I find it extremely useful to use a unix/linux box as a router/file server at home. I use a dynamic dns service which lets me access my personal files from anywhere over ssh/sftp. I'm a college student, and its saved me more than once when I needed to review notes or when i forgot to print a paper due in 20 minutes!
I've got the machine setup with samba and nfs so i can mount my documents and home directories on all the computers here. Regardless of the os i'm using, my files are accessible. On my laptop, I setup an nfs mount thats automatic (mac os x) so if i'm home its an icon on the desktop and if i'm away or not on the network it doesn't mount.
In my case, i use freebsd but its the same diff if you use a linux distro.
As for power consumption, i noticed my electric bill went up between 5 and 10 dollars a month. Its closer to 10 in the summer months since I have to pay to run the air conditioner to offset the heat the computer puts off. My current system is an AMD Sempron 2300+ with 256mb ram, two pci nics and 2 sata wd first gen 7200 rpm 80gb drives. I'm using an ATI firegl agp card that came with my dell workstation and i have a dvd drive and about 4 fans. The fans are set to run low and i have a "silent" power supply so its not too bad. Before the fans, the machine would overheat on hot days and crash. I initially started with a 120mm case fan, stock amd heatsink/fan and a fan on the firegl card. I added a 90mm fan and a fan from another amd heatsink. The latter is very loud actually and i plan on replacing it. The system cost me about 400 dollars to build using newegg in april. I had the dvd drive and firegl card but everything else is new. (Antec case, power supply, fan, etc)
I also setup a kvm switch so i can switch between bsd and my main pc (windows, linux, solaris, freebsd quad boot setup). Its nice to have x11 with firefox handy in the morning to check email etc.
One warning though, using a pc as an internet gateway and file server probably isn't the most secure thing to do. If someone ever got in, i'd be out a lot of data. I do have samba locked to my internal network/interface and the firewall blocks outside nfs/samba traffic.
One last positive to using a computer as a gateway instead of an appliance is speed. My 3mb cable modem package would slow down my netgear router/switch and i'd need to reboot it about once a week. It was even worse with my previous smc router. I've noticed a significant speed increase with file transfers and i can leave the machine up indefinetely. It does seem to have problems with msn file transfers, but thats probably a misconfiguration with ipfw + natd on my end. Downloading using firefox i see about 20kbps a second more on full speed transfers. 1-2kbps more if done directly on the file server. I've even got a voip phone working behind it!
Funny.. but lets get even more specific.. versions of vi..
vi nvi vim...
I vote for nvi since i don't need syntax hilighting in the CLI.
As for emacs, some people roll that way.. i don't.
Back to database land... does anyone know of any resource on migrating between mysql and postgres? I've been thinking about porting my blogging software to postgres from mysql. It has terrible mysql specific sql in it at the moment and tons of data to convert. Any thoughts?
Mysql used to have a bad JDBC driver. I found I could not use Prepared statements very reliably with mysql. In fact, I thought it was a java problem for the longest time. I've heard the newer drivers work well.
Mysql is like redhat.. its commercial and the goal is to make money. I wish people would realize that. There is nothing wrong with it and its what the GPL is all about. The protection is for the user and the person who wrote the software.
Personally, I chose mysql because it seemed easier to administer than postgresql when I first tried it. I'd use oracle if I could afford it or Microsoft SQL which i'm most familiar with. Oracle and MS SQL do not run on my platform of choice though. (FreeBSD)
Appleworks doesn't compete with office, it competes with Microsoft Works. Those two are in the same class. I can't believe you even tried to compare word to appleworks.
Keynote is better than powerpoint simply because the user interface is easier to use. They have almost the same functionality and arguably keynote has better templates.
What I'd like to see is more functionality it pages to make it possible to use as a word replacement or another app that is a replacement. Likewise, an excel replacement from apple would be great.
Currently, I use Word, Excel and Keynote on my mac and avoid the windows version of office. I have a mac laptop and pc desktop on my desk so I have the choice but always use the Mac version of Word. I think the user interface is much cleaner and since its a Mac the text is easier to read.
As a whole suite, you are right at the moment. Microsoft Office is the best, but the Mac version and not the Windows version. Its all about the user interface. And if you consider, Office was written for the Mac first it makes sense.
I'm mad at Sun for not making openoffice/staroffice native for the Mac. Sure there is that fork with the cocoa gui but its not the same experience. OpenOffice works great in Linux or BSD but i don't like using it in X11 on osx because of issues with copy and paste. It totally sucks in Windows. Too slow.
Then there's IBM. They killed Lotus SmartSuite. I used to love using WordPro and 123 over any other application. They are essentially stale and Mac versions do not exist.
I never liked WordPerfect but I certainly hope that takes off again just to get innovation in Microsoft Office. Any apps in the windows version that are new seem lame. Look at InfoPath or whatever its called. What does that do? It seems like a big overlap to Microsoft Access to me. Access is useless. We don't need two of them! Sure, some argue it has useful features for business people but often that could be done in a spreadsheet or needs to scale into a real database. How hard is it to make a quick vb app to interact with a database these days? Do we need access forms that break constantly?
I think the grandparent made a comment about an email client. Outlook should be included with windows instead of outlook express. At 300 dollars for Windows XP Pro, don't you think an enterprise email client should come with it? If anything, it would encourage upgrades of windows to get the new exchange client. My logic is that if Microsoft bundles their apps together, it will encourage sales initially but hurt them far more in the long run. A company like say pfizer is going to love it but redhat or novell can turn around and sell enterprise linux with evolution and so forth to compete head on. It may help push linux on the desktop at work. If people use it at work, they want it at home. Likewise, redhat and suse should give out copies for free at schools so those kids come home and ask for it. Choice in the computer industry is who can get the biggest market share and then force you to use their product. People want one solution for everything. As long as innovation occurs, it doesn't matter.
