Yeah, now show me one example of a person with any authority seriously saying macs are invincible... just one. Apple doesn't say that. I've never seen a security researcher, or even sensationalist papers say that. If you do a Google search for "mac invincible" you find one blogger asking if Macs are invincible and one article explaining that your statement is a classic strawman argument.
Apple, Inc. did suggest that they can't get viruses. View their television ads. http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ (Viruses I believe)
Since I consider Apple an authority on Apple computers, I think that backs it up. Take the ad at face value look an end user would and you'll see the problem. Granted, you can also find lists on apple's website suggesting antivirus software too. I don't see those in their ads though. They are scared to tell people that any computer could be compromised just as you are.
Windows users don't care about security anyway. If they did, they wouldn't be using Windows. Lets face it, at least once a year there is a big worm scare in the media like the iloveyou worm, etc. My grandmother won't even get a computer at all because the media has scared her from them. Most of my family doesn't see a reason to upgrade from Windows ME or Windows 2000 because security isn't a concern, only price and functionality. The real deterrent to apple is that they won't advertise Mac OS X aggressively. There are many advantages to OS X over windows, and while we start to see progress in their ads, its still not enough to convince people Mac OS X is better than windows. Similarly, IBM's pro linux ads encouraged a few people but not a mass exodus from Windows on servers. (it did hurt Microsoft a bit) Now if apple were to focus on software included with Macintosh systems plus all the third party software available, they might see some progress. The ad mentioning Microsoft Office support encouraged a few people I know to ask me about it. If you believe slashdot, gaming is the real issue anyway.
I prefer vendors be notified prior to releasing information about an exploit. Time to fix it is even better. You act as if I like 0 day exploits against systems. I administer a Mac based network at work. I have good reason to want patches.
Apple has contributed code back to the FreeBSD project. There are a few portions of darwin that were released under BSD license, etc. I'll agree there are many interesting bits under more restrictive licenses. Besides, OS X is just a continuation of NEXTSTEP anyway. Your 80s comment covered it already.
I don't know if I agree with your comment about bleeding either. Many BSD developers work on several projects. For instance, Oliver Fromme (sp?) recently proposed a patch for FreeBSD's init to allow chroot for use with Live CDs, etc. He also has worked with DragonFly.
There are also people who tried to join a project, but were pushed aside or treated unkindly. Most BSD forks start with conflict or a disagreement with direction. Isn't that one of the benefits of open source? You can explore different directions?
The difference between GPL and BSD licenses: 1. GPL = code freedom 2. BSD = coders freedom
I care about people more than source code. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
As for the article, it makes a good point. I've had constant problems getting GNU types to accept patches for my BSD. I get lovely replies like "BSD is dead", "why not use linux?", "I only care about linux.", etc. This is a real problem. I know considering I'm working on BSD desktop environment. Linux adopters had to fight hard for drivers, applications and other things that many new linux users take for granted. Now the BSD community is fighting that fight and losing because people point at Linux. I'd argue that part of the problem is the corporate involvement in linux, but there are advantages to it as well. Plus FreeBSD seems to be getting handouts from companies as well. I'm not so lucky.
No, the price of using a computer is to patch it and not run untrusted software. It does not matter what OS you are using. If you tell people they are invincible because they have a Mac or use linux, you are doing them a disservice. You are also lying to them.
I tell people that Macs or anything but windows are safer because less people care to attack them. I tell them that they must run software update and every two versions of Mac OS they must upgrade. (Apple stops patching after 2 releases) There are many bad things I can say about microsoft, but they do provide patches for a much longer period. Covering 1 or 2 products with back patches is a lot of work, but with the windows release cycle you get 5-6 years of patches! With Mac OS X you get 2 to 3 years of patches. You can argue all day long about how that isn't important on Mac desktops, but after administering an OS X server, I can tell you its very important!
I have talked a few people into using open source software since they can not afford to buy new software constantly. Staying current isn't cheap and with Mac OS X you often need to buy upgrades to get software to work in new versions of the OS. This is true with Adobe software and to a lesser degree with other applications.
A sample of the whole population would produce people who don't even own a DVD player. I think it depends what group you are talking about. My wife rarely watches content on her Mac, but I often watch movies or ITMS content on my PC. I know quite a few college students who use their computers in dorm rooms for watching content.
