There is no way anyone can build a home brew computer on par with the top tier OEMs anymore. That wasn't the case 10 years ago but you can't put together a system that compares with the Mac Mini or iMac for that matter.
And I wouldn't want to either. The Mac Mini is horribly slow (I own one, so I know). As for the iMac, I'd never want a screen built into the hardware on a non-portable computer.
However, I'm now in a position where I want to install subversion and tomcat, and it's really not easy. Windows wins in this situation, because of the ease of automated installers.
Installing subversion is incredibly easy (at least in Debian or Ubuntu), just use the package manager and install it like you'd do any other package. You can install the tomcat package if you want, too, which is just as easy.
Personally, for Java applications, I do the following, which does apply to Tomcat:
1. Download the zip 2. Unzip into a folder in your home directory You're done!
There may be cases where its more difficult to install an application in a Linux distro, but not the examples you gave. Personally, I've been impressed with Debian and how easy they made installing things like Apache/PHP/MySQL. You just install a few packages and you're done.
The "free as in beer" thing really annoys me. I've NEVER seen free beer, anywhere! I propose we all stop using this ridiculous phrase and start using "free as in air" instead.
Now, if there IS free beer being offered somewhere, just point me in the right direction.
Never been to a keg party before? Or any party that provides free beer?
There are also some bars/clubs that will provide free beer if you show up early enough in the night (and that's with no cover as well). Granted, its customary to tip the bartender, but that can be compared to donating to an open source project.
But overall, I agree with you, free beer isn't that common that the phrase makes sense.
I use Firefox when I'm on a Windows machine, but I would much rather have IE7 installed than any of the previous versions of IE. I mean, you're forced to have some version of IE installed, and all versions before 7 are actually much worse than 7.
The real problem is that CPU speeds have nearly flatlined. Making a new more bloated OS on the assumption that CPU speeds will offset the slowdown is yesterday(7 years ago?)'s development model. Moore's law still holds for a while but it will result in more cores and memory rather than a significant per-cpu speed increase.
The even more real problem is that hard drive speeds haven't made any huge increases. That is the real bottleneck in personal computer performance. Maybe when we start moving towards solid-state hard drives things will speed up.
I've always been in the camp that admired Microsoft and their products. I was an OS/2 guy out of the gate in my career, and when Windows 95 was released I was blown away at how innovative it was when it came to a consumer operating system.
Wow, I had a completely different experience with Windows 95. Of course I was (and still am) a UNIX/Linux guy at the time. I found Windows 95 to be completely unstable and problematic. Does the acronym "BSOD" mean anything to you? Of course, I was used to it having used Windows 3.x quite a bit (yes, even 3.11 for Workgroups was unstable crap). In comparison, Linux was rock stable and had a many more Internet apps due to its UNIX heritage (FreeBSD was also quite nice at the time). And at the time, having a UNIX-like running on your home machine was just extremely cool.
3.x/95/98/98SE/ME was a nightmare. It wasn't until Windows 2000 that Microsoft had a usable OS that didn't crash. And even then I had to wait a while before there were good drivers for my hardware. I know people who got by with the NT releases for their home machines, though.
Daniel Lyons, you are a fucking dumbass. Just go ahead and say "I am a dumbass" and quit your job. No one deserves to have to read the retarded shit you write.
Oh, and if you call me a nerd one more time I am going to find you and break your fuckin jaw. Bitch.
Cowon's iAudio X5 is a good example, they even say it on their website that Linux and Mac are no problem. I use my X5 on Ubuntu, recognized it right away. Too bad the x5 has been discontinued but I'm sure their other DAPs work well on Linux as well.
I've repeatedly heard good things about Cowon. But I go on there website and look at their players and they turn me off due to the way the interfaces look. I mean, a stick? Why? The website itself is so poorly done and inconsistent that it doesn't give me a good impression of the company, but I'd be willing to look past that if their players looked like they had decent user interface.
But in any case, its the iPod user interface that makes it so great (though far from perfect). Are any of the players out there comparable?
As a long time Ubuntu user (almost 4k posts on the Ubuntu forum)I learned some things 1. Eye candy will always be worked on over functionality. 2. Ubuntu is a word that means "I don't know Debian exists"
4000 posts? What do you use your computer for? Posting to the Ubuntu forum?
I've used Linux since 1995 (and different flavors of UNIX before that), was a Debian user for several years, and now use Ubuntu and think its quite good (not perfect but I am happy to use it). If Debian had a 6-month release cycle, I might still be using it, but Ubuntu is the best choice for an apt-based up-to-date Linux distro.
