1) Hunting around endlessly looking for a fancy materials drop, repeatedly 2) Running back to the "craft station" 3) Hitting "craft repeatedly" to create as many items as you can 4) Holding your "great" item over everyone's head as if you made some huge accomplishment, only to sell it at the store so you don't get screwed in a trade.
I'll stick to programming. At least the time and effort is normally worth it.
CoH was my first pay-for-play game ever, and one of the huge reasons was that it was not fantasy/mideval based. The other reason is that I can play a bad guy in a few months.:) The campy approach to the game leaves me with a good feeling that there's no expectation to take it seriously - which IMO, is what a game should be.
For the most part my teammates have been generally people that I don't mind - with the few exceptions falling under the "30yo in the parent's basement" type. If you have to tell me that your character (or your alt which you're not playing) is level 46 to feel better about yourself, that's a problem I can't solve. However, I can easily check out your level myself by clicking on your avatar if I'm interested.;)
The problem I had with Neverwinter Nights is that there are a heck of a lot of these types that play it. In fact, a good portion of these types also run the servers. A lack of servers which have appeal and good operators (which I might feel differently about than you) was very, very slim.
At least with City of Heroes, I can vote with my dollar, and that gives the people I pay incentive to keep me happy.
Good luck getting a decent, experienced 3d modeler/animator for "free". Much less people to write content, and maintain complex databases and networks.
Games aren't all programming, you know. Has anyone noticed recently in the counter-strike community how many, many more rental servers are out there? Someone is paying, even if it's not you.
1) FreeBSD is most certainly UNIX. (Heck, most of the manpages haven't even been modified) 2) Do you plan on using a laptop as your firewall? 3) Actually, there are just as many advantages to this as disadvantages. Weighing them for their benefits is really what it's all about. 4) It sounds like your opinion is based more on how users of the system act and their opinions of the system rather than your opinion of the system. 5) I don't know about you, but I look forward to trading in a 6 month old battery for a brand new one, for free. Especially since they ship first. Any other situation, I have insurance and a great support plan.
I don't own a portable mp3 player, except for the one in my car stereo. I guess I just haven't had a need.
OTOH, I don't play games on my laptop, I have a gaming machine for that. Considering that most of my true stress tests of my applications are staged on test lab servers at work, that's not an issue, either. So I guess the "poor" CPU performance is not a concern to me... I guess firefox could load 0.1 nanoseconds faster, but then again, I never have to shut down any programs because I have a ton of ram and the sleep feature works flawlessly.
And in reality, the fact that it runs Mac OS X, fully integrated with the hardware, is more important than just about anything else feature-wise this machine has. I don't have to worry about tuning the system, making sure it's going to work with the hardware, or having to spend a lot of time researching who made what chipset (and sometimes more importantly, what version that chipset is) so that I have a driver that works with it so I can use a UNIX operating system as my workstation.
This is understandable, and for the most part I agree with you - however, what data format is best?
When I need to edit a configuration file, I sure as heck don't want to type XML out for my frequently reconfigured application that requires simple directives. Ever mess with Tomcat? Hacking on that configuration scheme is a total nightmare.
However, for something more robust like apache, a more involved configuration is required. Apache's configuration is so right, nothing could make me happier - FOR APACHE. Yes, it's a form of XML (IIRC it uses expat or a modified expat to parse the configuration), but it's hardly strict and rarely cumbersome.
Realistically, when I'm editing/etc/aliases, do I want to do this:
(yes I know a mailing list would be better served in this example - I am trying to illustrate a point)
or this?
root: me root: management root: mycoworker root: myboss
I'll learn 30,000 configuration formats to prevent the mess in the first example from taking over my system.
The nice thing about Mac OS X, those XML files that are scattered everywhere are almost never touched (at least on my machine) - if they're not configured through the GUI, they're generally some kind of internal data that I don't need to touch - at least, I haven't had to yet.