I wouldn't discredit the media center pc in the future but it will be more like Apple TV. You may not want one, but I bet it will sell well.
More people drive chevy vehicles than BMWs. That doesn't mean BMW isn't important to someone. Somehow BMW continues to sell cars despite Chevy selling so many cars. More doesn't mean better or important... just as Windows having 90% market share is an indicator of quality or value.
Specifications help you determine what correct and incorrect input are. This allows you to write proper test cases. Testing leads to bug fixing. Bug fixing leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to a new PC when I pitch mine out the window.
In short, you should try to write proper specifications for important projects. It can also lead to hardware upgrades.
As an example what not to do, look at the source code for JustJournal.com's Users servlet (com.justjournal.Users). It is the worst code I've ever written. I did not create any specifications, do any design or any planning. Yet its still in use almost 4 years later. You never know what will happen with your code. I'm too lazy to rewrite it.
EVERY BSD has GPL and LGPL code in it. What do I mean? What system compiler do we use? Trust me, there are GNU userland components. Obviously, with the goal of my project I take offense to this GPL + BSD = EVIL philosophy. I much prefer BSD licensed code, but there is not much choice when you get to window managers, toolkits and things for x11 nor with system compilers. There are also benefits to gcc (or some)compiler as a standard across platforms.
So just remember that OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and MidnightBSD all contain source under several different licenses. If you count various clause BSD licenses its even more strange. PHK has released parts under the beerware license as well. PHKMalloc for instance...
Regardless of the camp you're on, software licenses prohibit the use of code across open source projects. This is yet another example. The only solution for them is to either 1. get permission or 2. rewrite it just as bsd 4.4 lite had to be done. At which point, it will cease to be FreeBSD unless they also adopt the code which they can't since it will probably be GPL.
If you think userland is bad, try to figure out what you can distribute in ports on cd, ftp, etc. (packages)
Someone please write a good x11 toolkit with a BSD license so we can build our own stuff! There are a few if you google it, but they are not very good or recent.
I've had to use two intel based minis at work. They work well for certain situations. Apple never ships Macs with enough ram. You should never order a Mac without double what they ship with as a rule. Mac OS 10.4 requires 512MB ram to open most applications or multitask in a reasonable fashion. 10.5 will probably require 768MB to be tolerable.
As for speed, the intel based Mac mini was very fast with native code but unpleasant with Microsoft Office and impossible with Adobe products which at the time were not native. I don't know how far they got with porting yet. At that job, I was a Mac OS Admin for student affairs at a university. The mini worked great in the radio station for the on air computer as it easily integrated into their studio. It also worked well in an office setting. I think apple should start including a keyboard and mouse with them though. Many pc users have mice and keyboards but they are often PS/2. Unless you bought a new PC in the last two years, its not going to have usb devices with it most likely. Even then, I've seen some models with PS/2 keyboards. In an office environment, you often need to swap out keyboards after several years of use. (3-5 before they got a new PC or Mac)
An academic configured iMac with the intel graphics chipset would work great in a typical office. There are software applications that some people can't use, but we did have a newspaper and radio station running on 99% Macs when I left. Both had one PC for accounting purposes as the university used an IE based payroll system. We did not want to deploy bootcamp in a beta stage nor make new disk images for it.
The old mac minis had good video and the new ones are lacking on that front. The CPU speed is much better and the ram is a wash. It all depends on what you intend to use it for though. I wouldn't spend $599 or less on a store bought PC or Mac to game on. Its also not going to work well for someone needing photoshop. If you are going to use word and view webpages its more than adequate. I believe iMacs work in the office and home for most people very well. You can still add ram and its not fun but possible to upgrade the hard drive.
I don't see the difference between plugging in to a dock or connecting two cables to use a real monitor and keyboard. (the mouse plugs into the keyboard) Three cables if you require wired networking. You could even get a wireless KVM switch if you didn't want as much clutter right on your desk or didn't want the cables to pull as much.
Are you really that lazy? Often docking stations cause the system to overheat, at least on the dell systems i've seen in the past.
On a side note, the smallest display apple sells is 13" widescreen now. You could always buy a MacBook Pro and get a 15" or 17" like most dell systems ship with.
