The best and least followed advice is simply to negotiate pay. I have always gotten at least a small increase in an offer after negotiating.
Now I'm the boss, and whenever I go into a hiring discussion I always have two figures in my head -- what I'll offer, and what I'm willing settle on. Don't be the fool who jumps at the first offer. Not only will you make less, but your boss will think less of you for it.
Interesting that it is a right-wing nation like Columbia that chooses to get it's OLPC laptops with Windows installed. There's no good reason why the choice of software should be a political decision (that goes for you too, Stallman), yet so often that is the case.
I'd like to invite some of the government officials who balked at a commie OS to my office where they can see that real business is done with open source products all the time.
Reality has a clear liberal bias. There's nothing wrong with the media portraying both candidates realistically. That meant that they talked more about McCain's negatives than Obama's, because Mcain is a vapid know-nothing with no real ideas.
BTW, there's absolutely nothing wrong with ignoring Obama's teenage drug use as it is irrelevant. The media also ignored Cindy McCain's more recent drug use (including prescription fraud that would send a less fortunate person to jail) and McCain's poor performance in the Naval Academy and throughout his military career.
We don't have to forget it, but we can de-prioritize. Personally, I think the LHC was worth it while most space boondoggles are not.
I love reading about space exploration as well as the next slashdotter, but that doesn't mean that we can't weigh costs and benefits. The gov't only has so much money, clearly there are more important things right now than the more wasteful types of space exploration.
Don't forget, we don't have a mars program in order to advance basic research and produce auxiliary technologies -- they're are cheaper and more direct ways to do that. We have a mars program because an idiot president thought it might get him a positive news story and maybe a vote or two.
Few 'Advanced' rails books?
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Perhaps it's because Rails is not an 'Advanced' language. Rails makes for quick development of cookie cutter apps, but fails to scale or customize properly. Most developers will read the intro book, but by the time they're ready for a second lesson they've already switched to something better.
...cause we clearly cannot rely on our Senators to protect our constitutional rights, at least when there's good money pushing against those rights. It's not a law yet though, the house has to sign off too.
I get as excited about space exploration as much as the next guy, but the argument that we need to get out of the solar system to further the cause of humanity is way off base. The fact is, we are not leaving the solar system any time soon. Even with an incredibly aggressive space program, it's hard to imagine even sending a couple of astronauts to the next star within the next hundred years.
What is easy to imagine happening in the next hundred years is catastrophic climate change (perhaps sped up by a CO2 spewing space program), famine, disease, war, and any number of other real problems here on Earth.
Spending billions on a space exploration program while doing little to halt climate change or provide for a growing world is not just foolish, it's almost criminal. Lets keep the space program small and focus our energies on other things. If we can focus humanities efforts and get through the next 100 years space exploration will live to see it's day. If we push hard now at the expense of more crucial projects, we may find ourselves on a desolate planet and no closer to the stars.
You can always try paying your engineers well enough that they don't jump ship when offered a job. Those who complain about poachers act as if they have some sort of right to their employees. This is not feudalism, your employees are not bound to you, if they leave it is their right. If you underpay them, treat them like shit, or give them other reasons to go, you're getting what you deserve.
Personally, I'm glad that the recruiters are out there to remind me what I'm worth from time to time, even when I'm not actively looking for a job. These guys help keep wages and benefits high by giving managers something to fear. The annoyance is well worth it.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that no one on slashdot is willing to disavow a Moon/Mars trip. I'm a techie with a hardon for space exploration too, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to blow all this money on a trip seriously lacking in scientific merit. Remember, it wasn't a scientist's idea to go to the Moon on the way to Mars, it was George Bush's. Also remember that NASA's real scientific programs are going to be seriously underfunded as a result of all this money going into the manned program.
In time we'll make it back to the moon and to mars, but lets not rush it. Our money is better spent on basic research, robotic missions, and problems on the home planet.
There's always lots of talk about velcro and other space-related spinoff technologies, but no one ever seems to mention the main one -- ICBMs. That's the real reason why the US and the Soviet Union were interested in the moon in the first place.
