IIRC, the EMac was the cheapest thing apple ever had before the MacMini, and it was at least $700. I could defintly get a PC for less than that at the time. Same thing was defintly true for the Imac's as well.
Not to say that wasn't competitive pricing. The Emac was pretty usable. We had one for production graphics work, running Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, etc. and it ran quite well. But PC's are ALWAYS cheaper...thats just how it is. I don't think Apple would even _want_ to be as cheap as the PC's. Like i said, they are trying to show that they sell quality, and part of that actually is having higher prices.
I would love to have a Mac. The mini is just cheap enough that I might finally get one...but I can still build a more powerful pc for less...or get a used one for almost nothing. Used Macs tend to hold onto their value much, much better.
I have three old Sun Sparcstations that I use daily. One runs NetBSD 2.0, one runs Splack 10, and one runs Solaris 8.
I'll admit, I haven't found a use for Solaris yet, other than to play with something different. But the other two are a webserver and shellserver respectively. They perform admirably well under heavy load, and are incredibly compact.
In other words, there are plenty of uses for Sun hardware...especially the old stuff that can be had for next to nothing(i got all three of those boxes for free!). Your AMD64 system may seem "cheap", but it costs a hell of a lot more than an old Ultrasparc. If your only requirement is 64-bits, that Ultrasparc will meet that, and be remarkably stable.
Not to knock AMD64, they are nice chips, and relatively inexpensive for what they are capable of. Personally, I have had no need for those capabilities, or at least not one to justify upgrading to one from my old P3 server and AthXP workstation.
An old Sun can do everything you listed that you're using Gentoo and Ath64 to do. NetBSD in particular runs VERY well on those things. Gentoo even has a decent sparc port.
If you were meaning to refer only to Solaris itself, I'm afraid I have to agree. My experience so far hasn't been great. It was a pain to install, bloated, difficult to upgrade, and I still have yet to find a real good purpose for it. NetBSD is running Apache so well that I see no reason to switch.
The Sun hardware is great though! I highly reccomend looking up those old Ultrasparcs on ebay:)
maybe they can open up their servers so that other, more responsible people can run their own.
AIM has been plagued with accidental account deletions over the past several months. The official line is that while cleaning up old, unused accounts, they have deleted some good ones. But this issue has been ongoing for several months now.
Personally, i had AIM reset my password daily for two weeks, then suddenly cancel my account..for no reason whatsoever. More infuriating, is that there is no support contact information on aim.com, at all.
Do some googling and you'll find this is a widespread problem. There was even a/. story at one point.
If AOL doesn't get their act together, they are going to really lose some ground in an area they have traditonally dominated.
I got this PC laptop for $500 day after thanksgiving, and it exceeds my needs. If I decided to get a new desktop, I would spend no more than $500, and I would likely spend closer to $200 or $300.
Yes, I am defintly a bottom-of-the-barrel as-far-from-bleeding-edge-as-you-can-get customer...but the nthing, is, in the PC world, I can do this. Until the Mini came out, Mac had nothing whatsoever that even came CLOSE to those kinds of prices.
I don't blame them, its not their market, they are selling quality, not quantity. But if you want to talk hard prices, the cheapest PC is usually half the cost of the cheapest Mac...including the mini.
I'm aware of what CO is. It is _not_ WINE, it is a tweaked version of WINE, with a company standing behind it guaranteeing support of specific programs.
What i said was that MS is not obligated to support WINE, I didn't say a thing about them intentionally breaking things in their products.
My complaint is still valid: If MS Office does not work in WINE, you need to talk to WINE developers. If this is because MS has something illegal, thats between the WINE devs and MS.
Calling MS for support for MS Office in WINE makes as much sense as calling them for support for Corel WordPerfect in Windows. They didn't sell you WINE, they sold you Office, and you aren't following the manual.
Nobody supports you not following the goddamn instructions. If you are running WINE, you are on your own, and anyone involved in WINE will tell you as much.
IBM's interests are not simply in buying up SCO and making this go away. If they desired that, they would have simply settled out of court with SCO long ago.