At least someone is working on user interface improvements. But I agree that Compiz Fusion is just not ready to be turned on by default, regardless of what the users want.
guh. Why not make a package w/ auto-configurable scripts available for install? Put a box in adept, or something "Click here for flashy graphics!!11".
That is essentially what they have in Fiesty Fawn right now. An option in the config where you can enable/disable Compiz on the fly (at least I believe that is an older version of Compiz and not Beryl).
I don't think they should enable it by default yet. I can't imagine its stable enough to be default, or at least other things will probably break when its used. For example, it breaks suspend on my machine, which may be more the NVidia driver's fault, but still its an issue.
One thing you forgot, in M$Win it would be enabled by default, and wired in without any chance to remove it. With Linux, you at least get a chance to find a distro without it, or be able to remove it completely.
And in OS X it would be enabled AND have no way to disable it, let alone remove it.
Funny Beats Intelligent comments any day.. (see this comment for reference, which is also a reference to the next rule!) Last and most important, always try to Karma Whore!
Hate to break it to you, but funny gets you no karma. They changed that a while ago.
Look at how long the submission is. Why would you make it even longer by including a definition of what a relatively popular software component is? You might as well include definition for Ubuntu, Gutsy, and Xorg while you're at it.
Keep up with the times or use Google/Wikipedia when you don't know what something is (like you just did).
Not just software vendor lock-in, but hardware lock-in too.
Not much software vendor lock-in when you can install Linux or Windows. I am currently typing this in Ubuntu 64-bit on my Mac Pro. I have also successfully installed Windows (XP and Vista) in various forms in both VM's and natively on this machine.
Suspend still doesn't work in Windows either. Well, let me restate that; Suspend works fine, Resume does not.
Good point, there are a lot of Windows machine that won't suspend properly due to poor drivers and/or hardware. I think I have even heard reports of issues with sleep on Mac laptops (at least with the Intel ones).
Add "power management" to the list, especially when it depends on the drivers for WiFi, USB, and Video to support it properly. Suspend is yet another function that tends to not work in Linux.
but if the core of what's at the top ain't your code, your debugging is going to be a lot harder, because your mistake is in how you set up the other guy's objects to do the work, not you doing the work yourself. (Assuming the other guy's stuff is solid.)
That's why I like to have the source code for my 3rd party libraries that I use. That way I can learn the other guy's code. I can link the code in with my IDE so that when a problem occurs I can trace through the code in those 3rd party libs.
With Java, I don't use any 3rd party libraries that aren't open source. And some of the key libraries I use (though not all), I am familiar with the source code and how it works. If I am not familiar, I can always become familiar with it when a problem occurs. It's generally good to pick 3rd party projects based on how clean their source code is (among other things), so when you do have to go dig in, its not as difficult.
I think this situation can give you an advantage over writing your own.
I was with you until you made that statement (and I don't even own a Honda). Why do you have to disrespect Honda like that? Especially when Honda's cars are reliable, Windows not so much. Honda's cars are closer to OS X than Windows, in that they "just work." They also have very refined engines and well thought-out interiors (at least the ones I've seen). They don't require much maintenance. Yeah, they don't look all that great, but they aren't ugly (like Windows is), simply very vanilla.
It would've made more sense if you made the Windows analogy with Ford or one of the GM brands.
And for the love of God, stop giving your variables names of 30 characters long that can really only be safely typed with some form of machine-driven autocompletion !
Java convention is generally to spell things out. It makes things more readable. Abbreviations are discouraged in most cases. Maybe its ok to shorten variable names, but you better not be shortening class/interface names into unintelligible abbreviations that only mean something to the person who created it. No one on my team is using notepad. We're all using Eclipse, and you better learn how to use auto-completion (for which Eclipse is excellent), otherwise you're going to be slow. If not for our own code, for all the code from libraries that we depend on. There are class names out there that read like sentences.
You can talk all you want about "real programmer". I used to code Java (and other things) in Emacs. And I still use vi for a lot of things. But for Java, I would be stupid not to use an IDE like Eclipse that makes me 20 times more productive. Eclipse makes it a joy to code Java.
I don't necessarily need my IDE to be graphical (though it probably helps). If I could get all the same features in a text mode editor I would be equally happy to use it. But I don't know of any Emacs/vi plugin that can achieve that.
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There is no way anyone can build a home brew computer on par with the top tier OEMs anymore. That wasn't the case 10 years ago but you can't put together a system that compares with the Mac Mini or iMac for that matter.
And I wouldn't want to either. The Mac Mini is horribly slow (I own one, so I know). As for the iMac, I'd never want a screen built into the hardware on a non-portable computer.
However, I'm now in a position where I want to install subversion and tomcat, and it's really not easy. Windows wins in this situation, because of the ease of automated installers.