There are a few smaller ones but no one will take them on ebay. Try to pay with an alternative! Occasionally i see western union epayment options.
I've had problems with paypal because my wife and i have seperate paypal and ebay accounts. My account can't be "verified" because we have one bank account. You can't have two accounts tied to one bank account with paypal. Then assholes on ebay require verfied paypal accounts which means i can't buy from them. Trying to convince my wife to buy a sun sparc box isn't going to happen:)
The issue is that people want one system for convenience sake. I suspect thats why debit mastercards and the like are popular instead of real credit cards now. Many people think its odd i have a real credit card especially in my age group. I'm a college student. (26)
Yes, but thast not all bad. Not every user on the computer wants the exact same music. Before I switched to a mac laptop, my mac desktop shared music with my wife's powermac. We had everything mapped on it and then i had mac os automount it on startup. Back when i had os9, i had an old pc act as an NT4 file server with afp on. All the mp3s were on that and accessible from my windows box too.
Now i find i want my music with me and we've bought music from itunes individual. Problem now is my entire laptop drive is used with music. If only i could trust windows not to die or open encrypted aac files in my linux or bsd installs.
Quality does matter. Most of the 35 dollar sets of tv shows i've bought had imperfections on the disks. For example, Knight rider season 1 has an unplayable episode and the knight rider 2000 movie does not play all the way through. In fact it dies right after "scotty" at the ATM. I've never had a problem with a star trek dvd playing. Season 2 of knight rider has a skip in an episode, macgyver has an unplayable episode in season 1. Its not my dvd player either.. i have 2 dvd players and 3 computers that can play dvds. All do it.
Likewise i have 1 simpsons disk thats bad and its got my third favorite episode when mr. burns runs for president and the fish is served to him (blinky?).
24 does not even come close to star trek. Don't try to compare them.
As for the price, it is very high but almost worth it. The sound quality on these is better than the earlier dvd release. I was able to pay for one season with the money from selling the few TOS dvds on ebay that i had bought before. I also sold vhs copies of episodes my grandfather picked up at a garage sale (CBS/Columbia house set).
The other two seasons i got as a gift. If you only can afford one season, i'd tell ya to get season 1. Season 2 is ok but season 3 is weak.
Remember though this is TOS and not some hack show from 20+ years in the future. Its worth some money.
You are absolutely right... I didn't drop out of high school because I was bored. I was depressed, not getting dinner, lunch and breakfast regularly, my mom was throwing wild parties with people my age, giving blow jobs in front of me, and begging me to get drunk, have sex with her coworkers, and smoke some pot. It had nothing to do with the fact I played DOOM on my pc. Hell I think DOOM helped me get anger out on virtual people instead of real ones! (yes i got a ged and later an associates degree, got married an live sort of normal now) It only took getting away from my mother!
I still enjoy a game of Enemy territory and WoW from time to time.
The following things must happen for GNU/Linux to take over the desktop:
1. Must ship on desktops and laptops from big vendors. (Dell, HP, IBM, Gateway, etc)
2. Must have a standarized GUI for all machines. The linux/unix choice idea has to go out the window. Yeah it sucks, but all machines MUST ship with the same UI. Thats why windows is on all desktops now. Its the SAME if you buy a dell, hp, gateway, etc.
3. Must be binary compatible on all sold systems shipping it. I have to be able to play enemy territory, run open office, firefox, etc without worrying about x11 libraries, open gl support, or even what kernel version I have. My mom can't do that!
4. Must be totally usable from a GUI. Control panel, installing software, and any other operation done on a pc must happen in the GUI.
5. Must have a consistant versioning scheme so lamers know if they can use a software package. Not redhat 9 or suse 9.2.. we need a Linux standard like the pc98 standard is to pcs... there are several movements for this but they must be pushed on the box in big bold letters! It must be on the about menu and in the help documents!
6. Finally, there must be a set of applications that are pushed for a given task that all the systems have. Sure you can do firefox vs opera all day long but lamers know the big blue e. You don't need Internet Explorer but you do need that one app say firefox that all users know is the "Internet".
In order to do these steps, we need one distro on all machines or a very strict standard that ALL distros follow. It will never happen. This is what Microsoft has on the Linux community when you cut the crap.
The only reason apple exists is because they have a monopoly on their hardware and so they control OSX on all macs. Its guaranteed that a Mac will have OSX and it will have safari and open gl and run iWork and iLife and The sims 2.
This change isn't just technical, its a mindset that the Linux world doesn't want to be in. Its the final sell out. Its the end of the hippie GNU free as in freedom BS. Users don't want free as in freedom.. they want software to work and they don't want to know what software is! The world wants one computer interface and we don't want to let go!
If you love the GNU and what it stands for, fight for lamers NOT to embrase linux. If you like linux because its free as in money, then push away and watch the cost go up. We don't get a free lunch in this world. And finally, if you are a hobbiest like me then enjoy the diversity of software. There's a lot of great stuff out there including linux, windowmaker, gnome, kde, firefox, freebsd, etc.
Yes, road blocks will not stop most accidents. For exmaple, I was involved in an accident in january. It totaled (sp?) my car. I was leaving my university and stopped at a light. There were about 7 cars in front of me and no one behind me yet or in the distance. It was light traffic as the semester had not resumed yet. The speed limit was 35 mph on this road and it was a public road that happened to cut through the boarder of the university property. The cross road is extremely busy, probably has the most traffic congestion in the city.