If we spent our money on an alternative energy program instead of manned space flight, we'd still get spinoff technology. Those spinoffs just wouldn't happen to include things that blow people up.
...recognize that the audience of the article understands that science cannot be properly directed by hacks that use spending promises from beyond their terms in office to promote programs that are easily exploitable for political gain.
Note:The cost of a manned trip to Mars would dwarf scientific NASA programs, not to mention most if not all other basic research, especially the kind that offends the Christian Right, so it's not like NASA can just painlessly start shifting all it's money over to the manned program.
Further, we aren't quick to be scared into military justifications and scare tactics. We remember the (continued) folly of missile defense, and realize that politicians can be easily fooled into throwing money at non existent threats, potential threats, and threats that don't have technical solutions, while sending soldiers in Iraq out in unarmored Humvees. With our forces and checkbooks spread thin at the moment, I'll be blunt and say we couldn't be steward of free access to space regardless of the amount of political hot air that floats around.
Cracking the Google Code... Under the GoogleScope Google's US Patent confirms information retrieval is based on historical data.
Publication Date: 5/8/2005 9:51:18 PM
Author Name: Lawrence Deon
An Introduction:...if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out... guess again.
Google's sweeping changes confirm the search giant has launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam in a continuing effort to provide the best search service in the world... and if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out... guess again.
Google has raised the bar against search engine spam and artificial link inflation to unrivaled heights with the filing of a United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005.
The filing unquestionable provides SEO's with valuable insight into Google's tightly guarded search intelligence and confirms that Google's information retrieval is based on historical data.
What exactly do these changes mean to you? Your credibility and reputation on-line are going under the Googlescope! Google has defined their patent abstract as follows:
"A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data."
Google's patent specification reveals a significant amount of information both old and new about the possible ways Google can (and likely does) use your web page updates to determine the ranking of your site in the SERPs.
Unfortunately, the patent filing does not prioritize or conclusively confirm any specific method one way or the other.
Here's how Google scores your web pages.
In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. What's new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page.
For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn't changed and the content is not updated or 'stale'.
According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.
The frequency of all web page changes
The actual amount of the change itself... whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
Changes in keyword distribution or density
The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page). Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.
Developing your web page augments for page freshness.
Now I'm not suggesting that it's always beneficial or advisable to change the content of your web pages regularly, but it is very important to keep your pages fresh regularly and that may not necessarily mean a content change.
Google states that decayed or stale results might be desirable for information that doesn't necessarily need updating, while fresh content is good for results that require it.
How do you unravel that statement and differentiate between the two types of content?
An excellent example of this methodology is the roller coaster ride seasonal results might experience in Google's SERPs based on the actual season of the year.
It's not impossible to secure a system like IIS, but it's much more difficult to make it secure permanently, as new exploits are found.
Just because exploits aren't found, doesn't mean they're not there. You can't say a system is secure just because it's not vulnerable to known bugs. If a bug is posted tomorrow that makes all IIS servers vulnerable, it doesn't just mean that those servers are vulnerable tomorrow. They're also vulnerable today.
I just dipped a few dozen foxes in lighter fluid and set them scurrying around the park aflame, but those damn firefox people just called me a sick bastard.
Point taken, but the IP doesn't have to be the unique identifier. You can always come up with as big of a key as you need to make a dictionary attack impossible (on current computers).
My point was that it is technically possible to get meaningful statistics without compromising privacy. The difficult part is verifying it independantly in a corporate environment. Still, I think it's doable.
Actually, you could get those stats (although with a slight margin of error) anonymously if you based them on a one way hash of the ip (or whatever is used as a unique identifier). What you can't do is verify this with a closed system. So the real question is, do you believe the the 'do no evil' google people really respect our privacy enough to do truly anonymous logging.
I'm not getting into the fact that Microsoft can/has purposely changed their software in order to break competitor products (or at the least make them look subpar).