As an open source developer and college student, I can clarify the problem. We are taught that memory is cheap and there will always be enough. Of course that is stupid. Anyone who uses Firefox, Gnome, KDE or Vista can tell you that modern software is using way too much RAM. Granted three of those products are trying to work on the problem a bit. In the case of Microsoft, it helps them sell new PCs which then ship with new versions of their software.
If you want to solve this problem, professors need to teach that there is a tradeoff between performance and security. There are not unlimited resources to work with and yet we must try to maintain a reasonable level of security. Then again the age of the professor is important. Some like C++ or Java while others only live by.NET. A few I've had love linux or BSD. Their tastes seem to control what's taught in class.
Part of the problem is that kernel developers need to use larger data structures to handle 64bit computing, larger file systems, and various other requests from the community. In order to fully support new hardware, more memory needs to be used and thus older systems run slowly. You must also consider the complexity of offering several performance hacks for each type of cpu generation. After awhile, just including a basic C function is much easier for older hardware since it gets harder to test over time.
Graphical applications for X11 tend to get much larger and resource intensive as time passes. Developers think they need to add more eye candy than apple or microsoft to get people to use Linux or BSD. Eye candy is not what most of us want.
I noticed that someone mentioned gentoo. I noticed during a project last april that a vanilla 2.6 kernel seemed faster than an gentoo patched kernel on two systems I was testing. Granted I custom compiled the kernel so arguably it should be faster. It could also mean some people are having different experiences based on how much they customized the kernel or possibly how much work went into kernel patches by each distro.
On topic, this shutdown might be a problem for the BSD projects which use fedora core userlands for their linux emulation. FreeBSD had a SoC project to gain Linux 2.6 compatibility with linuxolator so that they could track newer fedora core versions. It might not be an issue for them post RELENG_6_2_0_RELEASE. Other projects might have more trouble tracking newer versions which in turn decreases security over time. I don't see an immediate solution for MidnightBSD.
For the record, not everyone that is vegetarian or the smaller subset vegan is against killing animals. You can call it PETA logic if you want because that's more accurate, but still not quite right.
I'm a vegetarian, but not a vegan. I don't care if you eat a big steak or a pound of bacon. In fact I used to enjoy both of those things until my doctor told me to cut cholesterol and suggested my current diet. I am a lacto ovo vegetarian meaning I eat dairy and eggs.
Further, while we're on this topic do NOT consider a person who eats fish or poultry to be vegetarian. There are terms for that too.
Well I think its safe to say that people older than 20 something have used that style of naming convention. You already mentioned MacPaint which isn't shipped on modern Macs. Then we have NetBSD and FreeBSD. Its iPod which doesn't start with a capital letter.
In the case of the BSDs, I am 27 and those two projects were started before I owned my first PC. As for the Omni argument, my mother never would have thought of that. She would have called it something like Bad Guy Search or possibly Yahoo for criminals.
In a free society, people choose what they wish to view. That means you never need to click on a link or go to sites that often have links which are bad at work. No one is forcing you to view the crap to begin with. I tend to avoid looking at slashdot at work except for article summaries on the front page for a reason.
I understand your perspective, but stock prices are partially controlled by what ANALYSTS think. They don't understand the technical merits of anything. Analysts assume that Microsoft will do well and Windows will continue to be a monopoly because they have done so in the past.
I think some misunderstood and thought I hate Apple. I do own Apple products and Apple stock. After all, I was only making predictions which analysts do everyday.
1. Apple's stock price will flake out in 2007 with constant pressure from Microsoft products. 2. ITMS and the iPod will be targeted heavily by Microsoft. Eventually the iPod will be replaced just as sony list the Walkman/Discman fame of the 80s and 90s. 3. Apple will see a surge in market share on the Mac line during the first half of the year but have poor sales for back to school late in 2007. Dell's Indian production will allow them to lower prices and hit apple's bottom line. Consumers will know what Vista is by then. 4. Apple will fail to advertise Mac OS X again and let people think Apple is out of date and Vista is new and innovative. 5. Steve Jobs will leave apple or end up on the board. It could be related to the stock scandal or because of his health problems over the last year. 6. Apple will blow it again.
You make some valid points. Its just like Microsoft pushing IE and including it in Windows to kill Navigator. I think people forget that Netscape practically had a monopoly on browsing for a time. Yahoo was once in google's position and they did exactly the same thing. Its called marketing.