Some idiot driving a mini van with 2 kids in the back decided to TURN AROUND going 45 mph to YELL AT HIS KIDS. He ran right into me. My air bag deflated and i ran into the car in front which in turn ran into another and 5 cars were involved total in the accident. He was not drinking and it was about 5:15PM. It was bright outside and there is a slight incline but he should have seen me before turning around. My car was silver-plum so you couldn't miss it! I actually saw him turn around in my rear view mirror! His kids and everyone in the accident but me had to go to the hospital for back problems and other issues. I was scared to get in a car for 2 months and now I still get really nervous if a van, suv or big truck are pulling up behind me at a light.
I hate to give up driving as I enjoy it. With idiots on the road like that trying to kill their kids, i'd rather have the robots.
2% can cause problems. I have a MSI motherboard with an nforce2 chipset plus SATA nvraid controller. By default, MSI shipped the board 2% overclocked. My sata controller is very sensitive to the bus speed for some reason. I experienced slow disk corruption on one of the drivers. Luckily it wasn't the disk with/home on it. Eventually I figured out the overclock settings and manually forced the correct timings. Now the disk is stable and i've even been able to switch over to a raid 1 setup with the two sata drives.
In case anyone is curious, I first thought it was a cable problem and tried 5 different sata cables from different vendors on that channel. I did full tests on the drive with every program that would run. (spinrite would not run on that system) It has an AMD Sempron 2300+, Corsair value select PC2700 256mb chip, 2 western digital first generation SATA drives 80gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache (identical).
Of course, i've tried playing with overclocking a little because I wanted to prove it was the overclocking. The corruption starts at about 2% overclocked. 1% doesn't do much at all. It could be the cheap processor or ram too. If thats so, I hope asus customers always overbuy on memory and cpus.
As for asus, i used to think they were great. Then I tried to run freebsd 5.x on an asus motherboard. I want ACPI support from my motherboard vendors. Asus doesn't feel they need to finish their ACPI support in their bioses but sadly MSI does.
I just want to comment on the last part of that quoute "There really is no such thing as a free lunch". I don't think anyone truely belives that all OSS is free as in money! I mean lets face it, aside from ubuntu who gives out free cds you have to at least pay for bandwith to download software. If you go on the economist view that time is money, obviously initial investment into learning/setting up OSS is higher than using windows or OS X. Even with ubuntu, what are they doing with your postal address, etc?
Lets look at REAL total cost of ownership for a minute. What actually costs money?
1. Acquiring the software. This could mean buying it from a store, downloading it if its OSS (bandwith fees and blank media) or some closed source download service (sun store, microsft licensing, etc) Licensing is included here.
2. Paying someone to set it up for you (IT worker)
3. Maintaining the software with security patches, updates, adjustments, etc.
4. Tech support cost to answer questions about the software for your end users.
I've never seen an unbiased survey on TCO including all these points. Its hard enough to get unbiased surveys.
My personal view is that Microsoft is terrible on points 1 and 3 whereas linux is terrible on points 2 and 4. The reason we can't get a definitive answer is that each company has a different situation so the costs for each point change. What is correct for company A is not right for company B.
Open source software will never win out on point 2 (setup) but I do believe that ease of use is the key here. Linux distros are easier to use than in the past. When I started on Redhat 5, it wasn't pleasant to setup. The last Redhat install I did was a joke (redhat 9). I think windows is harder to install and thats a no brainer. Obviously gentoo isn't so good on installation. If you look at the state of Gnome and KDE, its usable by everyday people under a linux distrobution now. I think its almost usable under a BSD. Some utilities for administration and preferences are buggy or do not work properly on a BSD currently in Gnome at least.
The biggest set back to Linux now is that a beginner searches to web to find the following:
1. Fedora is 4 cds! 2. Suse costs money. (yes its going OSS and you can download it if you're really lucky on their ftp) Its 90 dollars at the local best buy! 3. Mandrake (well whatever they call themselves now) costs money. Again I suspect you can download it via ftp, but lamers don't know that.
Any other distro is marked as too hard on many sites.
If you go to Redhat.com, you see 300 dollar price tags on free software. This discourages corporate adoption as CEOs see this and not Gentoo or Debian. Windows costs 300 dollars and not for corporate users with volume licensing!
And that is exactly why I won't buy an xbox 360. The hole point to having a console is to know that your games will always work. Thats why I have 5 different consoles in my home. My old windows 95 and dos games usually don't run on my pc anymore, but my SNES still works great!
I've avoided the original xbox because I heard there were compatibility problems with early consoles and CONTROLLERS. I'm not about to let the microsoft write lots break everywhere philosophy ruin my console gaming too. Since microsoft likes to steal and lie maybe they should use sun's "write once run anywhere" philosophy as marketing talk for their new xbox to make the package complete!
The irony here is that you think blind people use lynx. I bought into that until I started working on a site for a blind businessman. He has a Dell with IE! Of course there is software to read the sites to him, but he actually uses IE!!!!!
He can access a lot more information than I thought he could on sites. Forms are cumbersome, but he can use them. He is fine with drop down menus and he said that the most annoying thing is navigation on sites. DHTML menus are bad and navigation at the bottom with symbols in between like pipe, etc. throw him off. The stuff the w3 feeds us about using headings is way off. He doesn't seem to care on his site. His sited assistant insists on headings for font sizes.
What i've learned from him is to include a drop down or text links for everything somewhere, don't use flash or dhtml for navigation or exclusive content display, and avoid images for depicting information that is important.
My wife tried to teach him about hyperlinks one day. He has problems understanding relative links. Even the w3 only has images to depict the diferences. The text makes no sense without the images. That confused him greatly!
Yes and it will be nice to call American technical support again. It will be nice not to have to buy a substandard pc with crappy motherboards and try to run windows on it. I used to hate windows until i got my current system, but i paid through the teeth. Then i have this desire to have a mac for everyday stuff, graphics, programming, and a few games. It will save me money.