I don't see how you can ignore the above fact -- it's all interrelated. MS's competitors cannot survive unless they can write windows software that's on par with what MS themselves write. That simply can't be done without going beyond the published API's.
It's like saying that GWB is an environmentalist because he talks a lot about hydrogen. Sure, he talks the talk, but everyone who knows a thing or two about environmentalism knows he's just skirting the issue. Sometimes a token effort is worse than doing nothing, because it muddles things up.
MS may talk a lot about allowing comptetition by publishing their API's, but unless it's a complete and thorough documentation of ALL API's, it just doesn't fly in my book. I don't think anyone is arguing that, for example, a windows open office programmer has all the benefits of a MS office programmer. Part of MS's business model is to keep a little piece of everything just for themselves. As long as they continue to do business that way, they'll never have a truly reliable platform.
I don't see how you can blame the vendors for this. Fact is, the reason that software breaks in unpredictable ways is because windows closed API's act unpredictably. The full details are never published, so therefore incompatibilities for future versions can be very difficult to predict.
Sure, it would be nice if more vendors had fixed their software in the past 3/4 of a year, but that's really not such a terribly long time--you can't expect all of them to have done it. Besides, this is a service pack--I've always thought that a major distinctions between patches/services packs and new versions is that there is a much lower tolerance for incompatibilities in SP's. If anyone complains when longhorn comes out and it breaks some apps, they'd have a much weaker argument than those who complain about the SP.
The way I see it, this problem comes down to a general philosophical opposition to open standards and api's at MS. As a web developer, I see these problems all the time. MS refuses to use web standards in IE, therefore web developers are forced to work with what they have. The result is nonsensical code that doesn't follow any type of guideline, whether open or belonging to MS. That's a big part of why there hasn't been a new version of IE for so long -- MS knows that anything they come out with will break all of that makeshift pseudo-html that's out there. I'm not a windows programmer, but I'd imagine that while the specific problems those guys run into are different, they stem from the same root causes.
If you put a quarter in the cup at mcdonalds each time you get a big Mac, chances are you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates does. Sure, it's better to donate something than nothing, but as the old saying goes, it's not what you give, it's what you sacrifice. The point of the comment was that Bill Gates can't make up for all the wrong he's done by giving away what is, to him, a pittance.
As a self-described audiophile, I have a deep respect for the musicians who provide me with all of this entertainment. I don't complain when I pay $10 or $40 to see a show. I don't mind shelling out $15 for a T-shirt. But I do refuse to pay $20 for a cd. I know that only a dollar or two will go to the artist, unlike maybe half of a concert ticket. If it's a Beatles cd, that dollar is going towards Michael Jackson's kid-touching defense. The rest goes to promote the next Brittany Spears.
I could go to a used record shop and buy a CD for $5-$10 legally, but my favorite one down the block just went out of business, along with most of my other favorite ones. Don't tell me it's gone because of file sharing--it has a lot more to do with WalMart. So I download the track, and then go and pay for a concert ticket when the band comes to town. Usually I can by a copy of the cd at the show for $10, which I'm fine with.
Fact is, as long as music prices reflect huge marketting budgets that mean the stuff on the radio can't compare in quality to the cashless musicians who play at the bar down the road, I don't see a need to spend money on full priced CD's from the big labels.
As for the arguments that few musicians agree, i think that if you polled only the quality musicians you'd find a different story. And besides, bands like The Grateful Dead have been allowing fans to freely tape and distribute their concerts for almost 40 years. In the Dead's case, they'v made a hell of a lot of money in the process.
If you want to make a legal argument against file sharing, be my guest, you'll probably be correct. But please, quit the moralizing. I've done my part in supporting the arts financially through concert tickets and the CD's I do buy. More importantly, I've supported the arts by demanding quality and fighting the marketting monster that is the true threat to the future of music. I've fought it by covering my ears to top 40 garbage, and to complaints of those who shovel it in my direction.
Real programmers CAN code in any language, but that doesn't mean they have to like it. Some programming languages and environments can be incredibly tedious and stressful to work with. If that means I'm spending my time punching walls instead of writing an application that I get some satisfaction out of, it's gonna effect my quality of life. That's as good a reason as any to start looking for a new job.
