Strange how the "Macs are expensive" myth is still out there.
To be fair the Mac range is simply often far more expensive. For those of us that don't care for OS X the MBP just isn't a sane buy while better hardware exists for less cost.
I've always thought Thinkpads were a luxury laptop, however after reading many customer reviews, reading benchmarks, reading about build quality and looking at prices it turned out to be a very sane idea to buy one. I couldn't find a better spec'd, more performant and portable laptop with these features, let alone at the 14.1" footprint. I have around 6 hours battery life at normal use, a better graphics card than the most expensive MBP (the 17" has only the 8600 GT) and with twice the RAM (MBP is just 2G).. for $1000 less. Better still it has a keyboard to which no other laptop can remotely compare.
See for yourself:
The best spec'd MBP is $2799. A better spec'd T61p is $1728.. The T61p$1000 less expensive..
Thankfully those that design the Thinkpads understood the importance of input and gave it steering priority over the design. Having used a variety of laptops over the years it would be very hard for me to choose anything other than a Thinkpad: I haven't used a keyboard which is as kind to my hands - an actual pleasure to use - as that of my T61.
I recently spent time working on a MacBook and soon felt my joints and wrists complaining, sharing a similar experience to this MacBook owner.
It's easy to create consistent, flat, sharp-edged, un-ergonomic laptops: make them as symmetrical as possible while removing features that bear any relation to the shape of peoples bodies and voila, you have a fantastically good looking object that was never meant to be typed on for extensive periods without strain.
Before you start damning the EU for doing this quite so liberally, take note that America has been doing this to us EU citizens for quite a while now: on a recent trip to America I had both index fingers printed and my eyes photographed. It most certainly discourages me from returning.
Worse, the guy taking the photos was aggressive and treated me with suspicion - and to think I was going there to teach students at one of your most well reputed technical universities, complete with invitation in hand.
Oh well, best I stick to countries where I'm treated with basic respect.
This is a local exploit in that kernel version range, in other words instigated by someone at a keyboard connected to the host and with an existing user account on the machine.
Linux is doing just fine if you consider growth rate. These statistics - and those of several other sites I've encountered (including my own) indicate it's adoption rate is as fast as that of Apple's, in some cases moreso. However, adoption looks very poor if you look to 'market share', a figure based on sale count, and by far the most popular guage.
Recently, however, the wide success of the EeePC (and apparent solid sales of Dell's M1330 w/Ubuntu) shows that Linux can work very well in the hands of the uninterested or uninitiated if it comes preinstalled. At a conference I recently attended I met an art curator using an EeePC. She said she doesn't like computers but prefers the EeePC because "it's easier than my MacBook and has better internet". For the casual and highly mobile computer user I think Linux is very much claiming market share.
At the other end, the workstation market, Linux is also making very strong ground (3D animation, film compositing/editing, engineering).
Well looking at it logically, if they don't want people to try it they wouldn't have released a public beta
Expecting BETA software to be easy to install is a bit of a stretch.
All a Public BETA means is that it's publically accessible for trial. BETA software is very rarely targetted at the average user; it is evaluated by enthusiasts and those capable of squashing bugs. Aruably you wouldn't want to push a vast majority of people toward your BETA software. That's the Microsoft model - as if Vista isn't precisely a lesson in how not to do it.
There really isn't much point in bolting down the installation process at such an early stage, so that is why it is such a mess. Most open source apps are a pleasure to install compared to the google soup you get if you are looking for windows apps. There isn't anything that even comes close to package repositories. Which makes your statement rather ironic.
Since when has packaged FLOSS software been harder to install than proprietary software? 1998? It would seem you are working hard to try to generalise the installation process of FLOSS based on the installation notes of a BETA release of KDE, an entire desktop environment. That's a bit ridiculous I'm afraid.
FLOSS doesn't have your 90% market share for a vast number of reasons other than the installation process of software. A decent package-manager even finds and downloads the stuff for you and ensures there aren't duplicate depending libraries flung all over the system. Don't look there for your witches..
You'd do well to slow down and allow yourself to think a little more broadly on this topic.
This exemplifies what I hate about many open source projects. If you want me to try it, don't make me work for it.
This is a stupifying spin on it. What happened to the "If I want to try it, I must be prepared to work for it?". Why should KDE developers give a flying fuck whether you try their BETA release or not? $WHO is making you do $WHAT again?
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering.'
The primary problem surrounds the foolishness of mistaking a song for an artifact, of something of fixed value, to be bought and sold akin to furniture, houses and books.
Contrarily a song is not an artifact; it is not the sum of its spectral data, the print it makes on vinyl. A song is something experienced, it propagates by instigating changes in air-pressure as an orchestrated environmental effect felt by our ear-drums and our bones.
Music is something experienced in time, plays with interpretation and memory, and as such should be sold as a time-based service.
This is an old idea: 'The Wireless' (aka radio) did it. Last.fm still does it. Saunas do it, as do golf courses, the hotel and sex industries.
Don't make objects where they don't exist. A recording is a thing that includes the membrane it's recorded on. This innately makes it reproduce-able. Recordings don't 'contain' songs any more than a street contains the memories of those that walked on it.
Don't go the way of selling songs as objects. It was never going to work. It's silly.
My beautiful Macbook Pro is hidden behind my monitor, because the keyboard is the worst laptop keyboard I've ever owned, and pretty close to the worst I've ever used.
This is a common complaint.
Not since the G3 (a beautiful laptop to use) has ergonomics been a priority in Apple portables. I know of several heavy typers claiming that the iBook or the G4 PB has wrecked their wrists. If you want pleasurable typing experience, and are prepared to (illegally?) run OS/X on that machine, you ought to choose something like a Thinkpad. IBM (and now Lenovo) always did take input seriously.