My only concert is the NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP fiasco when NeXT went Intel and later stopped selling NEXTSTEP all together. I hope steve jobs doesn't relive history!
My home contains 3 macs, 2 pcs and a sun sparc. I'm planning on selling the sparc as the macs and my freebsd box fulfill my needs. Two of the macs are my wife's and she got me to get into Apple boxes. As for the post above about hardware support, i'm concerned simply because of the *BSDs history with drivers. Try to get an ATI Radeon 9600 chipset to work in XORG without linux binary drivers. Worse yet, mine's an All in wonder 9600xt 128mb and the PCI id isn't even there. I've begged for them to add it. 2d acceleration sort of works, but forget 3d. Likewise, my old firegl 8800 chipset freezes the whole box when i try to use it accelerated. Apple could have serious problems ahead. Of course they have the advantage of being a real company so they can sign NDAs and so forth for drivers.
Perhaps but the cops used to use MS Word.. switching from MS products to open office is not intuitive. The menus are not the same. In the cases they are, the behavior is different. The same is true if you tried to switch to word perfect which more closely tries to be be Word. I actually think Lotus WordPro is easier because the interface is so different that you have to look at it.
Users hate behavior changes when switching. Thats why some can't use firefox or switch from windows to Mac OS X or Linux + KDE or Gnome.
Remember lamers memorize "screens". Each new screen is a completely different concept. Some cops are very intelligent and others have AOL at home.. if you know what i mean.
You have to rebuy Microsoft office yes... antivirus is not needed
WOW CD/DVD sets work on both platforms because blizzard is a GOOD company.
Firefox works on a mac as does most of the source forge stuff since its UNIX and has X11 built in. For others, try Fink. You can get gnome, kde, ethereal and tons of other packages by 2 mouse clicks from an optional fink gui for the mac.
As for games, i'm tired of the no games rants. Yes there are more games for windows, but quality games are available for Mac OS X or classic. Lets look at my cd shelf for a minute.. just mac games..
WOW Warcraft 3 and frozen throne Warcraft 2 Starcraft and expansion Diablo 1 and 2 Return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory tropico 1 and 2 Railroad tycoon 3 star wars tie fighter quake 3 arena and expansion Age of empires II Star Wars battlegrounds
Plus i have quake 1, doom/doom 2, and a ton of open source games on my mac. If you're into piracy, you can get console emulators for practically anything.
Other games i know that are out for mac: halo doom 3 several tom clancy games neverwinter nights several unreal tournament games nascar games tony hawk pro skater games (2 and 4 for sure) The sims The sims 2 expansions for sims games America's army...
Its a big list...
The most notable exceptions are Valve games since they won't port steam.
There are a lot of games.. many popular games on that list. Worst case buy an xbox 360 or ps3 when they come out!
I think your 95% number is high unless you like crappy software.
Apps are fairly easy to replace.. thats why people can run mac os x, linux or bsd as their primary desktops! VPC and vmware help the rest of the way.
Windows XP is stable with common cheap hardware.. i.e. built in sound cards, built in nics, intel/ati/nvidia low end cards, ide hard drives. I personally get blue screens thanks to creative's lovely sound blaster audigy driver. It works fine in linux or freebsd though. THe problem with xp isn't stability, its performance. Compare a ping in WOW on a mac vs pc. Its night and day.. and i mean my dual xeon 2 gig vs my wife's powermac g4 dual 867. Her ping is under 100 when mine is over 200. Same network and i have an intel gig e pci-x card. Thats just one case. Try enemy territory in linux vs windows some time. Check your ping. Windows has a slow TCP stack. Try comparing windows vs X11 using a good window manager. (gnome and kde are not peppy! yeah its an environment...)
Finally, here's one more pro for you.. no loss of productivity from viruses or spyware. This may change if the mac platform takes off, but now its lovely to open up emails and not think about it.
Jumping the gun are we? We haven't even hit the clone wars phase yet! America's got pleanty of tricks up its sleeve, if only george lucas would invent more ideas for us! This one might be handled better by a guy with a whip, a pistol and a funny hat! Perhaps if his father came along...
They are different types of languages so comparing them makes little sense. I disagree that xml is hard to read though. Some people create lame schemas that are hard to use (see tomcat config files for an example). Note i used () there:)
In most cases, XML is used to markup data to make it more meaningful to the computer. A tag indicates some property or identifier on data. An extension of this idea makes it useful. RDF comes to mind.
I personally like to use xml heavily for data storage when writing web applications. I find that it allows my mind to shift into a different mode based on what i'm looking at. I can focus on user data vs business logic (code). Some people don't like that approach. To some, a print statement with an embedded output string can be more clear than a template sucked in from a file and printed to the screen.
Language A is better than Language B wars never solve anything. Its like comparing C and C++. One is a much more straightforward attempt at OO than the other. Interestingly, you can manually follow many OO principles in C. I guess it makes sense if you look at Objective C. People have been arguing that for years.
For fun, lets bring up web development languages next... that always causes fights. PHP vs Perl vs Python vs Ruby vs C# vs VB.NET vs Java vs C (cgi's are fun right?) vs... I did not put that in the order i like btw!
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I find it extremely useful to use a unix/linux box as a router/file server at home. I use a dynamic dns service which lets me access my personal files from anywhere over ssh/sftp. I'm a college student, and its saved me more than once when I needed to review notes or when i forgot to print a paper due in 20 minutes!
I've got the machine setup with samba and nfs so i can mount my documents and home directories on all the computers here. Regardless of the os i'm using, my files are accessible. On my laptop, I setup an nfs mount thats automatic (mac os x) so if i'm home its an icon on the desktop and if i'm away or not on the network it doesn't mount.