I looked into using a Mac server at the request of a Mac-nerd client. I found a lot of information about why using OS X is as good as linux at this or that, but never anything saying it's actually better at anything. Seems like a niche OS for Mac fundamentalists who can't imagine that there's any computing question where the best solution comes from Apple.
I had similar aspirations for a central sound server, but found that the latency issue can be hard to get by. If you want to use wireless, you're going to have to have independent decoding at each wireless access point. Problem is, each device is going to decode at it's own slightly different rate. The result is speakers in adjacent rooms that are a millisecond or two off. If you happen to be standing where you can hear both sets of speakers, the sound is going to be pretty nasty.
Its difficult to get around this any way other than having the wires all come from the same box.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm the boss, and whenever I go into a hiring discussion I always have two figures in my head -- what I'll offer, and what I'm willing settle on. Don't be the fool who jumps at the first offer. Not only will you make less, but your boss will think less of you for it.
I'd like to invite some of the government officials who balked at a commie OS to my office where they can see that real business is done with open source products all the time.
Reality has a clear liberal bias. There's nothing wrong with the media portraying both candidates realistically. That meant that they talked more about McCain's negatives than Obama's, because Mcain is a vapid know-nothing with no real ideas.
BTW, there's absolutely nothing wrong with ignoring Obama's teenage drug use as it is irrelevant. The media also ignored Cindy McCain's more recent drug use (including prescription fraud that would send a less fortunate person to jail) and McCain's poor performance in the Naval Academy and throughout his military career.
I love reading about space exploration as well as the next slashdotter, but that doesn't mean that we can't weigh costs and benefits. The gov't only has so much money, clearly there are more important things right now than the more wasteful types of space exploration.
Don't forget, we don't have a mars program in order to advance basic research and produce auxiliary technologies -- they're are cheaper and more direct ways to do that. We have a mars program because an idiot president thought it might get him a positive news story and maybe a vote or two.
Perhaps it's because Rails is not an 'Advanced' language. Rails makes for quick development of cookie cutter apps, but fails to scale or customize properly. Most developers will read the intro book, but by the time they're ready for a second lesson they've already switched to something better.
...cause we clearly cannot rely on our Senators to protect our constitutional rights, at least when there's good money pushing against those rights. It's not a law yet though, the house has to sign off too.
...that the Bush administration's definition of 'terrorist' includes Democrats, pot smokers, vegetarians, and people with two arms and two legs.
I get as excited about space exploration as much as the next guy, but the argument that we need to get out of the solar system to further the cause of humanity is way off base. The fact is, we are not leaving the solar system any time soon. Even with an incredibly aggressive space program, it's hard to imagine even sending a couple of astronauts to the next star within the next hundred years. What is easy to imagine happening in the next hundred years is catastrophic climate change (perhaps sped up by a CO2 spewing space program), famine, disease, war, and any number of other real problems here on Earth. Spending billions on a space exploration program while doing little to halt climate change or provide for a growing world is not just foolish, it's almost criminal. Lets keep the space program small and focus our energies on other things. If we can focus humanities efforts and get through the next 100 years space exploration will live to see it's day. If we push hard now at the expense of more crucial projects, we may find ourselves on a desolate planet and no closer to the stars.
You can always try paying your engineers well enough that they don't jump ship when offered a job. Those who complain about poachers act as if they have some sort of right to their employees. This is not feudalism, your employees are not bound to you, if they leave it is their right. If you underpay them, treat them like shit, or give them other reasons to go, you're getting what you deserve.
Personally, I'm glad that the recruiters are out there to remind me what I'm worth from time to time, even when I'm not actively looking for a job. These guys help keep wages and benefits high by giving managers something to fear. The annoyance is well worth it.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that no one on slashdot is willing to disavow a Moon/Mars trip. I'm a techie with a hardon for space exploration too, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to blow all this money on a trip seriously lacking in scientific merit. Remember, it wasn't a scientist's idea to go to the Moon on the way to Mars, it was George Bush's. Also remember that NASA's real scientific programs are going to be seriously underfunded as a result of all this money going into the manned program.
