believe that, do you also believe other advertising?
.. ouch .. working".
mensans bank on the illusion of creating an iq-society that, allegedly, contains the "top 2%" of the society. one real purpose is to run scams of all sorts. logically, you will also meet people there that have an interest in some exploitative aspects - and if that is what you expect, you will not be disappointed. "now that we are so intelligent and now that we can admit how intelligent we really are, we should not have to use these fingers and injure them while
mensa - as was allegedly published in a controversial article in some local mensa newsletter (was it los angeles?) - has one very serious focus on the "exploitation of the lower 98%".
with regard to technology, many mensans themselves fall into two broad categories: the ones that run latest technology, run their own meta search scripts, and use google, slashdot, citeseer et cetera to their advantage - and the ones that are not interested in any technology unless their grandkid runs it for them. none of them are in any way interesting for microsoft to invest in.
mensans by and large are probably not a really bright lot. they're not slow, admitted - but it took them until 2005 in order to get that search engine scam in place, and that's rather late. but they expect a lot, and they make sure they can run exploits. that's what you are looking for when you look at mensans.
i don't know many people who can get paid for simply putting a search engine on some web site. that's the true spirit of exploiting the lower 98. maybe they will have a little virtual oil lamp on their website that is sponsored by halliburton? and maybe they will support president bush, schwarzenegger and the republicans with paid advertising? don't be upset about that either - it's not about intelligence - it's about getting paid for it.
well done, mensa!
Mac OS X saves a lot of time through it's user interface once you are used to it. Far more time than OS 9 - through all of it's logic - or Windows offer.
The option of having many Finder windows - to the same location or different locations - and the option of navigating entirely within 1 window instead of having to navigate using the "whole Finder desktop" allows for time to be saved. I can focus on one window, use the keyboard extensively, and get to where I want fast.
The dock allows for fast navigation. I can get an idea of the identity of any minimized window without clicking - which can not be said for Windows, and definitely not for OS 9.
The Aqua windows theme is one of the most ergonomical themes I have encountered in a long while and despite ShapeShifter, I go back to it all the time. Sure, some aspects of CDE would be cool to have - front window with unique color, for example - but still: Close, minimize, resize, scroll: I can click on the correct window button on OS X within a much smaller amount of blink in the eyes than OS 9 or Windows; I always mix up the middle windows button because I forget whether a window is minimized or maximized. If you time how fast you get to the scrollbar - you'll see it first in Aqua. If you have to search for your buttons anyway because you just happen to take your time, you will not notice the difference that much.
Unix commands save a lot of time - and they are for the computer user, not for the newbie. If you use a command to deal with a lot of files, if you do networking - any of these "picture" computers, OS 9 or Windows - are not as sleek as Mac OS X technically is. You are done faster on OS X setting yourself up as client for a Solaris or AIX workstation than you are using Windows or OS 9.
Being able to run Unix software under X11 is also a time saver - no need to use another machine saves a lot of time sometimes.
Typical Unix features such as the renice command (set process priorities) allows the user to have full speed happening while operating a user interface, and background calculations to run at a full speed while the user reads, thinks, or just does not fully interact with the computer. This combination turns out to be a very important time saver: I do not have to wait for the machine, but the machine can resume full speed at the second I stop using the CPU.
Memory management lets you forget fiddling with manual settings of applications such as OS 9. You save time because OS X lets you set all that.
Web applications are somewhat faster than anything else. Instead of having to run special software for server solutions, OS X allows you to easily set up Apache, PHP and MySQL under the hood of a fully graphical desktop OS so you can run your groupware reliably and fast. That was not at all the case with OS 9.
Some dedicated applications simply remove clutter. The Mail application, the Adress Book application, iCal, and others are so simple to use that this feature alone saves a lot of time.
Ever hooked up a Powerbook to a beamer or external display? With the pull-down-monitor menu, this is an easy - and therefore, fast - task. All that is needed is to use that menu - and the external display or beamer will be recognised within seconds. An extremely important time saver for presentations.
I'd wish for more: User and File System management as AIX has - fully 64-bit address space - simple add-on-control panel for processor sharing just as in AIX or VMS. Such features may follow.
All in all, OS X is much more of an elegant time saver than many people can admit, as many features are sleek and not intrusive.
But already, many OS X features are raw time savers for experienced computer users.
Apple *must* release a full 64-bit OS so customers can take advantage of the G5's main selling point (the 64-bit processor/s), and the sooner, the better. They should have released that OS including a 64-bit-supporting X11, XCode and some multi-platform-grid-software (such as Pooch or XGrid) in autumn 2003 and their only option is to catch up as soon as possible. That type of technology will be surely at the center of the Tiger update.
As long as you have your application package to install, it doesn't matter on what OS you install it; Windows XP, Linux or Mac OS X. Most installations require the user to follow 'some installation steps' anyway, and the more interesting options usually take a bit longer.
You will end up with more than one platform on your desk anyway, so you can take advantage of some more options than just being locked on one OS - remember, an OS is not a belief system, it's a means to an end. While Windows XP may not be as stable as Mac OS X, the choice of specialized software products is excellent and makes up for a lot; and while Linux may not be as simple to set up, it's free, it runs on cheap hardware and for the most part it is very stable. OS X is a very stable GUI for a powerful system and has a lot of recent, very hip applications and a very useful file browser (Finder). Even on OS X, you will also spend some more time installing your X11-packages, sometimes manually, sometimes using Fink, at which point you're doing the same you'd be doing on Linux. I don't know whether it's a big difference whether you run Mozilla on Windows, Linux or Mac.
If Apple had a 64-bit OS now, the G5 could easily be on the road to becoming the 'iPod mini' of the entry-level workstations. If they wait for too long until the unleash the full power of the G5, we will eventually have switched to some Hewlett Packard RISC workstations - and I am sure that Sun will drop prices on their workstations a bit, too.
So: I believe that Tiger will be fully 64-bit. If it is not, it's simply bad business.
Wolf.