There are several things that google has done I'm not happy about. This is very small on my list. As a geek, I realize that many of us have stronger ethics than most others. The public will continue to use google just as they love their Windows install. The difference is that its much easier to unseat a search engine.
Now if the developers at Mozilla wish to look down on google, they could stop making it default in Firefox as a search engine. Frankly I find it interesting after Microsoft started giving them help with Vista compatibility that we hear this negative google talk. I can say things about others just as easy as the Firefox guy.
I think its time some of you realized that google is not this amazing company that is totally different. Its similar to the argument I have with my mother over Yahoo. She views them as the best thing the internet has ever seen. She chooses them over google daily. For a long time I tried to talk her into using another search tool and game site. She stuck with Yahoo because of her personal experiences. I stay away from Yahoo because of my personal experience*. If you don't like google, just don't use any of their products and chose something else. The same goes for IE, Windows, etc. Modern computing is about choice.
* If you are curious about my hatred of Yahoo, its simply a flaw in their early childrens search feature. Their advertising code displayed a porno ad to a 7 year old I was watching and nearly lost me my job. His search was totally unrelated and quite clean.
One fall is different that 20+. Besides, those clamshell models have problems with the hinges over time. You pay a premium to get replacements from anyone. My wife's original first gen iBook is still running, but its very fragile at this point. It does run OpenBSD well. It was almost ok with Mac OS 10.3, but the disk space requirements took up the whole drive.
Darwin isn't FreeBSD. Apple has imported code from NetBSD and FreeBSD for userland, but saying its a FreeBSD based OS when the kernel is so different is silly.
I don't really care about an Apple phone right now. I'd rather have the "iTV". The rumors of an apple iPhone might be true, or it could be a scraped project. It could even be that POS phone developed and used by cingular. I don't think many investors want apple to enter that market. It doesn't make sense unless they want to try to protect the iPod from music phones. I'd rather have a phone thats just a phone and works right with long battery life. There are many times I want an iPod but not a cell phone.
Yes, and someone from any party can be corrupt. This also plays into a stereotype about democrats... remember the videos run about bush and gore during that campaign? Al Gore wasn't raised poor either. Even in different parties, politicians have much in common.
Retail sales are hurt, but not OEM. If someone needs a new PC, they will buy one even if vista has bad ratings. Two people in my family bought windows me based pcs. The first was my mother and she only got rid of it last month as I built her a new PC with Windows XP on it. The second was my wife's grandmother. She still uses Windows ME every day.
I agree it was the worst windows release since 1.0 but that didn't stop it from selling. Besides, Microsoft is used to bad sales at first on products. Remember the xbox? Now many people recommend the xbox 360 over other consoles.
Mono runs on linux, sort of on Mac OS X (not ASP.net though) and a bit on solaris. That is about it. It does not run well on the BSDs. While I think the write once, run anywhere "promise" is bullshit, Java does run on more platforms than mono does.
In windows, nothing beats.NET for a quick and dirty app for the web or desktop. I can also say that Java is on the way out. My wife is a consultant and regularly works with.NET and occasionally with PHP. I've only heard her talk about two Java projects and one was really cold fusion running in a servlet container (as the new ones are java based). The other was a desktop application which was GPL'd by the client. So Microsoft is winning on that level.
I don't know what really big organizations are doing, and I don't care much. These same people used WebObjects and like J2EE for all its complexity. Lets face it, Java's real push was that IBM liked it just as they do Linux. It saved them money to push Sun's product as they didn't have to write anything themselves and people still will go to IBM no matter what. In fact, when IBM started pushing Linux my opinion of it dropped. IBM always blows it with operating systems. Look at OS/2. It also happens in other areas. Everybody got Notes and Smartsuite running at work?
As a programmer, I prefer.NET for gui applications and web applications to Java. The only redeeming quality is the portability. I don't accept Mono as a replacement since its not very portable and licensing could get weird with the Novell/Microsoft deal down the road.
Well if the RIAA isn't going to hold idiots with computers responsible, why would a technical savvy parent be held responsible? They didn't necessarily teach their children not to use kazaa or whatever.