However, mucking in/etc is commonplace (although OS X does a great job of screwing that up as soon as I touch the GUI again, arg)
As for your program parsing comments, here's a very simple solution:
If you have a program which is 'glue' for multiple programs that use multiple configurations, write a program that parses both formats and creates a third format. If your target programs are decently designed they will mostly likely use one of the following types of configurations:
m4 - which is made to do conversions, writing the rules are daunting at first, but it's just like any other language.
XML - XSLT, XPath, all stuff that is easily available (and I'm sure you already know about)
plain old text files - generally when someone uses the above two their app is sufficiently complex to warrant one, when someone uses this, generally it's simple - if not, the "big" services all have (E)BNF waiting and ready in their RFC's or man pages. Just about anything else can be parsed with two builtins in the perl interpreter: split() and join() (pick another OSS language if that one doesn't suit you - they all have equivalents for reasons that will be left as an exercise to the reader).
In reality the third is the time waster, for obvious reasons. However, once you know how to parse a zone file, sudoers, etc, you don't have to write it again. In reality the ever-changing configurations are the simple ones, the ones that fall into the split() and join() category. In rare cases, you might have to use a regular expression, oh dear.
another thing is important to mention, that is the fact that if you are mucking around in a configuration file for an application so often, generally one of two things are the problem: you need to constantly adjust this program based on technical or business requirements, or your program does not provide ample command line options. In the latter case, perhaps your programming resources could be used to either add the options to the program (libpopt is very easy to use and almost every GNU program uses it, if not, they're probably using getopt(), a little more painful but fairly standard nonetheless), or find one that suits your needs from a configuration perspective - after all, if the author of the program didn't think command line options or a good, easy to edit configuration were important, there's probably a good number of features it's missing anyways.
Care to note in the constitution where your anonymity is preserved?
Seriously, I'm interested. So many people use this argument yet (and I'll admit it's been a while) I don't recall finding anything in the constitution that guarantees you a right to anonymity.
Otherwise we wouldn't have these stupid birth certificates, social security numbers, identification cards, etc, etc, etc.
BTW, this is coming from someone who almost missed OSCON this year because his ID was expired, the lady at the counter wouldn't give me the ticket until after I emptied my wallet with all these pieces of plastic that had my name on them.
That's because ctrl-click means a different thing in X11 than it does in the mac GUI.
Frankly, I got Mac OS X to get rid of crappy, slow, bloated, annoying X11. The lack of consistant toolkits, looks, and feels, the constant sitting in one of the top 5 positions in a 'top' listing, the painful configuration, inconsistant rules for simple GUI operation (like copy and paste), and the fact that progress is being made on it at the pace of a snail crawling over a mountain of salt made me run far, far away.
Well I guess it poses the question, are you interested in being well-rounded 30 years from now when linux is dead and fading, or do you want to be the comic book guy from the simpsons, ranting on how great this and that was, and being alone because the only conversation you can have with someone is about dead, 30 year old technology?
Not that these conversations are bad, but plenty of interesting people are in the world that don't even use computers (*gasp*) - and there are so many walks of life that I would hope you are not so infected with geek tunnel-vision that you would find at least a small portion of them interesting as well.
And the fact that you seem so quick to label all bar patrons as "Drunks" seems to tell me than engaging in conversations with people that you don't know is the least of your problems.
I am a "highly intelligent" person (don't ask me, ask the people I know, who also happen to be "highly intelligent").
A lack of diversity can almost be directly equated to a lack of knowledge. I fail to see how your approach to so-called "stupid people" is any different than a racist bias.
Who defines intelligence? At least racists made it clear who they hated - but you provide nothing more than a loophole which you can manipulate to your will.
"I don't like him; he must be an idiot".
Heck, if you wanted to say you didn't like hanging out with uninteresting people, that would make sense. Heck, I'm not fond of uninteresting people either, but my definition of uninteresting is different than yours.