In time we'll make it back to the moon and to mars, but lets not rush it. Our money is better spent on basic research, robotic missions, and problems on the home planet.
This entire debate is a waste of time. We know what pluto is, why is it of such great importance whether we define a planet as bigger or smaller?
There's always lots of talk about velcro and other space-related spinoff technologies, but no one ever seems to mention the main one -- ICBMs. That's the real reason why the US and the Soviet Union were interested in the moon in the first place.
If we spent our money on an alternative energy program instead of manned space flight, we'd still get spinoff technology. Those spinoffs just wouldn't happen to include things that blow people up.
Note:The cost of a manned trip to Mars would dwarf scientific NASA programs, not to mention most if not all other basic research, especially the kind that offends the Christian Right, so it's not like NASA can just painlessly start shifting all it's money over to the manned program.
Further, we aren't quick to be scared into military justifications and scare tactics. We remember the (continued) folly of missile defense, and realize that politicians can be easily fooled into throwing money at non existent threats, potential threats, and threats that don't have technical solutions, while sending soldiers in Iraq out in unarmored Humvees. With our forces and checkbooks spread thin at the moment, I'll be blunt and say we couldn't be steward of free access to space regardless of the amount of political hot air that floats around.
Cracking the Google Code... Under the GoogleScope
...if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out ... guess again.
... guess again.
Google's US Patent confirms information retrieval is based on historical data.
Publication Date: 5/8/2005 9:51:18 PM
Author Name: Lawrence Deon
An Introduction:
Google's sweeping changes confirm the search giant has launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam in a continuing effort to provide the best search service in the world... and if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out
Google has raised the bar against search engine spam and artificial link inflation to unrivaled heights with the filing of a United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005.
The filing unquestionable provides SEO's with valuable insight into Google's tightly guarded search intelligence and confirms that Google's information retrieval is based on historical data.
What exactly do these changes mean to you?
Your credibility and reputation on-line are going under the Googlescope! Google has defined their patent abstract as follows:
"A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data."
Google's patent specification reveals a significant amount of information both old and new about the possible ways Google can (and likely does) use your web page updates to determine the ranking of your site in the SERPs.
Unfortunately, the patent filing does not prioritize or conclusively confirm any specific method one way or the other.
Here's how Google scores your web pages.
In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates.
What's new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page.
For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn't changed and the content is not updated or 'stale'.
According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.
The frequency of all web page changes
The actual amount of the change itself... whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
Changes in keyword distribution or density
The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page).
Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.
Developing your web page augments for page freshness.
Now I'm not suggesting that it's always beneficial or advisable to change the content of your web pages regularly, but it is very important to keep your pages fresh regularly and that may not necessarily mean a content change.
Google states that decayed or stale results might be desirable for information that doesn't necessarily need updating, while fresh content is good for results that require it.
How do you unravel that statement and differentiate between the two types of content?
An excellent example of this methodology is the roller coaster ride seasonal results might experience in Google's SERPs based on the actual season of the year.
A page related to winter clothin
I just dipped a few dozen foxes in lighter fluid and set them scurrying around the park aflame, but those damn firefox people just called me a sick bastard.
My point was that it is technically possible to get meaningful statistics without compromising privacy. The difficult part is verifying it independantly in a corporate environment. Still, I think it's doable.
Actually, you could get those stats (although with a slight margin of error) anonymously if you based them on a one way hash of the ip (or whatever is used as a unique identifier). What you can't do is verify this with a closed system. So the real question is, do you believe the the 'do no evil' google people really respect our privacy enough to do truly anonymous logging.
I don't see how you can ignore the above fact -- it's all interrelated. MS's competitors cannot survive unless they can write windows software that's on par with what MS themselves write. That simply can't be done without going beyond the published API's.