By saying the parent is not responsible, and most of us can assume many children do not know the law, then its safe to say that the RIAA is responsible for not getting the message how to CHILDREN not to download music. I guess they need to start running ads on cartoon network and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple, Inc. did suggest that they can't get viruses. View their television ads. http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ (Viruses I believe)
Since I consider Apple an authority on Apple computers, I think that backs it up. Take the ad at face value look an end user would and you'll see the problem. Granted, you can also find lists on apple's website suggesting antivirus software too. I don't see those in their ads though. They are scared to tell people that any computer could be compromised just as you are.
Windows users don't care about security anyway. If they did, they wouldn't be using Windows. Lets face it, at least once a year there is a big worm scare in the media like the iloveyou worm, etc. My grandmother won't even get a computer at all because the media has scared her from them. Most of my family doesn't see a reason to upgrade from Windows ME or Windows 2000 because security isn't a concern, only price and functionality. The real deterrent to apple is that they won't advertise Mac OS X aggressively. There are many advantages to OS X over windows, and while we start to see progress in their ads, its still not enough to convince people Mac OS X is better than windows. Similarly, IBM's pro linux ads encouraged a few people but not a mass exodus from Windows on servers. (it did hurt Microsoft a bit) Now if apple were to focus on software included with Macintosh systems plus all the third party software available, they might see some progress. The ad mentioning Microsoft Office support encouraged a few people I know to ask me about it. If you believe slashdot, gaming is the real issue anyway.
I prefer vendors be notified prior to releasing information about an exploit. Time to fix it is even better. You act as if I like 0 day exploits against systems. I administer a Mac based network at work. I have good reason to want patches.
Apple has contributed code back to the FreeBSD project. There are a few portions of darwin that were released under BSD license, etc. I'll agree there are many interesting bits under more restrictive licenses. Besides, OS X is just a continuation of NEXTSTEP anyway. Your 80s comment covered it already.
I don't know if I agree with your comment about bleeding either. Many BSD developers work on several projects. For instance, Oliver Fromme (sp?) recently proposed a patch for FreeBSD's init to allow chroot for use with Live CDs, etc. He also has worked with DragonFly.
There are also people who tried to join a project, but were pushed aside or treated unkindly. Most BSD forks start with conflict or a disagreement with direction. Isn't that one of the benefits of open source? You can explore different directions?
The difference between GPL and BSD licenses:
1. GPL = code freedom
2. BSD = coders freedom
I care about people more than source code. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
As for the article, it makes a good point. I've had constant problems getting GNU types to accept patches for my BSD. I get lovely replies like "BSD is dead", "why not use linux?", "I only care about linux.", etc. This is a real problem. I know considering I'm working on BSD desktop environment. Linux adopters had to fight hard for drivers, applications and other things that many new linux users take for granted. Now the BSD community is fighting that fight and losing because people point at Linux. I'd argue that part of the problem is the corporate involvement in linux, but there are advantages to it as well. Plus FreeBSD seems to be getting handouts from companies as well. I'm not so lucky.
No, the price of using a computer is to patch it and not run untrusted software. It does not matter what OS you are using. If you tell people they are invincible because they have a Mac or use linux, you are doing them a disservice. You are also lying to them.
I tell people that Macs or anything but windows are safer because less people care to attack them. I tell them that they must run software update and every two versions of Mac OS they must upgrade. (Apple stops patching after 2 releases) There are many bad things I can say about microsoft, but they do provide patches for a much longer period. Covering 1 or 2 products with back patches is a lot of work, but with the windows release cycle you get 5-6 years of patches! With Mac OS X you get 2 to 3 years of patches. You can argue all day long about how that isn't important on Mac desktops, but after administering an OS X server, I can tell you its very important!
I have talked a few people into using open source software since they can not afford to buy new software constantly. Staying current isn't cheap and with Mac OS X you often need to buy upgrades to get software to work in new versions of the OS. This is true with Adobe software and to a lesser degree with other applications.
A sample of the whole population would produce people who don't even own a DVD player. I think it depends what group you are talking about. My wife rarely watches content on her Mac, but I often watch movies or ITMS content on my PC. I know quite a few college students who use their computers in dorm rooms for watching content.
I wouldn't discredit the media center pc in the future but it will be more like Apple TV. You may not want one, but I bet it will sell well.
More people drive chevy vehicles than BMWs. That doesn't mean BMW isn't important to someone. Somehow BMW continues to sell cars despite Chevy selling so many cars. More doesn't mean better or important... just as Windows having 90% market share is an indicator of quality or value.