Installing subversion is incredibly easy (at least in Debian or Ubuntu), just use the package manager and install it like you'd do any other package. You can install the tomcat package if you want, too, which is just as easy.
Personally, for Java applications, I do the following, which does apply to Tomcat:
1. Download the zip
2. Unzip into a folder in your home directory
You're done!
There may be cases where its more difficult to install an application in a Linux distro, but not the examples you gave. Personally, I've been impressed with Debian and how easy they made installing things like Apache/PHP/MySQL. You just install a few packages and you're done.
The "free as in beer" thing really annoys me. I've NEVER seen free beer, anywhere! I propose we all stop using this ridiculous phrase and start using "free as in air" instead.
Now, if there IS free beer being offered somewhere, just point me in the right direction.
Never been to a keg party before? Or any party that provides free beer?
There are also some bars/clubs that will provide free beer if you show up early enough in the night (and that's with no cover as well). Granted, its customary to tip the bartender, but that can be compared to donating to an open source project.
But overall, I agree with you, free beer isn't that common that the phrase makes sense.
I use Firefox when I'm on a Windows machine, but I would much rather have IE7 installed than any of the previous versions of IE. I mean, you're forced to have some version of IE installed, and all versions before 7 are actually much worse than 7.
The Newton is already back, it's called the iPhone
The real problem is that CPU speeds have nearly flatlined. Making a new more bloated OS on the assumption that CPU speeds will offset the slowdown is yesterday(7 years ago?)'s development model. Moore's law still holds for a while but it will result in more cores and memory rather than a significant per-cpu speed increase.
The even more real problem is that hard drive speeds haven't made any huge increases. That is the real bottleneck in personal computer performance. Maybe when we start moving towards solid-state hard drives things will speed up.
I've always been in the camp that admired Microsoft and their products. I was an OS/2 guy out of the gate in my career, and when Windows 95 was released I was blown away at how innovative it was when it came to a consumer operating system.
Wow, I had a completely different experience with Windows 95. Of course I was (and still am) a UNIX/Linux guy at the time. I found Windows 95 to be completely unstable and problematic. Does the acronym "BSOD" mean anything to you? Of course, I was used to it having used Windows 3.x quite a bit (yes, even 3.11 for Workgroups was unstable crap). In comparison, Linux was rock stable and had a many more Internet apps due to its UNIX heritage (FreeBSD was also quite nice at the time). And at the time, having a UNIX-like running on your home machine was just extremely cool.
3.x/95/98/98SE/ME was a nightmare. It wasn't until Windows 2000 that Microsoft had a usable OS that didn't crash. And even then I had to wait a while before there were good drivers for my hardware. I know people who got by with the NT releases for their home machines, though.
Daniel Lyons, you are a fucking dumbass. Just go ahead and say "I am a dumbass" and quit your job. No one deserves to have to read the retarded shit you write.
Oh, and if you call me a nerd one more time I am going to find you and break your fuckin jaw. Bitch.
Cowon's iAudio X5 is a good example, they even say it on their website that Linux and Mac are no problem. I use my X5 on Ubuntu, recognized it right away. Too bad the x5 has been discontinued but I'm sure their other DAPs work well on Linux as well.
I've repeatedly heard good things about Cowon. But I go on there website and look at their players and they turn me off due to the way the interfaces look. I mean, a stick? Why? The website itself is so poorly done and inconsistent that it doesn't give me a good impression of the company, but I'd be willing to look past that if their players looked like they had decent user interface.
But in any case, its the iPod user interface that makes it so great (though far from perfect). Are any of the players out there comparable?
As a long time Ubuntu user (almost 4k posts on the Ubuntu forum)I learned some things 1. Eye candy will always be worked on over functionality. 2. Ubuntu is a word that means "I don't know Debian exists"
4000 posts? What do you use your computer for? Posting to the Ubuntu forum?
I've used Linux since 1995 (and different flavors of UNIX before that), was a Debian user for several years, and now use Ubuntu and think its quite good (not perfect but I am happy to use it). If Debian had a 6-month release cycle, I might still be using it, but Ubuntu is the best choice for an apt-based up-to-date Linux distro.
At least someone is working on user interface improvements. But I agree that Compiz Fusion is just not ready to be turned on by default, regardless of what the users want.
guh. Why not make a package w/ auto-configurable scripts available for install? Put a box in adept, or something "Click here for flashy graphics!!11".
That is essentially what they have in Fiesty Fawn right now. An option in the config where you can enable/disable Compiz on the fly (at least I believe that is an older version of Compiz and not Beryl).