But trying to plant your statement as objective when it's obviously subjective is some kind of logical fallacy (and if it isn't, I'll be taking my nobel prize now), one which I can't remember at this time.
What's funny, is that most of the job skills that I apply today that really make me stand out (other than my technical skills), are the skills I learned working jobs for shit pay like being a clerk at a convenience store or *gasp* working at McDonalds.
Some of the smartest people I know are engineers. They are also spend 90% of their time trying to avoid work, never apply themselves to their fullest potential and occasionally outright refuse to work with team or accept team members' ideas.
Nothing requires you to learn these skills when your technical knowledge and ideas are put on a pedestal. On the flipside, everyone knows how to flip a burger or work a cash register - you are competing for something significantly more real (like your cash flow) and might actually learn a thing or two.
P.S, did you know that there are Truck Drivers that are in MENSA? Don't believe me? Look at their Web Site, here's the quote:
As far as occupations, the range is staggering. Mensa has professors and truck drivers, scientists and firefighters, computer programmers and farmers, artists, military people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers--the diverse list goes on and on. There are famous Mensans and prize-winning Mensans, but there are many whose names you wouldn't know.
for a standard setup and ports 1-1024 it's not as big of a deal, really, as your "friendly neighborhood cracker" needs to crack your machine completely to open ports. (Should be obvious, but if your user has root, you just lost all benefit of the firewall as it can be modified)
However, if the cracker just manages to get user privilidges on the box, *ka-blam*, if you don't block inbound you are a mail relay, a DoS zombie, you name it. An easy way to prevent that is to block everything incoming that you don't use.
Heck, with the way some rootkits work, and the relative naievete of the cracker, blocking hte lower ports may prevent something more sinister happening automatically and give you time to shutdown/clean/whatever the system before things get too screwed up.
A good firewall plan always starts with "block everything".
Another neat trick is to use NAT and port forwarding to send all incoming traffic on the firewall from the internet to a host on the local net that doesn't and will never exist. Depending on implementation and how you use it, this prevents the cracker from even touching the box (save a hole in the networking stack) and installing services on it, even if cracked, is fairly pointless. Of course this trick is useless if you don't follow firewalling best practices and block all incoming traffic from the outside that appears to come from internal-only network blocks.
If you don't need to tinker with the guts, SuSE is a pretty nice system. I installed this about a year ago (shortly after v9 came out), and was impressed at the ease of use and the ability to get a basic workstation up and running quickly.
It really depends on what you want to do. If the machines are relatively uniform, configure a system with the features that you need, image it, and bring it over to the rest of your systems.
If you want to dual boot, workstations or servers, you need to stick with windows - the time wasted on booting to run an application or two is not worth rebuilding all of your systems.
Actually, I think a lot of it has to do with one specific thing, in today's world and yesteryear, you have to be at least capable of writing a shell script to properly administer your box.
Maybe I am the exception here, but I can't think of a single person that I know, who gets paid to administer unix machines, that doesn't know how to write at least a shell script, and the vast majority of them know how to write a program in C, Perl, Python, etc. Some of them are very skilled programmers and choose to administer boxes because they enjoy it more, not because it's the only thing they can do.
I know several windows admins who couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag, but make competitive wages with the unix admins described above.
Of course, there is a huge shareware community on the windows side, but when I build a box, I normally write several tools to accompany it to make my life easier. I throw several of them in cron, and never have to worry about them again. I know I am not the exception when it comes to this. Most unix ISP's and web farms (small and large) have a vast array of tools to accompany their systems, if not for just the admins, the users as well.
I'm not saying that the good windows admins aren't doing this as well, or anything like that. However, the culture is vastly different: I find in the windows world it's, "buy something that does what you want". In the unix world, it's: "write it yourself".
Necessity breeds many things, education is not in the least. Several times I have been in a pinch and had to learn some new feature of the shell I was using, or a system call, just to get the job done. This is "standard practice" as far as I've experienced in the unix world.