In my case, i use freebsd but its the same diff if you use a linux distro.
As for power consumption, i noticed my electric bill went up between 5 and 10 dollars a month. Its closer to 10 in the summer months since I have to pay to run the air conditioner to offset the heat the computer puts off. My current system is an AMD Sempron 2300+ with 256mb ram, two pci nics and 2 sata wd first gen 7200 rpm 80gb drives. I'm using an ATI firegl agp card that came with my dell workstation and i have a dvd drive and about 4 fans. The fans are set to run low and i have a "silent" power supply so its not too bad. Before the fans, the machine would overheat on hot days and crash. I initially started with a 120mm case fan, stock amd heatsink/fan and a fan on the firegl card. I added a 90mm fan and a fan from another amd heatsink. The latter is very loud actually and i plan on replacing it. The system cost me about 400 dollars to build using newegg in april. I had the dvd drive and firegl card but everything else is new. (Antec case, power supply, fan, etc)
I also setup a kvm switch so i can switch between bsd and my main pc (windows, linux, solaris, freebsd quad boot setup). Its nice to have x11 with firefox handy in the morning to check email etc.
One warning though, using a pc as an internet gateway and file server probably isn't the most secure thing to do. If someone ever got in, i'd be out a lot of data. I do have samba locked to my internal network/interface and the firewall blocks outside nfs/samba traffic.
One last positive to using a computer as a gateway instead of an appliance is speed. My 3mb cable modem package would slow down my netgear router/switch and i'd need to reboot it about once a week. It was even worse with my previous smc router. I've noticed a significant speed increase with file transfers and i can leave the machine up indefinetely. It does seem to have problems with msn file transfers, but thats probably a misconfiguration with ipfw + natd on my end. Downloading using firefox i see about 20kbps a second more on full speed transfers. 1-2kbps more if done directly on the file server. I've even got a voip phone working behind it!
Funny.. but lets get even more specific.. versions of vi..
...
vi
nvi
vim
I vote for nvi since i don't need syntax hilighting in the CLI.
As for emacs, some people roll that way.. i don't.
Back to database land... does anyone know of any resource on migrating between mysql and postgres? I've been thinking about porting my blogging software to postgres from mysql. It has terrible mysql specific sql in it at the moment and tons of data to convert. Any thoughts?
Mysql used to have a bad JDBC driver. I found I could not use Prepared statements very reliably with mysql. In fact, I thought it was a java problem for the longest time. I've heard the newer drivers work well.
Mysql is like redhat.. its commercial and the goal is to make money. I wish people would realize that. There is nothing wrong with it and its what the GPL is all about. The protection is for the user and the person who wrote the software.
Personally, I chose mysql because it seemed easier to administer than postgresql when I first tried it. I'd use oracle if I could afford it or Microsoft SQL which i'm most familiar with. Oracle and MS SQL do not run on my platform of choice though. (FreeBSD)
Appleworks doesn't compete with office, it competes with Microsoft Works. Those two are in the same class. I can't believe you even tried to compare word to appleworks.
Keynote is better than powerpoint simply because the user interface is easier to use. They have almost the same functionality and arguably keynote has better templates.
What I'd like to see is more functionality it pages to make it possible to use as a word replacement or another app that is a replacement. Likewise, an excel replacement from apple would be great.
Currently, I use Word, Excel and Keynote on my mac and avoid the windows version of office. I have a mac laptop and pc desktop on my desk so I have the choice but always use the Mac version of Word. I think the user interface is much cleaner and since its a Mac the text is easier to read.
As a whole suite, you are right at the moment. Microsoft Office is the best, but the Mac version and not the Windows version. Its all about the user interface. And if you consider, Office was written for the Mac first it makes sense.
I'm mad at Sun for not making openoffice/staroffice native for the Mac. Sure there is that fork with the cocoa gui but its not the same experience. OpenOffice works great in Linux or BSD but i don't like using it in X11 on osx because of issues with copy and paste. It totally sucks in Windows. Too slow.
Then there's IBM. They killed Lotus SmartSuite. I used to love using WordPro and 123 over any other application. They are essentially stale and Mac versions do not exist.
I never liked WordPerfect but I certainly hope that takes off again just to get innovation in Microsoft Office. Any apps in the windows version that are new seem lame. Look at InfoPath or whatever its called. What does that do? It seems like a big overlap to Microsoft Access to me. Access is useless. We don't need two of them! Sure, some argue it has useful features for business people but often that could be done in a spreadsheet or needs to scale into a real database. How hard is it to make a quick vb app to interact with a database these days? Do we need access forms that break constantly?
I think the grandparent made a comment about an email client. Outlook should be included with windows instead of outlook express. At 300 dollars for Windows XP Pro, don't you think an enterprise email client should come with it? If anything, it would encourage upgrades of windows to get the new exchange client. My logic is that if Microsoft bundles their apps together, it will encourage sales initially but hurt them far more in the long run. A company like say pfizer is going to love it but redhat or novell can turn around and sell enterprise linux with evolution and so forth to compete head on. It may help push linux on the desktop at work. If people use it at work, they want it at home. Likewise, redhat and suse should give out copies for free at schools so those kids come home and ask for it. Choice in the computer industry is who can get the biggest market share and then force you to use their product. People want one solution for everything. As long as innovation occurs, it doesn't matter.
There are a few smaller ones but no one will take them on ebay. Try to pay with an alternative! Occasionally i see western union epayment options.