This entire thing has made Linux questionable. IBM has invested a great deal of time and money into Linux as a business strategy. What they are trying to do with SCO is prove, in court, that Linux is 100% legitimate, and that there are absolutely no legal issues regarding any od the code contained within.
SCO is not important to them in the least, as a company. But this court case is. If they don't settle it once and for all in court, it sets a dangerous precedent for others to follow in SCO's footsteps.
What makes you think MS is _required_ to give you any updates whatsoever for any of their products? I don't recall reading that anywhere. And the fact that they no longer offer such for older versions of their products further supports this point. If they aren't required to support Windows 95, how are they required to support the latest MS Office under WINE?
Furthermore, that box for MS Office that you bought says explicticly on it that it requires windows, unless of course you bought the Mac version, which you guessed it, requires a Mac.
There is absolutely no legitimate reason I can think of that anyone can require them to support their product in any way, shape, or form on a system that does not meet the specific requirements.
Would you call them and complain because WindowsXP won't run on your 486? No, because the stated hardware requirements are right there on the box. So are the software ones.
And of course, I have a legal copy of MS Office 2000 that I use in Crossover Office. One of the advantages to buying Crossover is that they specifically state full support for certain products(such as MS Office 2000), and they are the ones I can register my complaints with if that software suddenly stops working with their product.
If there are problems with WINE itself, they are the ones you should be registering your complaints with. And as its a free and open-source product, your complaints are only going to go so far.
IBM representatives have repeatedly stated that they have no interest in owning any one distro.
among other things, they don't think anyone would actually use "IBM's Linux" because of image issues. They want to make money from support anyways, it works well to be distro-neutral.
I would think a Red Hat user would move to Mandrake or SuSE. Those are the other two major RPM-based distros, and they have plenty in common with Red Hat.
I've used SuSE, so I can speak first-hand for it being a pretty decent distro. Excellent hardware recogniation, easy installation, and GUI tools for everything. I would personally use it over Red Hat any day of the week. Of course I would use Debian, Slackware, or NetBSD over either in most situations, so take that with a grain of salt. After learning of the other things out there, I've never really liked Red Hat. It was a nice place to start however.
What else is there? Any other distro has the same '*insert package format here* hell' issues whenever you try to install something not maintained by the distro itself.
Personally I use Slackware...and like most people, did start out on Red Hat. Slackware is the only distro of all the ones i've tried where i've really been happy
As far as your complaint, a large portion of what I use in Slackware is not maintained by Slackware itself. it's a one-man distro, so there are obviously a lot of things he doesn't have time for. I've had no problems using 3rd party packages, or compiling things myself...which i do often.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/
free download. So even if somehow your copy is a 120-day trial, you can grab the current version for free at that URL.
I'd really like to know if it is conceivable that MS would actually offer a "Windows" window manager to run atop linux. No reason they couldn't, and I'd sure as hell buy it for the windows boxes I have to run at work.I'd really like to know if it is conceivable that MS would actually offer a "Windows" window manager to run atop linux. No reason they couldn't, and I'd sure as hell buy it for the windows boxes I have to run at work.
I've been confident for a long time that the minute Linux becomes a true threat to Microsoft on the desktop, they will do exactly this.
Technically Linux can never "win" that fight...MS can always turn around and put out their own version of Linux...and what do you know, MS Office happens to run ONLY on their version;)
Before people pipe up about the GPL...SuSE and Red Hat include propietary and closed software in their distributions. MS could as well.
MS has already demonstrated a willingness to work with Unix. Take a look at "Services for Unix", its full of GNU software, and is actually a pretty nice product. And free!
Of course if any of this ever happens, we may have "won", as Windows would be running on a more secure base. On the other hand, we'd probably start to see more worms targetting linux...
The linux system is just there so that the microctonroller can be interfaced with his network, and the internet, so that one can feed the cat through a browser.
overkill perhaps, but pretty useful IMHO while you're away on a trip.
I know a LOT of people in their twenties with DS's already.
People in their 20's and 30's now grew up playing Nintendo and Atari games as kids. Youngs adults are one of the fastest growing parts of the market. Why do you suppose companies like "Rock Star Games" are essentially targetting them?
Heck, one of the most popular games for the DS is that goofy dating sim. That is defintly not something for little kids.