I agree with you completely, which is why, believe it or not, I think you'd enjoy an Apple.
As much as the "Think Different" thing is over-used, a lot of people who are new to OSX never give it the chance it deserves. Ironically, the majority of people I know that don't give it a chance are the hard-core unix geeks that would benefit the most from having one.
Here are some of the arguments I've heard, you may have used or heard some of them yourself.
"I hate the finder"
I hate the finder too. That's why I use the terminal and bash to navigate the filesystem, except for absolutely braindead tasks where using the finder is quicker.
"Too much pretty, not enough speed"
This is outright false. And I have a Powerbook G4, not one of those supercharged G5 dual systems. I have only had one speed complaint with this system since I bought it - compiles are slow. However, this is a laptop and I should expect that. Plus, why in the heck should I be installing most applications from source anyways? And if you're doing your major compiles of your developed applications on the same machine running your GUI, you deserve the wait.
"It's expensive"
That's true. However, the hardware is rock solid, I haven't been able to do anything to damage the OS (yet), mainly because I've never been put in a position to do so. On other systems, I always end up with a collection of 3rd-party applications and patches which make the system "usable". I just haven't had a need with the Mac. Their idealism allows me to be more pragmatic as I use the system. The saved frustration and ease of use is more than worth the dollar amount in my opinion.
"The menu bar at the top annoys me"
Don't use it. The OS has built in controls to assign a hotkey to any menu item. Not only has this resulted in a smoother, faster computing experience for me, but reaching from the keyboard to the mouse sucks, is a top complaint amongst frequent computer users.
"1 button mouse"
Mac OS will use all 3 buttons and the wheel if you plug a mouse capable of doing this in. If not, you can use the modifier keys to simulate all of these buttons.
"Application Support"
If you have needs for a specific application, then use another OS, of course. However, almost any OSS program will compile on the Mac, and if not, chances are it's being ported. Java applications run as a subsystem of the OS, not as a userland process (like sun's JVM), and are well-integrated.
I'm sure there are a ton of questions I could refute, and I'm sure there are a ton that I couldn't. The point is, the low-end macs are relatively cheap and it's worth it if you really want the to know what the best computing experience is for you. If you know someone with a Mac, ask them to let you toy with it for a while, heck, you'll probably get a tour of the system with it.
And I can tell you first hand, using DOS, Windows, Linux and other Unices for more than 16 years now that the most important thing about using a computer is getting what you need to get done with the least amount of pain possible. I just didn't realize that shelling out an extra $500 was the answer to making 8+ hours a day a heck of a lot less stressful.
Actually, as far as application launching and task selection go, yes. You can also set it to auto-hide, it automatically collates windows of the same application and accessing all the windows of the same application require one mouse click. It's even easy to cycle the windows in your single application with a universal hotkey (which can be configured if you don't like the original setup).
The menu bar that you are referring to does not launch programs - it is a universal location for program menus.
Please guys, if you're going to flame an OS (which is pretty silly in itself), at least know what you're talking about.
I use 4 major operating systems every day for different needs, and currently I'm using a Powerbook with a 3 button mouse, running Firefox, Word, EMacs, a set of Unix shells and Apple's Mail application. I prefer the Powerbook for my workstation needs, Windows for gaming, FreeBSD for raw power in a cheap server, and Linux for application-specific support on a server.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, considering crafting normally consists of:
1) Hunting around endlessly looking for a fancy materials drop, repeatedly
2) Running back to the "craft station"
3) Hitting "craft repeatedly" to create as many items as you can
4) Holding your "great" item over everyone's head as if you made some huge accomplishment, only to sell it at the store so you don't get screwed in a trade.
I'll stick to programming. At least the time and effort is normally worth it.
Neverwinter nights was such a huge let-down.
:) The campy approach to the game leaves me with a good feeling that there's no expectation to take it seriously - which IMO, is what a game should be.
;)
CoH was my first pay-for-play game ever, and one of the huge reasons was that it was not fantasy/mideval based. The other reason is that I can play a bad guy in a few months.