:)
I've had problems with paypal because my wife and i have seperate paypal and ebay accounts. My account can't be "verified" because we have one bank account. You can't have two accounts tied to one bank account with paypal. Then assholes on ebay require verfied paypal accounts which means i can't buy from them. Trying to convince my wife to buy a sun sparc box isn't going to happen
The issue is that people want one system for convenience sake. I suspect thats why debit mastercards and the like are popular instead of real credit cards now. Many people think its odd i have a real credit card especially in my age group. I'm a college student. (26)
Yes, but thast not all bad. Not every user on the computer wants the exact same music. Before I switched to a mac laptop, my mac desktop shared music with my wife's powermac. We had everything mapped on it and then i had mac os automount it on startup. Back when i had os9, i had an old pc act as an NT4 file server with afp on. All the mp3s were on that and accessible from my windows box too.
Now i find i want my music with me and we've bought music from itunes individual. Problem now is my entire laptop drive is used with music. If only i could trust windows not to die or open encrypted aac files in my linux or bsd installs.
Quality does matter. Most of the 35 dollar sets of tv shows i've bought had imperfections on the disks. For example, Knight rider season 1 has an unplayable episode and the knight rider 2000 movie does not play all the way through. In fact it dies right after "scotty" at the ATM. I've never had a problem with a star trek dvd playing. Season 2 of knight rider has a skip in an episode, macgyver has an unplayable episode in season 1. Its not my dvd player either.. i have 2 dvd players and 3 computers that can play dvds. All do it. Likewise i have 1 simpsons disk thats bad and its got my third favorite episode when mr. burns runs for president and the fish is served to him (blinky?).
24 does not even come close to star trek. Don't try to compare them.
As for the price, it is very high but almost worth it. The sound quality on these is better than the earlier dvd release. I was able to pay for one season with the money from selling the few TOS dvds on ebay that i had bought before. I also sold vhs copies of episodes my grandfather picked up at a garage sale (CBS/Columbia house set).
The other two seasons i got as a gift. If you only can afford one season, i'd tell ya to get season 1. Season 2 is ok but season 3 is weak.
Remember though this is TOS and not some hack show from 20+ years in the future. Its worth some money.
You are absolutely right... I didn't drop out of high school because I was bored. I was depressed, not getting dinner, lunch and breakfast regularly, my mom was throwing wild parties with people my age, giving blow jobs in front of me, and begging me to get drunk, have sex with her coworkers, and smoke some pot. It had nothing to do with the fact I played DOOM on my pc. Hell I think DOOM helped me get anger out on virtual people instead of real ones! (yes i got a ged and later an associates degree, got married an live sort of normal now) It only took getting away from my mother!
I still enjoy a game of Enemy territory and WoW from time to time.
The following things must happen for GNU/Linux to take over the desktop:
1. Must ship on desktops and laptops from big vendors. (Dell, HP, IBM, Gateway, etc)
2. Must have a standarized GUI for all machines. The linux/unix choice idea has to go out the window. Yeah it sucks, but all machines MUST ship with the same UI. Thats why windows is on all desktops now. Its the SAME if you buy a dell, hp, gateway, etc.
3. Must be binary compatible on all sold systems shipping it. I have to be able to play enemy territory, run open office, firefox, etc without worrying about x11 libraries, open gl support, or even what kernel version I have. My mom can't do that!
4. Must be totally usable from a GUI. Control panel, installing software, and any other operation done on a pc must happen in the GUI.
5. Must have a consistant versioning scheme so lamers know if they can use a software package. Not redhat 9 or suse 9.2.. we need a Linux standard like the pc98 standard is to pcs... there are several movements for this but they must be pushed on the box in big bold letters! It must be on the about menu and in the help documents!
6. Finally, there must be a set of applications that are pushed for a given task that all the systems have. Sure you can do firefox vs opera all day long but lamers know the big blue e. You don't need Internet Explorer but you do need that one app say firefox that all users know is the "Internet".
In order to do these steps, we need one distro on all machines or a very strict standard that ALL distros follow. It will never happen. This is what Microsoft has on the Linux community when you cut the crap.
The only reason apple exists is because they have a monopoly on their hardware and so they control OSX on all macs. Its guaranteed that a Mac will have OSX and it will have safari and open gl and run iWork and iLife and The sims 2.
This change isn't just technical, its a mindset that the Linux world doesn't want to be in. Its the final sell out. Its the end of the hippie GNU free as in freedom BS. Users don't want free as in freedom.. they want software to work and they don't want to know what software is! The world wants one computer interface and we don't want to let go!
If you love the GNU and what it stands for, fight for lamers NOT to embrase linux. If you like linux because its free as in money, then push away and watch the cost go up. We don't get a free lunch in this world. And finally, if you are a hobbiest like me then enjoy the diversity of software. There's a lot of great stuff out there including linux, windowmaker, gnome, kde, firefox, freebsd, etc.
You might be right, but most motherboards ship with SATA controllers now! This is a problem with overclocking.
Yes, road blocks will not stop most accidents. For exmaple, I was involved in an accident in january. It totaled (sp?) my car. I was leaving my university and stopped at a light. There were about 7 cars in front of me and no one behind me yet or in the distance. It was light traffic as the semester had not resumed yet. The speed limit was 35 mph on this road and it was a public road that happened to cut through the boarder of the university property. The cross road is extremely busy, probably has the most traffic congestion in the city.
Some idiot driving a mini van with 2 kids in the back decided to TURN AROUND going 45 mph to YELL AT HIS KIDS. He ran right into me. My air bag deflated and i ran into the car in front which in turn ran into another and 5 cars were involved total in the accident. He was not drinking and it was about 5:15PM. It was bright outside and there is a slight incline but he should have seen me before turning around. My car was silver-plum so you couldn't miss it! I actually saw him turn around in my rear view mirror! His kids and everyone in the accident but me had to go to the hospital for back problems and other issues. I was scared to get in a car for 2 months and now I still get really nervous if a van, suv or big truck are pulling up behind me at a light.