I don't think they should enable it by default yet. I can't imagine its stable enough to be default, or at least other things will probably break when its used. For example, it breaks suspend on my machine, which may be more the NVidia driver's fault, but still its an issue.
One thing you forgot, in M$Win it would be enabled by default, and wired in without any chance to remove it. .
With Linux, you at least get a chance to find a distro without it, or be able to remove it completely
And in OS X it would be enabled AND have no way to disable it, let alone remove it.
Funny Beats Intelligent comments any day.. (see this comment for reference, which is also a reference to the next rule!)
Last and most important, always try to Karma Whore!
Hate to break it to you, but funny gets you no karma. They changed that a while ago.
You may not mod me up +1 Informative. Thanks.
Look at how long the submission is. Why would you make it even longer by including a definition of what a relatively popular software component is? You might as well include definition for Ubuntu, Gutsy, and Xorg while you're at it.
Keep up with the times or use Google/Wikipedia when you don't know what something is (like you just did).
I'm sure your parents think so. :)
I should have added "in this day and age" to really express my sentiment.
But I do think my parents made a huge mistake by having children. There lives are certainly not better for it.
Not just software vendor lock-in, but hardware lock-in too.
Not much software vendor lock-in when you can install Linux or Windows. I am currently typing this in Ubuntu 64-bit on my Mac Pro. I have also successfully installed Windows (XP and Vista) in various forms in both VM's and natively on this machine.
IMNSHO, you don't truly understand the value of experience until you have teenage children.
Only morons have children.
Suspend still doesn't work in Windows either. Well, let me restate that; Suspend works fine, Resume does not.
Good point, there are a lot of Windows machine that won't suspend properly due to poor drivers and/or hardware. I think I have even heard reports of issues with sleep on Mac laptops (at least with the Intel ones).
Sorry, but someone with a million+ Slashdot ID is in no place to comment about what the typical Slashdotter is like.
;)
And yes, my ID isn't exactly low, but this is not my first account!
Add "power management" to the list, especially when it depends on the drivers for WiFi, USB, and Video to support it properly. Suspend is yet another function that tends to not work in Linux.
but if the core of what's at the top ain't your code, your debugging is going to be a lot harder, because your mistake is in how you set up the other guy's objects to do the work, not you doing the work yourself. (Assuming the other guy's stuff is solid.)
That's why I like to have the source code for my 3rd party libraries that I use. That way I can learn the other guy's code. I can link the code in with my IDE so that when a problem occurs I can trace through the code in those 3rd party libs.
With Java, I don't use any 3rd party libraries that aren't open source. And some of the key libraries I use (though not all), I am familiar with the source code and how it works. If I am not familiar, I can always become familiar with it when a problem occurs. It's generally good to pick 3rd party projects based on how clean their source code is (among other things), so when you do have to go dig in, its not as difficult.
I think this situation can give you an advantage over writing your own.
Apart from being silly, the code names add confusion to Ubuntu's already-confusing version numbering system.
How is the version numbering system confusing? It's year followed by month it was released (Y.MM). How can that possibly be confusing?
So, if you want a Honda, then go by Windows
I was with you until you made that statement (and I don't even own a Honda). Why do you have to disrespect Honda like that? Especially when Honda's cars are reliable, Windows not so much. Honda's cars are closer to OS X than Windows, in that they "just work." They also have very refined engines and well thought-out interiors (at least the ones I've seen). They don't require much maintenance. Yeah, they don't look all that great, but they aren't ugly (like Windows is), simply very vanilla.
It would've made more sense if you made the Windows analogy with Ford or one of the GM brands.
Try VMWare Player 2.0. The server product lags behind apparently.
And for the love of God, stop giving your variables names of 30 characters long that can really only be safely typed with some form of machine-driven autocompletion !
Java convention is generally to spell things out. It makes things more readable. Abbreviations are discouraged in most cases. Maybe its ok to shorten variable names, but you better not be shortening class/interface names into unintelligible abbreviations that only mean something to the person who created it. No one on my team is using notepad. We're all using Eclipse, and you better learn how to use auto-completion (for which Eclipse is excellent), otherwise you're going to be slow. If not for our own code, for all the code from libraries that we depend on. There are class names out there that read like sentences.
You can talk all you want about "real programmer". I used to code Java (and other things) in Emacs. And I still use vi for a lot of things. But for Java, I would be stupid not to use an IDE like Eclipse that makes me 20 times more productive. Eclipse makes it a joy to code Java.
I don't necessarily need my IDE to be graphical (though it probably helps). If I could get all the same features in a text mode editor I would be equally happy to use it. But I don't know of any Emacs/vi plugin that can achieve that.