For the most part my teammates have been generally people that I don't mind - with the few exceptions falling under the "30yo in the parent's basement" type. If you have to tell me that your character (or your alt which you're not playing) is level 46 to feel better about yourself, that's a problem I can't solve. However, I can easily check out your level myself by clicking on your avatar if I'm interested.
The problem I had with Neverwinter Nights is that there are a heck of a lot of these types that play it. In fact, a good portion of these types also run the servers. A lack of servers which have appeal and good operators (which I might feel differently about than you) was very, very slim.
At least with City of Heroes, I can vote with my dollar, and that gives the people I pay incentive to keep me happy.
Good luck getting a decent, experienced 3d modeler/animator for "free". Much less people to write content, and maintain complex databases and networks.
Games aren't all programming, you know. Has anyone noticed recently in the counter-strike community how many, many more rental servers are out there? Someone is paying, even if it's not you.
When I go to bed, I take the glasses off.
1) FreeBSD is most certainly UNIX. (Heck, most of the manpages haven't even been modified)
2) Do you plan on using a laptop as your firewall?
3) Actually, there are just as many advantages to this as disadvantages. Weighing them for their benefits is really what it's all about.
4) It sounds like your opinion is based more on how users of the system act and their opinions of the system rather than your opinion of the system.
5) I don't know about you, but I look forward to trading in a 6 month old battery for a brand new one, for free. Especially since they ship first. Any other situation, I have insurance and a great support plan.
I don't own a portable mp3 player, except for the one in my car stereo. I guess I just haven't had a need.
OTOH, I don't play games on my laptop, I have a gaming machine for that. Considering that most of my true stress tests of my applications are staged on test lab servers at work, that's not an issue, either. So I guess the "poor" CPU performance is not a concern to me... I guess firefox could load 0.1 nanoseconds faster, but then again, I never have to shut down any programs because I have a ton of ram and the sleep feature works flawlessly.
And in reality, the fact that it runs Mac OS X, fully integrated with the hardware, is more important than just about anything else feature-wise this machine has. I don't have to worry about tuning the system, making sure it's going to work with the hardware, or having to spend a lot of time researching who made what chipset (and sometimes more importantly, what version that chipset is) so that I have a driver that works with it so I can use a UNIX operating system as my workstation.
me three! the 15" PB was my first mac purchase ever, in a long line of computer purchases over the last 20 years or so. :)
best computer I have ever owned, period.
This is understandable, and for the most part I agree with you - however, what data format is best?
/etc/aliases, do I want to do this:
y coworker</to>i ases>
/etc is commonplace (although OS X does a great job of screwing that up as soon as I touch the GUI again, arg)
When I need to edit a configuration file, I sure as heck don't want to type XML out for my frequently reconfigured application that requires simple directives. Ever mess with Tomcat? Hacking on that configuration scheme is a total nightmare.
However, for something more robust like apache, a more involved configuration is required. Apache's configuration is so right, nothing could make me happier - FOR APACHE. Yes, it's a form of XML (IIRC it uses expat or a modified expat to parse the configuration), but it's hardly strict and rarely cumbersome.
Realistically, when I'm editing
<?xml>
<aliases>
<user name="root">
<to>me</to>
<to>myboss</to>
<to>m
<to>management</to>
</user>
</al
(yes I know a mailing list would be better served in this example - I am trying to illustrate a point)
or this?
root: me
root: management
root: mycoworker
root: myboss
I'll learn 30,000 configuration formats to prevent the mess in the first example from taking over my system.
The nice thing about Mac OS X, those XML files that are scattered everywhere are almost never touched (at least on my machine) - if they're not configured through the GUI, they're generally some kind of internal data that I don't need to touch - at least, I haven't had to yet.