In other words, there are a lot of people walking around with a Palm to organize, and a DS for games. If one device could do both, and still do each fairly well, it would sell.
perhaps theres a timer of some sort in the file? If a month goes buy without you going online and logging into their system, the file is no longer usable.
you sir, are making some really interesting use of your ipods!
i've been meaning to come up with a good method of ripping all of the CDs i currently own into mp3...but never got around to it.
I also have been meaning to create a data partition on my archos mp3 player...and never got around to it. storing OS's on there and using it as a rescue disk is DEFINTLY interesting.
I must admit, it seems like it was awfully easy to do all those things with mac+ipod. I am really starting to give more thought to replacing the Slackware laptop with a Powerbook next time around.
if i write a piece of software and it only runs on the Mac, people will either demand a port to Windows, or just choose not to use it. If there is enough demand, either I will be forced to make a port, or some other enterprising individual will create a windows program with similar functionality and be much more succesful with it.
if i write a piece of software that runs only on Windows, mac users will be annoyed, but make little difference as theres few of them. They'll either find ways of running it in emulation, or be forced to find themselves a Windows machine to run it on...both things they are quite used to.
...is why Apple, or someone hasn't sued them in some fashion over their commerical.
It states repeatedly that you can get MP3's to put on a Napster-supporting MP3 player.
From what I understand, their service and players are using WMA, with DRM of course.
MP3 != WMA. These are both very specific things. Had they just said "songs", or "music" it would not be an issue. They chose to say MP3 and I fail to see how thats not an outright lie. That oversight alone could be the nail in the coffin for them.
Phillips had similar issues with the RIAA labeling DRM-enabled CD's as official "Compact Discs." Phillips owns the rights to that name, and since the DRM broke the ability for those disks to play in many players, Phillips felt it was damaging their IP to claim they were CD's. They sued and won.
games are one of the things that are still weak in linux...but i rarely game, so it does not bug me.
linux is very strong as far as support for software development tools of any kind, server applications, even a good range of office productivity apps. I am able to find native programs to fit most of my needs.
I've even found plenty of native games to satisfy me, like tuxracer, defendguin, puzzlepirates. Found a lot more for$$$ games that surprised me, like SimCity3000, Civilization, Descent, Doom, America's Army, Neverwinter Nights, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. If I ever felt like getting into gaming, I would be busy for a long time with those alone.
As it is i occasionly play supertux and xbill, and thats about it;)
but the parent is right: if you are a serious gamer, stay with windows, at least for your games. keep a linux box for other things.
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Not to say that wasn't competitive pricing. The Emac was pretty usable. We had one for production graphics work, running Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, etc. and it ran quite well. But PC's are ALWAYS cheaper...thats just how it is. I don't think Apple would even _want_ to be as cheap as the PC's. Like i said, they are trying to show that they sell quality, and part of that actually is having higher prices.
I would love to have a Mac. The mini is just cheap enough that I might finally get one...but I can still build a more powerful pc for less...or get a used one for almost nothing. Used Macs tend to hold onto their value much, much better.
I'll admit, I haven't found a use for Solaris yet, other than to play with something different. But the other two are a webserver and shellserver respectively. They perform admirably well under heavy load, and are incredibly compact.
In other words, there are plenty of uses for Sun hardware...especially the old stuff that can be had for next to nothing(i got all three of those boxes for free!). Your AMD64 system may seem "cheap", but it costs a hell of a lot more than an old Ultrasparc. If your only requirement is 64-bits, that Ultrasparc will meet that, and be remarkably stable.
Not to knock AMD64, they are nice chips, and relatively inexpensive for what they are capable of. Personally, I have had no need for those capabilities, or at least not one to justify upgrading to one from my old P3 server and AthXP workstation.
An old Sun can do everything you listed that you're using Gentoo and Ath64 to do. NetBSD in particular runs VERY well on those things. Gentoo even has a decent sparc port.
If you were meaning to refer only to Solaris itself, I'm afraid I have to agree. My experience so far hasn't been great. It was a pain to install, bloated, difficult to upgrade, and I still have yet to find a real good purpose for it. NetBSD is running Apache so well that I see no reason to switch.