Specifications help you determine what correct and incorrect input are. This allows you to write proper test cases. Testing leads to bug fixing. Bug fixing leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to a new PC when I pitch mine out the window.
In short, you should try to write proper specifications for important projects. It can also lead to hardware upgrades.
As an example what not to do, look at the source code for JustJournal.com's Users servlet (com.justjournal.Users). It is the worst code I've ever written. I did not create any specifications, do any design or any planning. Yet its still in use almost 4 years later. You never know what will happen with your code. I'm too lazy to rewrite it.
EVERY BSD has GPL and LGPL code in it. What do I mean? What system compiler do we use? Trust me, there are GNU userland components. Obviously, with the goal of my project I take offense to this GPL + BSD = EVIL philosophy. I much prefer BSD licensed code, but there is not much choice when you get to window managers, toolkits and things for x11 nor with system compilers. There are also benefits to gcc (or some)compiler as a standard across platforms.
So just remember that OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and MidnightBSD all contain source under several different licenses. If you count various clause BSD licenses its even more strange. PHK has released parts under the beerware license as well. PHKMalloc for instance...
Regardless of the camp you're on, software licenses prohibit the use of code across open source projects. This is yet another example. The only solution for them is to either 1. get permission or 2. rewrite it just as bsd 4.4 lite had to be done. At which point, it will cease to be FreeBSD unless they also adopt the code which they can't since it will probably be GPL.
If you think userland is bad, try to figure out what you can distribute in ports on cd, ftp, etc. (packages)
Someone please write a good x11 toolkit with a BSD license so we can build our own stuff! There are a few if you google it, but they are not very good or recent.
I've had to use two intel based minis at work. They work well for certain situations. Apple never ships Macs with enough ram. You should never order a Mac without double what they ship with as a rule. Mac OS 10.4 requires 512MB ram to open most applications or multitask in a reasonable fashion. 10.5 will probably require 768MB to be tolerable.
As for speed, the intel based Mac mini was very fast with native code but unpleasant with Microsoft Office and impossible with Adobe products which at the time were not native. I don't know how far they got with porting yet. At that job, I was a Mac OS Admin for student affairs at a university. The mini worked great in the radio station for the on air computer as it easily integrated into their studio. It also worked well in an office setting. I think apple should start including a keyboard and mouse with them though. Many pc users have mice and keyboards but they are often PS/2. Unless you bought a new PC in the last two years, its not going to have usb devices with it most likely. Even then, I've seen some models with PS/2 keyboards. In an office environment, you often need to swap out keyboards after several years of use. (3-5 before they got a new PC or Mac)
An academic configured iMac with the intel graphics chipset would work great in a typical office. There are software applications that some people can't use, but we did have a newspaper and radio station running on 99% Macs when I left. Both had one PC for accounting purposes as the university used an IE based payroll system. We did not want to deploy bootcamp in a beta stage nor make new disk images for it.
The old mac minis had good video and the new ones are lacking on that front. The CPU speed is much better and the ram is a wash. It all depends on what you intend to use it for though. I wouldn't spend $599 or less on a store bought PC or Mac to game on. Its also not going to work well for someone needing photoshop. If you are going to use word and view webpages its more than adequate. I believe iMacs work in the office and home for most people very well. You can still add ram and its not fun but possible to upgrade the hard drive.
Maybe if someone makes the software for the Mac...
s p
:)
http://www.aviinc.com/projectors-displays/wijet.a
There are wireless monitors.
I don't see the difference between plugging in to a dock or connecting two cables to use a real monitor and keyboard. (the mouse plugs into the keyboard) Three cables if you require wired networking. You could even get a wireless KVM switch if you didn't want as much clutter right on your desk or didn't want the cables to pull as much.
Are you really that lazy? Often docking stations cause the system to overheat, at least on the dell systems i've seen in the past.
On a side note, the smallest display apple sells is 13" widescreen now. You could always buy a MacBook Pro and get a 15" or 17" like most dell systems ship with.
As an open source developer and college student, I can clarify the problem. We are taught that memory is cheap and there will always be enough. Of course that is stupid. Anyone who uses Firefox, Gnome, KDE or Vista can tell you that modern software is using way too much RAM. Granted three of those products are trying to work on the problem a bit. In the case of Microsoft, it helps them sell new PCs which then ship with new versions of their software.