However, mucking in
As for your program parsing comments, here's a very simple solution:
If you have a program which is 'glue' for multiple programs that use multiple configurations, write a program that parses both formats and creates a third format. If your target programs are decently designed they will mostly likely use one of the following types of configurations:
m4 - which is made to do conversions, writing the rules are daunting at first, but it's just like any other language.
XML - XSLT, XPath, all stuff that is easily available (and I'm sure you already know about)
plain old text files - generally when someone uses the above two their app is sufficiently complex to warrant one, when someone uses this, generally it's simple - if not, the "big" services all have (E)BNF waiting and ready in their RFC's or man pages. Just about anything else can be parsed with two builtins in the perl interpreter: split() and join() (pick another OSS language if that one doesn't suit you - they all have equivalents for reasons that will be left as an exercise to the reader).
In reality the third is the time waster, for obvious reasons. However, once you know how to parse a zone file, sudoers, etc, you don't have to write it again. In reality the ever-changing configurations are the simple ones, the ones that fall into the split() and join() category. In rare cases, you might have to use a regular expression, oh dear.
another thing is important to mention, that is the fact that if you are mucking around in a configuration file for an application so often, generally one of two things are the problem: you need to constantly adjust this program based on technical or business requirements, or your program does not provide ample command line options. In the latter case, perhaps your programming resources could be used to either add the options to the program (libpopt is very easy to use and almost every GNU program uses it, if not, they're probably using getopt(), a little more painful but fairly standard nonetheless), or find one that suits your needs from a configuration perspective - after all, if the author of the program didn't think command line options or a good, easy to edit configuration were important, there's probably a good number of features it's missing anyways.
Care to note in the constitution where your anonymity is preserved?
Seriously, I'm interested. So many people use this argument yet (and I'll admit it's been a while) I don't recall finding anything in the constitution that guarantees you a right to anonymity.
Otherwise we wouldn't have these stupid birth certificates, social security numbers, identification cards, etc, etc, etc.
BTW, this is coming from someone who almost missed OSCON this year because his ID was expired, the lady at the counter wouldn't give me the ticket until after I emptied my wallet with all these pieces of plastic that had my name on them.
That's because ctrl-click means a different thing in X11 than it does in the mac GUI.
Frankly, I got Mac OS X to get rid of crappy, slow, bloated, annoying X11. The lack of consistant toolkits, looks, and feels, the constant sitting in one of the top 5 positions in a 'top' listing, the painful configuration, inconsistant rules for simple GUI operation (like copy and paste), and the fact that progress is being made on it at the pace of a snail crawling over a mountain of salt made me run far, far away.
Well I guess it poses the question, are you interested in being well-rounded 30 years from now when linux is dead and fading, or do you want to be the comic book guy from the simpsons, ranting on how great this and that was, and being alone because the only conversation you can have with someone is about dead, 30 year old technology?
Not that these conversations are bad, but plenty of interesting people are in the world that don't even use computers (*gasp*) - and there are so many walks of life that I would hope you are not so infected with geek tunnel-vision that you would find at least a small portion of them interesting as well.
Don't know what to talk about?
Try listening.
And the fact that you seem so quick to label all bar patrons as "Drunks" seems to tell me than engaging in conversations with people that you don't know is the least of your problems.
Sigh.
I work with a couple of people like you!
I can't stand them.
I am a "highly intelligent" person (don't ask me, ask the people I know, who also happen to be "highly intelligent").
A lack of diversity can almost be directly equated to a lack of knowledge. I fail to see how your approach to so-called "stupid people" is any different than a racist bias.
Who defines intelligence? At least racists made it clear who they hated - but you provide nothing more than a loophole which you can manipulate to your will.
"I don't like him; he must be an idiot".
Heck, if you wanted to say you didn't like hanging out with uninteresting people, that would make sense. Heck, I'm not fond of uninteresting people either, but my definition of uninteresting is different than yours.
But trying to plant your statement as objective when it's obviously subjective is some kind of logical fallacy (and if it isn't, I'll be taking my nobel prize now), one which I can't remember at this time.