I hate to give up driving as I enjoy it. With idiots on the road like that trying to kill their kids, i'd rather have the robots.
2% can cause problems. I have a MSI motherboard with an nforce2 chipset plus SATA nvraid controller. By default, MSI shipped the board 2% overclocked. My sata controller is very sensitive to the bus speed for some reason. I experienced slow disk corruption on one of the drivers. Luckily it wasn't the disk with /home on it. Eventually I figured out the overclock settings and manually forced the correct timings. Now the disk is stable and i've even been able to switch over to a raid 1 setup with the two sata drives.
In case anyone is curious, I first thought it was a cable problem and tried 5 different sata cables from different vendors on that channel. I did full tests on the drive with every program that would run. (spinrite would not run on that system) It has an AMD Sempron 2300+, Corsair value select PC2700 256mb chip, 2 western digital first generation SATA drives 80gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache (identical).
Of course, i've tried playing with overclocking a little because I wanted to prove it was the overclocking. The corruption starts at about 2% overclocked. 1% doesn't do much at all. It could be the cheap processor or ram too. If thats so, I hope asus customers always overbuy on memory and cpus.
As for asus, i used to think they were great. Then I tried to run freebsd 5.x on an asus motherboard. I want ACPI support from my motherboard vendors. Asus doesn't feel they need to finish their ACPI support in their bioses but sadly MSI does.
I just want to comment on the last part of that quoute "There really is no such thing as a free lunch". I don't think anyone truely belives that all OSS is free as in money! I mean lets face it, aside from ubuntu who gives out free cds you have to at least pay for bandwith to download software. If you go on the economist view that time is money, obviously initial investment into learning/setting up OSS is higher than using windows or OS X. Even with ubuntu, what are they doing with your postal address, etc?
Lets look at REAL total cost of ownership for a minute. What actually costs money?
1. Acquiring the software. This could mean buying it from a store, downloading it if its OSS (bandwith fees and blank media) or some closed source download service (sun store, microsft licensing, etc) Licensing is included here.
2. Paying someone to set it up for you (IT worker)
3. Maintaining the software with security patches, updates, adjustments, etc.
4. Tech support cost to answer questions about the software for your end users.
I've never seen an unbiased survey on TCO including all these points. Its hard enough to get unbiased surveys.
My personal view is that Microsoft is terrible on points 1 and 3 whereas linux is terrible on points 2 and 4. The reason we can't get a definitive answer is that each company has a different situation so the costs for each point change. What is correct for company A is not right for company B.
Open source software will never win out on point 2 (setup) but I do believe that ease of use is the key here. Linux distros are easier to use than in the past. When I started on Redhat 5, it wasn't pleasant to setup. The last Redhat install I did was a joke (redhat 9). I think windows is harder to install and thats a no brainer. Obviously gentoo isn't so good on installation. If you look at the state of Gnome and KDE, its usable by everyday people under a linux distrobution now. I think its almost usable under a BSD. Some utilities for administration and preferences are buggy or do not work properly on a BSD currently in Gnome at least.
The biggest set back to Linux now is that a beginner searches to web to find the following:
1. Fedora is 4 cds!
2. Suse costs money. (yes its going OSS and you can download it if you're really lucky on their ftp) Its 90 dollars at the local best buy!
3. Mandrake (well whatever they call themselves now) costs money. Again I suspect you can download it via ftp, but lamers don't know that.
Any other distro is marked as too hard on many sites.
If you go to Redhat.com, you see 300 dollar price tags on free software. This discourages corporate adoption as CEOs see this and not Gentoo or Debian. Windows costs 300 dollars and not for corporate users with volume licensing!
I meant whole not hole.. thinking about microsoft I just used hole.. hmm..
And that is exactly why I won't buy an xbox 360. The hole point to having a console is to know that your games will always work. Thats why I have 5 different consoles in my home. My old windows 95 and dos games usually don't run on my pc anymore, but my SNES still works great!
I've avoided the original xbox because I heard there were compatibility problems with early consoles and CONTROLLERS. I'm not about to let the microsoft write lots break everywhere philosophy ruin my console gaming too. Since microsoft likes to steal and lie maybe they should use sun's "write once run anywhere" philosophy as marketing talk for their new xbox to make the package complete!
The irony here is that you think blind people use lynx. I bought into that until I started working on a site for a blind businessman. He has a Dell with IE! Of course there is software to read the sites to him, but he actually uses IE!!!!!
He can access a lot more information than I thought he could on sites. Forms are cumbersome, but he can use them. He is fine with drop down menus and he said that the most annoying thing is navigation on sites. DHTML menus are bad and navigation at the bottom with symbols in between like pipe, etc. throw him off. The stuff the w3 feeds us about using headings is way off. He doesn't seem to care on his site. His sited assistant insists on headings for font sizes.
What i've learned from him is to include a drop down or text links for everything somewhere, don't use flash or dhtml for navigation or exclusive content display, and avoid images for depicting information that is important.
My wife tried to teach him about hyperlinks one day. He has problems understanding relative links. Even the w3 only has images to depict the diferences. The text makes no sense without the images. That confused him greatly!
Yes and it will be nice to call American technical support again. It will be nice not to have to buy a substandard pc with crappy motherboards and try to run windows on it. I used to hate windows until i got my current system, but i paid through the teeth. Then i have this desire to have a mac for everyday stuff, graphics, programming, and a few games. It will save me money.
My only concert is the NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP fiasco when NeXT went Intel and later stopped selling NEXTSTEP all together. I hope steve jobs doesn't relive history!