The Sun hardware is great though! I highly reccomend looking up those old Ultrasparcs on ebay :)
AIM has been plagued with accidental account deletions over the past several months. The official line is that while cleaning up old, unused accounts, they have deleted some good ones. But this issue has been ongoing for several months now.
Personally, i had AIM reset my password daily for two weeks, then suddenly cancel my account..for no reason whatsoever. More infuriating, is that there is no support contact information on aim.com, at all.
Do some googling and you'll find this is a widespread problem. There was even a /. story at one point.
If AOL doesn't get their act together, they are going to really lose some ground in an area they have traditonally dominated.
If i message a user who is not online, it puts my message into a queue, and delivers it the next time that user comes online while I am signed on.
pretty useful feature, I must say.
Yes, I am defintly a bottom-of-the-barrel as-far-from-bleeding-edge-as-you-can-get customer...but the nthing, is, in the PC world, I can do this. Until the Mini came out, Mac had nothing whatsoever that even came CLOSE to those kinds of prices.
I don't blame them, its not their market, they are selling quality, not quantity. But if you want to talk hard prices, the cheapest PC is usually half the cost of the cheapest Mac...including the mini.
What i said was that MS is not obligated to support WINE, I didn't say a thing about them intentionally breaking things in their products.
My complaint is still valid: If MS Office does not work in WINE, you need to talk to WINE developers. If this is because MS has something illegal, thats between the WINE devs and MS.
Calling MS for support for MS Office in WINE makes as much sense as calling them for support for Corel WordPerfect in Windows. They didn't sell you WINE, they sold you Office, and you aren't following the manual.
Nobody supports you not following the goddamn instructions. If you are running WINE, you are on your own, and anyone involved in WINE will tell you as much.
This entire thing has made Linux questionable. IBM has invested a great deal of time and money into Linux as a business strategy. What they are trying to do with SCO is prove, in court, that Linux is 100% legitimate, and that there are absolutely no legal issues regarding any od the code contained within.
SCO is not important to them in the least, as a company. But this court case is. If they don't settle it once and for all in court, it sets a dangerous precedent for others to follow in SCO's footsteps.
Furthermore, that box for MS Office that you bought says explicticly on it that it requires windows, unless of course you bought the Mac version, which you guessed it, requires a Mac.
There is absolutely no legitimate reason I can think of that anyone can require them to support their product in any way, shape, or form on a system that does not meet the specific requirements.
Would you call them and complain because WindowsXP won't run on your 486? No, because the stated hardware requirements are right there on the box. So are the software ones.
And of course, I have a legal copy of MS Office 2000 that I use in Crossover Office. One of the advantages to buying Crossover is that they specifically state full support for certain products(such as MS Office 2000), and they are the ones I can register my complaints with if that software suddenly stops working with their product.
If there are problems with WINE itself, they are the ones you should be registering your complaints with. And as its a free and open-source product, your complaints are only going to go so far.
among other things, they don't think anyone would actually use "IBM's Linux" because of image issues. They want to make money from support anyways, it works well to be distro-neutral.
I've used SuSE, so I can speak first-hand for it being a pretty decent distro. Excellent hardware recogniation, easy installation, and GUI tools for everything. I would personally use it over Red Hat any day of the week. Of course I would use Debian, Slackware, or NetBSD over either in most situations, so take that with a grain of salt. After learning of the other things out there, I've never really liked Red Hat. It was a nice place to start however.
What else is there? Any other distro has the same '*insert package format here* hell' issues whenever you try to install something not maintained by the distro itself.
Personally I use Slackware...and like most people, did start out on Red Hat. Slackware is the only distro of all the ones i've tried where i've really been happy
As far as your complaint, a large portion of what I use in Slackware is not maintained by Slackware itself. it's a one-man distro, so there are obviously a lot of things he doesn't have time for. I've had no problems using 3rd party packages, or compiling things myself...which i do often.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/ free download. So even if somehow your copy is a 120-day trial, you can grab the current version for free at that URL.
Next time actually digest what someone has written before going off half cocked...and as AC.