What's funny, is that most of the job skills that I apply today that really make me stand out (other than my technical skills), are the skills I learned working jobs for shit pay like being a clerk at a convenience store or *gasp* working at McDonalds.
Some of the smartest people I know are engineers. They are also spend 90% of their time trying to avoid work, never apply themselves to their fullest potential and occasionally outright refuse to work with team or accept team members' ideas.
Nothing requires you to learn these skills when your technical knowledge and ideas are put on a pedestal. On the flipside, everyone knows how to flip a burger or work a cash register - you are competing for something significantly more real (like your cash flow) and might actually learn a thing or two.
P.S, did you know that there are Truck Drivers that are in MENSA? Don't believe me? Look at their Web Site, here's the quote:
As far as occupations, the range is staggering. Mensa has professors and truck drivers, scientists and firefighters, computer programmers and farmers, artists, military people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers--the diverse list goes on and on. There are famous Mensans and prize-winning Mensans, but there are many whose names you wouldn't know.
Get real.
Please come back when you learn what a hash is.
Have a nice day.
for a standard setup and ports 1-1024 it's not as big of a deal, really, as your "friendly neighborhood cracker" needs to crack your machine completely to open ports. (Should be obvious, but if your user has root, you just lost all benefit of the firewall as it can be modified)
However, if the cracker just manages to get user privilidges on the box, *ka-blam*, if you don't block inbound you are a mail relay, a DoS zombie, you name it. An easy way to prevent that is to block everything incoming that you don't use.
Heck, with the way some rootkits work, and the relative naievete of the cracker, blocking hte lower ports may prevent something more sinister happening automatically and give you time to shutdown/clean/whatever the system before things get too screwed up.
A good firewall plan always starts with "block everything".
Another neat trick is to use NAT and port forwarding to send all incoming traffic on the firewall from the internet to a host on the local net that doesn't and will never exist. Depending on implementation and how you use it, this prevents the cracker from even touching the box (save a hole in the networking stack) and installing services on it, even if cracked, is fairly pointless. Of course this trick is useless if you don't follow firewalling best practices and block all incoming traffic from the outside that appears to come from internal-only network blocks.
when I didn't have extra drives to spare, I partitioned the main drive.
Doesn't help in the case of a disk crash, but it does allow quick reinstalls if I hork a system pretty bad.
Mr. Fusion!
If you don't need to tinker with the guts, SuSE is a pretty nice system. I installed this about a year ago (shortly after v9 came out), and was impressed at the ease of use and the ability to get a basic workstation up and running quickly.
It really depends on what you want to do. If the machines are relatively uniform, configure a system with the features that you need, image it, and bring it over to the rest of your systems.
If you want to dual boot, workstations or servers, you need to stick with windows - the time wasted on booting to run an application or two is not worth rebuilding all of your systems.
Actually, I think a lot of it has to do with one specific thing, in today's world and yesteryear, you have to be at least capable of writing a shell script to properly administer your box.
Maybe I am the exception here, but I can't think of a single person that I know, who gets paid to administer unix machines, that doesn't know how to write at least a shell script, and the vast majority of them know how to write a program in C, Perl, Python, etc. Some of them are very skilled programmers and choose to administer boxes because they enjoy it more, not because it's the only thing they can do.
I know several windows admins who couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag, but make competitive wages with the unix admins described above.
Of course, there is a huge shareware community on the windows side, but when I build a box, I normally write several tools to accompany it to make my life easier. I throw several of them in cron, and never have to worry about them again. I know I am not the exception when it comes to this. Most unix ISP's and web farms (small and large) have a vast array of tools to accompany their systems, if not for just the admins, the users as well.
I'm not saying that the good windows admins aren't doing this as well, or anything like that. However, the culture is vastly different: I find in the windows world it's, "buy something that does what you want". In the unix world, it's: "write it yourself".