My home contains 3 macs, 2 pcs and a sun sparc. I'm planning on selling the sparc as the macs and my freebsd box fulfill my needs. Two of the macs are my wife's and she got me to get into Apple boxes. As for the post above about hardware support, i'm concerned simply because of the *BSDs history with drivers. Try to get an ATI Radeon 9600 chipset to work in XORG without linux binary drivers. Worse yet, mine's an All in wonder 9600xt 128mb and the PCI id isn't even there. I've begged for them to add it. 2d acceleration sort of works, but forget 3d. Likewise, my old firegl 8800 chipset freezes the whole box when i try to use it accelerated. Apple could have serious problems ahead. Of course they have the advantage of being a real company so they can sign NDAs and so forth for drivers.
Every blizzard release is simultaneous for Mac/PC. Some companies get it right.
Security through obscurity helps linux too. Any system is vulnerable.
I made a list of games I have which do include older ones.
If you want to see a current list lookup Aspyr or MacSoft's current projects on their sites.
Perhaps but the cops used to use MS Word.. switching from MS products to open office is not intuitive. The menus are not the same. In the cases they are, the behavior is different. The same is true if you tried to switch to word perfect which more closely tries to be be Word. I actually think Lotus WordPro is easier because the interface is so different that you have to look at it.
Users hate behavior changes when switching. Thats why some can't use firefox or switch from windows to Mac OS X or Linux + KDE or Gnome.
Remember lamers memorize "screens". Each new screen is a completely different concept. Some cops are very intelligent and others have AOL at home.. if you know what i mean.
Rebuy all your software? No. Some yes...
...
You have to rebuy Microsoft office yes...
antivirus is not needed
WOW CD/DVD sets work on both platforms because blizzard is a GOOD company.
Firefox works on a mac as does most of the source forge stuff since its UNIX and has X11 built in. For others, try Fink. You can get gnome, kde, ethereal and tons of other packages by 2 mouse clicks from an optional fink gui for the mac.
As for games, i'm tired of the no games rants. Yes there are more games for windows, but quality games are available for Mac OS X or classic. Lets look at my cd shelf for a minute.. just mac games..
WOW
Warcraft 3 and frozen throne
Warcraft 2
Starcraft and expansion
Diablo 1 and 2
Return to castle wolfenstein
enemy territory
tropico 1 and 2
Railroad tycoon 3
star wars tie fighter
quake 3 arena and expansion
Age of empires II
Star Wars battlegrounds
Plus i have quake 1, doom/doom 2, and a ton of open source games on my mac. If you're into piracy, you can get console emulators for practically anything.
Other games i know that are out for mac:
halo
doom 3
several tom clancy games
neverwinter nights
several unreal tournament games
nascar games
tony hawk pro skater games (2 and 4 for sure)
The sims
The sims 2
expansions for sims games
America's army
Its a big list...
The most notable exceptions are Valve games since they won't port steam.
There are a lot of games.. many popular games on that list. Worst case buy an xbox 360 or ps3 when they come out!
I think your 95% number is high unless you like crappy software.
Apps are fairly easy to replace.. thats why people can run mac os x, linux or bsd as their primary desktops! VPC and vmware help the rest of the way.
Windows XP is stable with common cheap hardware.. i.e. built in sound cards, built in nics, intel/ati/nvidia low end cards, ide hard drives. I personally get blue screens thanks to creative's lovely sound blaster audigy driver. It works fine in linux or freebsd though. THe problem with xp isn't stability, its performance. Compare a ping in WOW on a mac vs pc. Its night and day.. and i mean my dual xeon 2 gig vs my wife's powermac g4 dual 867. Her ping is under 100 when mine is over 200. Same network and i have an intel gig e pci-x card. Thats just one case. Try enemy territory in linux vs windows some time. Check your ping. Windows has a slow TCP stack. Try comparing windows vs X11 using a good window manager. (gnome and kde are not peppy! yeah its an environment...)
Finally, here's one more pro for you.. no loss of productivity from viruses or spyware. This may change if the mac platform takes off, but now its lovely to open up emails and not think about it.
Jumping the gun are we? We haven't even hit the clone wars phase yet! America's got pleanty of tricks up its sleeve, if only george lucas would invent more ideas for us! This one might be handled better by a guy with a whip, a pistol and a funny hat! Perhaps if his father came along...
They are different types of languages so comparing them makes little sense. I disagree that xml is hard to read though. Some people create lame schemas that are hard to use (see tomcat config files for an example). Note i used () there :)
... I did not put that in the order i like btw!
In most cases, XML is used to markup data to make it more meaningful to the computer. A tag indicates some property or identifier on data. An extension of this idea makes it useful. RDF comes to mind.
I personally like to use xml heavily for data storage when writing web applications. I find that it allows my mind to shift into a different mode based on what i'm looking at. I can focus on user data vs business logic (code). Some people don't like that approach. To some, a print statement with an embedded output string can be more clear than a template sucked in from a file and printed to the screen.
Language A is better than Language B wars never solve anything. Its like comparing C and C++. One is a much more straightforward attempt at OO than the other. Interestingly, you can manually follow many OO principles in C. I guess it makes sense if you look at Objective C. People have been arguing that for years.
For fun, lets bring up web development languages next... that always causes fights. PHP vs Perl vs Python vs Ruby vs C# vs VB.NET vs Java vs C (cgi's are fun right?) vs
There's no need.. just use the BSD license. Its already usable by everyone! (non ad clause version of course)
If you GPL something, you want to limit the use of your code by other parties. I don't see why you would want to loosen it up later.
I know this sounds like trolling. i'm just trying to point out that another license makes more sense for the parents point.
I don't know if foreign products contain back doors. I do, however, know for sure that american products will.