.NET. A few I've had love linux or BSD. Their tastes seem to control what's taught in class.
If you want to solve this problem, professors need to teach that there is a tradeoff between performance and security. There are not unlimited resources to work with and yet we must try to maintain a reasonable level of security. Then again the age of the professor is important. Some like C++ or Java while others only live by
Part of the problem is that kernel developers need to use larger data structures to handle 64bit computing, larger file systems, and various other requests from the community. In order to fully support new hardware, more memory needs to be used and thus older systems run slowly. You must also consider the complexity of offering several performance hacks for each type of cpu generation. After awhile, just including a basic C function is much easier for older hardware since it gets harder to test over time.
Graphical applications for X11 tend to get much larger and resource intensive as time passes. Developers think they need to add more eye candy than apple or microsoft to get people to use Linux or BSD. Eye candy is not what most of us want.
I noticed that someone mentioned gentoo. I noticed during a project last april that a vanilla 2.6 kernel seemed faster than an gentoo patched kernel on two systems I was testing. Granted I custom compiled the kernel so arguably it should be faster. It could also mean some people are having different experiences based on how much they customized the kernel or possibly how much work went into kernel patches by each distro.
On topic, this shutdown might be a problem for the BSD projects which use fedora core userlands for their linux emulation. FreeBSD had a SoC project to gain Linux 2.6 compatibility with linuxolator so that they could track newer fedora core versions. It might not be an issue for them post RELENG_6_2_0_RELEASE. Other projects might have more trouble tracking newer versions which in turn decreases security over time. I don't see an immediate solution for MidnightBSD.
For the record, not everyone that is vegetarian or the smaller subset vegan is against killing animals. You can call it PETA logic if you want because that's more accurate, but still not quite right.
I'm a vegetarian, but not a vegan. I don't care if you eat a big steak or a pound of bacon. In fact I used to enjoy both of those things until my doctor told me to cut cholesterol and suggested my current diet. I am a lacto ovo vegetarian meaning I eat dairy and eggs.
Further, while we're on this topic do NOT consider a person who eats fish or poultry to be vegetarian. There are terms for that too.
Well I think its safe to say that people older than 20 something have used that style of naming convention. You already mentioned MacPaint which isn't shipped on modern Macs. Then we have NetBSD and FreeBSD. Its iPod which doesn't start with a capital letter.
In the case of the BSDs, I am 27 and those two projects were started before I owned my first PC. As for the Omni argument, my mother never would have thought of that. She would have called it something like Bad Guy Search or possibly Yahoo for criminals.
In a free society, people choose what they wish to view. That means you never need to click on a link or go to sites that often have links which are bad at work. No one is forcing you to view the crap to begin with. I tend to avoid looking at slashdot at work except for article summaries on the front page for a reason.
No problem Balmer. I had some extra time.
I understand your perspective, but stock prices are partially controlled by what ANALYSTS think. They don't understand the technical merits of anything. Analysts assume that Microsoft will do well and Windows will continue to be a monopoly because they have done so in the past.
I think some misunderstood and thought I hate Apple. I do own Apple products and Apple stock. After all, I was only making predictions which analysts do everyday.
1. Apple's stock price will flake out in 2007 with constant pressure from Microsoft products.
2. ITMS and the iPod will be targeted heavily by Microsoft. Eventually the iPod will be replaced just as sony list the Walkman/Discman fame of the 80s and 90s.
3. Apple will see a surge in market share on the Mac line during the first half of the year but have poor sales for back to school late in 2007. Dell's Indian production will allow them to lower prices and hit apple's bottom line. Consumers will know what Vista is by then.
4. Apple will fail to advertise Mac OS X again and let people think Apple is out of date and Vista is new and innovative.
5. Steve Jobs will leave apple or end up on the board. It could be related to the stock scandal or because of his health problems over the last year.
6. Apple will blow it again.
You make some valid points. Its just like Microsoft pushing IE and including it in Windows to kill Navigator. I think people forget that Netscape practically had a monopoly on browsing for a time. Yahoo was once in google's position and they did exactly the same thing. Its called marketing.
There are several things that google has done I'm not happy about. This is very small on my list. As a geek, I realize that many of us have stronger ethics than most others. The public will continue to use google just as they love their Windows install. The difference is that its much easier to unseat a search engine.