It's like saying that GWB is an environmentalist because he talks a lot about hydrogen. Sure, he talks the talk, but everyone who knows a thing or two about environmentalism knows he's just skirting the issue. Sometimes a token effort is worse than doing nothing, because it muddles things up.
MS may talk a lot about allowing comptetition by publishing their API's, but unless it's a complete and thorough documentation of ALL API's, it just doesn't fly in my book. I don't think anyone is arguing that, for example, a windows open office programmer has all the benefits of a MS office programmer. Part of MS's business model is to keep a little piece of everything just for themselves. As long as they continue to do business that way, they'll never have a truly reliable platform.
Sure, it would be nice if more vendors had fixed their software in the past 3/4 of a year, but that's really not such a terribly long time--you can't expect all of them to have done it. Besides, this is a service pack--I've always thought that a major distinctions between patches/services packs and new versions is that there is a much lower tolerance for incompatibilities in SP's. If anyone complains when longhorn comes out and it breaks some apps, they'd have a much weaker argument than those who complain about the SP.
The way I see it, this problem comes down to a general philosophical opposition to open standards and api's at MS. As a web developer, I see these problems all the time. MS refuses to use web standards in IE, therefore web developers are forced to work with what they have. The result is nonsensical code that doesn't follow any type of guideline, whether open or belonging to MS. That's a big part of why there hasn't been a new version of IE for so long -- MS knows that anything they come out with will break all of that makeshift pseudo-html that's out there. I'm not a windows programmer, but I'd imagine that while the specific problems those guys run into are different, they stem from the same root causes.
If you put a quarter in the cup at mcdonalds each time you get a big Mac, chances are you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates does. Sure, it's better to donate something than nothing, but as the old saying goes, it's not what you give, it's what you sacrifice. The point of the comment was that Bill Gates can't make up for all the wrong he's done by giving away what is, to him, a pittance.
I could go to a used record shop and buy a CD for $5-$10 legally, but my favorite one down the block just went out of business, along with most of my other favorite ones. Don't tell me it's gone because of file sharing--it has a lot more to do with WalMart. So I download the track, and then go and pay for a concert ticket when the band comes to town. Usually I can by a copy of the cd at the show for $10, which I'm fine with.
Fact is, as long as music prices reflect huge marketting budgets that mean the stuff on the radio can't compare in quality to the cashless musicians who play at the bar down the road, I don't see a need to spend money on full priced CD's from the big labels.
As for the arguments that few musicians agree, i think that if you polled only the quality musicians you'd find a different story. And besides, bands like The Grateful Dead have been allowing fans to freely tape and distribute their concerts for almost 40 years. In the Dead's case, they'v made a hell of a lot of money in the process.
If you want to make a legal argument against file sharing, be my guest, you'll probably be correct. But please, quit the moralizing. I've done my part in supporting the arts financially through concert tickets and the CD's I do buy. More importantly, I've supported the arts by demanding quality and fighting the marketting monster that is the true threat to the future of music. I've fought it by covering my ears to top 40 garbage, and to complaints of those who shovel it in my direction.
Real programmers CAN code in any language, but that doesn't mean they have to like it. Some programming languages and environments can be incredibly tedious and stressful to work with. If that means I'm spending my time punching walls instead of writing an application that I get some satisfaction out of, it's gonna effect my quality of life. That's as good a reason as any to start looking for a new job.
I looked into using a Mac server at the request of a Mac-nerd client. I found a lot of information about why using OS X is as good as linux at this or that, but never anything saying it's actually better at anything. Seems like a niche OS for Mac fundamentalists who can't imagine that there's any computing question where the best solution comes from Apple.
I had similar aspirations for a central sound server, but found that the latency issue can be hard to get by. If you want to use wireless, you're going to have to have independent decoding at each wireless access point. Problem is, each device is going to decode at it's own slightly different rate. The result is speakers in adjacent rooms that are a millisecond or two off. If you happen to be standing where you can hear both sets of speakers, the sound is going to be pretty nasty. Its difficult to get around this any way other than having the wires all come from the same box.