I've been confident for a long time that the minute Linux becomes a true threat to Microsoft on the desktop, they will do exactly this.
Technically Linux can never "win" that fight...MS can always turn around and put out their own version of Linux...and what do you know, MS Office happens to run ONLY on their version ;)
Before people pipe up about the GPL...SuSE and Red Hat include propietary and closed software in their distributions. MS could as well.
MS has already demonstrated a willingness to work with Unix. Take a look at "Services for Unix", its full of GNU software, and is actually a pretty nice product. And free!
Of course if any of this ever happens, we may have "won", as Windows would be running on a more secure base. On the other hand, we'd probably start to see more worms targetting linux...
Noone at /. has a subscription?
he _is_ using a simple microcontroller.
The linux system is just there so that the microctonroller can be interfaced with his network, and the internet, so that one can feed the cat through a browser.
overkill perhaps, but pretty useful IMHO while you're away on a trip.
People in their 20's and 30's now grew up playing Nintendo and Atari games as kids. Youngs adults are one of the fastest growing parts of the market. Why do you suppose companies like "Rock Star Games" are essentially targetting them?
Heck, one of the most popular games for the DS is that goofy dating sim. That is defintly not something for little kids.
In other words, there are a lot of people walking around with a Palm to organize, and a DS for games. If one device could do both, and still do each fairly well, it would sell.
what does this prove, other than that they just didn't build a very good random number generator?
I could have sworn i heard them say you could download MP3's for your MP3 player. I just watched both commercials on ifilm.com. they don't.
They say download "songs" to your MP3 player.
So that answers my question: the lawyers DID cover their asses, and i was just too dumb to catch the nuance.
perhaps theres a timer of some sort in the file? If a month goes buy without you going online and logging into their system, the file is no longer usable.
it would be no great task to trot out dozens of experts to explain all the ways the two files are defintly not the same.
i'm guessing either noone has thought of it, or their lawyers managed to cover their asses in some way before airing it.
it still seems to me like they just didn't think it through. any intelligent lawyer would have told them to be less specific.
i've been meaning to come up with a good method of ripping all of the CDs i currently own into mp3...but never got around to it.
I also have been meaning to create a data partition on my archos mp3 player...and never got around to it. storing OS's on there and using it as a rescue disk is DEFINTLY interesting.
I must admit, it seems like it was awfully easy to do all those things with mac+ipod. I am really starting to give more thought to replacing the Slackware laptop with a Powerbook next time around.
if i write a piece of software and it only runs on the Mac, people will either demand a port to Windows, or just choose not to use it. If there is enough demand, either I will be forced to make a port, or some other enterprising individual will create a windows program with similar functionality and be much more succesful with it.
if i write a piece of software that runs only on Windows, mac users will be annoyed, but make little difference as theres few of them. They'll either find ways of running it in emulation, or be forced to find themselves a Windows machine to run it on...both things they are quite used to.
It states repeatedly that you can get MP3's to put on a Napster-supporting MP3 player.
From what I understand, their service and players are using WMA, with DRM of course.
MP3 != WMA. These are both very specific things. Had they just said "songs", or "music" it would not be an issue. They chose to say MP3 and I fail to see how thats not an outright lie. That oversight alone could be the nail in the coffin for them.
Phillips had similar issues with the RIAA labeling DRM-enabled CD's as official "Compact Discs." Phillips owns the rights to that name, and since the DRM broke the ability for those disks to play in many players, Phillips felt it was damaging their IP to claim they were CD's. They sued and won.
games are one of the things that are still weak in linux...but i rarely game, so it does not bug me.
linux is very strong as far as support for software development tools of any kind, server applications, even a good range of office productivity apps. I am able to find native programs to fit most of my needs.
I've even found plenty of native games to satisfy me, like tuxracer, defendguin, puzzlepirates. Found a lot more for$$$ games that surprised me, like SimCity3000, Civilization, Descent, Doom, America's Army, Neverwinter Nights, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. If I ever felt like getting into gaming, I would be busy for a long time with those alone.
As it is i occasionly play supertux and xbill, and thats about it ;)
but the parent is right: if you are a serious gamer, stay with windows, at least for your games. keep a linux box for other things.