Necessity breeds many things, education is not in the least. Several times I have been in a pinch and had to learn some new feature of the shell I was using, or a system call, just to get the job done. This is "standard practice" as far as I've experienced in the unix world.
Unless things have changed very recently, Apple doesn't make a G5 notebook. They are G4's.
So let me get this straight, you don't like OSX because it's not X11?
Wow, that's sad.
I've never had any of the other issues you mention.
Uh, all your problems have to do with X11, more specifically, X11 applications that use specific toolkits.
open.
God, I love that program.
Nothing like saying, "hey, random file I have an application for, run so I can use this!"
All from the terminal.
Or a shell script.
Mmmm.....
I agree with you completely, which is why, believe it or not, I think you'd enjoy an Apple.
As much as the "Think Different" thing is over-used, a lot of people who are new to OSX never give it the chance it deserves. Ironically, the majority of people I know that don't give it a chance are the hard-core unix geeks that would benefit the most from having one.
Here are some of the arguments I've heard, you may have used or heard some of them yourself.
"I hate the finder"
I hate the finder too. That's why I use the terminal and bash to navigate the filesystem, except for absolutely braindead tasks where using the finder is quicker.
"Too much pretty, not enough speed"
This is outright false. And I have a Powerbook G4, not one of those supercharged G5 dual systems. I have only had one speed complaint with this system since I bought it - compiles are slow. However, this is a laptop and I should expect that. Plus, why in the heck should I be installing most applications from source anyways? And if you're doing your major compiles of your developed applications on the same machine running your GUI, you deserve the wait.
"It's expensive"
That's true. However, the hardware is rock solid, I haven't been able to do anything to damage the OS (yet), mainly because I've never been put in a position to do so. On other systems, I always end up with a collection of 3rd-party applications and patches which make the system "usable". I just haven't had a need with the Mac. Their idealism allows me to be more pragmatic as I use the system. The saved frustration and ease of use is more than worth the dollar amount in my opinion.
"The menu bar at the top annoys me"
Don't use it. The OS has built in controls to assign a hotkey to any menu item. Not only has this resulted in a smoother, faster computing experience for me, but reaching from the keyboard to the mouse sucks, is a top complaint amongst frequent computer users.
"1 button mouse"
Mac OS will use all 3 buttons and the wheel if you plug a mouse capable of doing this in. If not, you can use the modifier keys to simulate all of these buttons.
"Application Support"
If you have needs for a specific application, then use another OS, of course. However, almost any OSS program will compile on the Mac, and if not, chances are it's being ported. Java applications run as a subsystem of the OS, not as a userland process (like sun's JVM), and are well-integrated.
I'm sure there are a ton of questions I could refute, and I'm sure there are a ton that I couldn't. The point is, the low-end macs are relatively cheap and it's worth it if you really want the to know what the best computing experience is for you. If you know someone with a Mac, ask them to let you toy with it for a while, heck, you'll probably get a tour of the system with it.
And I can tell you first hand, using DOS, Windows, Linux and other Unices for more than 16 years now that the most important thing about using a computer is getting what you need to get done with the least amount of pain possible. I just didn't realize that shelling out an extra $500 was the answer to making 8+ hours a day a heck of a lot less stressful.
Actually, as far as application launching and task selection go, yes. You can also set it to auto-hide, it automatically collates windows of the same application and accessing all the windows of the same application require one mouse click. It's even easy to cycle the windows in your single application with a universal hotkey (which can be configured if you don't like the original setup).
The menu bar that you are referring to does not launch programs - it is a universal location for program menus.
Please guys, if you're going to flame an OS (which is pretty silly in itself), at least know what you're talking about.
I use 4 major operating systems every day for different needs, and currently I'm using a Powerbook with a 3 button mouse, running Firefox, Word, EMacs, a set of Unix shells and Apple's Mail application. I prefer the Powerbook for my workstation needs, Windows for gaming, FreeBSD for raw power in a cheap server, and Linux for application-specific support on a server.
There is no panacea.