Now if the developers at Mozilla wish to look down on google, they could stop making it default in Firefox as a search engine. Frankly I find it interesting after Microsoft started giving them help with Vista compatibility that we hear this negative google talk. I can say things about others just as easy as the Firefox guy.
I think its time some of you realized that google is not this amazing company that is totally different. Its similar to the argument I have with my mother over Yahoo. She views them as the best thing the internet has ever seen. She chooses them over google daily. For a long time I tried to talk her into using another search tool and game site. She stuck with Yahoo because of her personal experiences. I stay away from Yahoo because of my personal experience*. If you don't like google, just don't use any of their products and chose something else. The same goes for IE, Windows, etc. Modern computing is about choice.
* If you are curious about my hatred of Yahoo, its simply a flaw in their early childrens search feature. Their advertising code displayed a porno ad to a 7 year old I was watching and nearly lost me my job. His search was totally unrelated and quite clean.
One fall is different that 20+. Besides, those clamshell models have problems with the hinges over time. You pay a premium to get replacements from anyone. My wife's original first gen iBook is still running, but its very fragile at this point. It does run OpenBSD well. It was almost ok with Mac OS 10.3, but the disk space requirements took up the whole drive.
Darwin isn't FreeBSD. Apple has imported code from NetBSD and FreeBSD for userland, but saying its a FreeBSD based OS when the kernel is so different is silly.
I don't really care about an Apple phone right now. I'd rather have the "iTV". The rumors of an apple iPhone might be true, or it could be a scraped project. It could even be that POS phone developed and used by cingular. I don't think many investors want apple to enter that market. It doesn't make sense unless they want to try to protect the iPod from music phones. I'd rather have a phone thats just a phone and works right with long battery life. There are many times I want an iPod but not a cell phone.
Yes, and someone from any party can be corrupt. This also plays into a stereotype about democrats... remember the videos run about bush and gore during that campaign? Al Gore wasn't raised poor either. Even in different parties, politicians have much in common.
Retail sales are hurt, but not OEM. If someone needs a new PC, they will buy one even if vista has bad ratings. Two people in my family bought windows me based pcs. The first was my mother and she only got rid of it last month as I built her a new PC with Windows XP on it. The second was my wife's grandmother. She still uses Windows ME every day.
I agree it was the worst windows release since 1.0 but that didn't stop it from selling. Besides, Microsoft is used to bad sales at first on products. Remember the xbox? Now many people recommend the xbox 360 over other consoles.
Mono runs on linux, sort of on Mac OS X (not ASP.net though) and a bit on solaris. That is about it. It does not run well on the BSDs. While I think the write once, run anywhere "promise" is bullshit, Java does run on more platforms than mono does.
.NET for a quick and dirty app for the web or desktop. I can also say that Java is on the way out. My wife is a consultant and regularly works with .NET and occasionally with PHP. I've only heard her talk about two Java projects and one was really cold fusion running in a servlet container (as the new ones are java based). The other was a desktop application which was GPL'd by the client. So Microsoft is winning on that level.
.NET for gui applications and web applications to Java. The only redeeming quality is the portability. I don't accept Mono as a replacement since its not very portable and licensing could get weird with the Novell/Microsoft deal down the road.
In windows, nothing beats
I don't know what really big organizations are doing, and I don't care much. These same people used WebObjects and like J2EE for all its complexity. Lets face it, Java's real push was that IBM liked it just as they do Linux. It saved them money to push Sun's product as they didn't have to write anything themselves and people still will go to IBM no matter what. In fact, when IBM started pushing Linux my opinion of it dropped. IBM always blows it with operating systems. Look at OS/2. It also happens in other areas. Everybody got Notes and Smartsuite running at work?
As a programmer, I prefer
You might be right about that. I felt rather safe from copyright infringement as a teen. I ran websites with bootleg music and things.
Well if the RIAA isn't going to hold idiots with computers responsible, why would a technical savvy parent be held responsible? They didn't necessarily teach their children not to use kazaa or whatever.
By saying the parent is not responsible, and most of us can assume many children do not know the law, then its safe to say that the RIAA is responsible for not getting the message how to CHILDREN not to download music. I guess they need to start running ads on cartoon network and so forth.