Having worked alot on an iMac recently - and having spent some time with a MacBook - my hands sigh with relief at my T-series Thinkpad. The keyboard is a pleasure to type on and doesn't run nearly as hot as a MacBook (I wonder how heat affects the joints also).
Thinkpads may not be a Euclidean image of geometric beauty - but neither are people.
I guess you can only hope that Apple stops artificially tying down OS/X to their otherwise completely generic x86 hardware. The MacBooks wouldn't be nearly as popular if OS/X was de-shackled from so-called Apple hardware.
Cows are 100% dependent on humans for survival (put a cow in the wild and see how long it takes the local predator to feast on it),
Cows have been made dependent on humans. The term is Domestication. Cows, like sheep, used to be perfectly independent from humans before the Egyptians trained them into submission.
That said, in America, the cows bred are so pumped up on growth hormones and other meat-meddling stuff that they will no-doubt differ very greatly from their pre-Western civilisation ancestors above and beyond the immediate affects of traditional domestication: their bodies will be chemically very different from those your parents would've eaten (assuming they weren't vegetarian).
According to TFA the stripped down version of Windows runs very fast on the hardware.
To quote Negroponte:
The version that's up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it's very, very successful.
MS will do whatever they can to ensure it is more appealing and better performing than Linux. there is simply too much to lose otherwise. Whether they are successful is another thing. I don't doubt that whatever mutation of Windows they put on the thing, it will fly.
This dual-booting project, of course, isn't about co-existance, it's about providing a future opportunity for Windows to be the sole OS on the OLPC, with Microsoft being a major investor. This is clear. All it takes now is a few visits to governments talking about education and being competitive in a "Windows world" and Governments will soon opt in for a Windows only install. The question being: "Dual boot or Windows with extra disk space?"
It's reasonably likely the OLPC will become a Windows-only machine in short time.
It will start with older children assuming Windows looks more 'serious' and grown up, like the computers people in images and movies they see online use. Governments will be taught to prefer Windows on the basis of it being more 'competitive' because Windows is "more like" what people in wealthier economies use.
The result of this is that more kids will learn to be bored by computers and computing, believing that they are opaque appliances with western graphic metaphors (what's a 'desktop' to someone that's never sat at a desk?) that seem to get slow over time. Just a small segment of the truly curious seeking alternative operating systems. Governments that bought the machines will wonder what went wrong when they see little or no innovation in the IT sector yet a massive outsourcing industry to faltering IT giants like the U.S.
Negroponte has always wanted to work with Microsoft on his terms. Windows will certainly enjoy a long and prosperous life.
As a heavy terminal user I long since lost interest in running a desktop environment. This has become a problem when I travel internationally, something I do very often.
On two separate occassions I've been asked to boot my machine. On both occassions the security officials became quite disturbed when they saw a text only boot sequence. One asked me to turn the machine off immediately and after 30 minutes I was able to explain what was on my computer in a way they liked. The second incident was worse. Once my laptop had come out of suspend-to-RAM the security guy demanded "Log into your computer please". On seeing a single maximised xterm he became nervous. He held me until an official came down from upstairs, who promptly laughed warmly and said "It's unix. It's OK".
I know a couple of other people that have been in very similar situations.
These days I have a session manager such that I can boot into a clean GNOME desktop should such a situation arise, complete with soothing coastal background image.
The rationale for having me boot my computer apparently was that it may be a bomb, not that my contents might be suspicious. The logic of having me sit in front of them and power on a bomb just to find out if it is, in fact, a bomb still escapes me to this day. Nearly as bizarre as the giant liquids disposal vat at security check: "Please mix your bomb ingredients in this packed airport instead of on the plane. Thankyou."
In my experience both Fink and Macports are pretty poor alternatives to apt-get on a Debian based system. Fink however has more of the pre-2000 dependency woes Debian used to suffer. To be more specific, however, as someone that has developed and taught on both platforms, Fink and Macports are inferior for two simple reasons:
1/Fink and Macports have around 1/6th of the packages that Debian has (which is ~24000 packages)
2/ apt-get on a Debian system is fully integrated, and that's a beautiful thing, useful to upgrade the entire system with just a click in a GUI package manager or an apt-get upgrade.
To get up and running on a programming project on a bare Debian system takes me very little time compared to on Macs: downloading 960Mb of XCode and going to various websites to install software not available using Fink or Macports. From my experience, they cannot compare as development environments for portable programming projects. I far prefer a Debian machine.
Looking at some of the comments for this article it's clear that many aren't aware of just how easy it is to install and run a modern Linux desktop these days. Buy a laptop with Linux on it. You'll be very pleasantly surprised..
Finally, the primary statistical premise of the article is flawed: how can the market share of Linux on the desktop be used when Linux preinstalls are still so rare (with the exception of EEPC..)?
What's wrong with the Python interface to Intel's immensely popular OpenCV. Firewire devices, USB, multiple cameras.. all are a breeze on Linux or those-other-two-popular-OS's.
Clearly they are getting a headstart by treating all visitors to America as suspects: getting your eyes scanned and both index fingers printed is no kind of "welcome". A few years ago it was a completely different experience.
oops, should read: "To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product in the market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product."
The size of a patent portfolio cannot be a reasonable measure of innovation, especially in this case given that much of the Microsoft patent portfolio comprises bought patents: patents are bought and sold just like any other commodity.
Secondly, a patent doesn't guarantee the given innovation ever reaches the market. To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product from going to market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product. As a result it's possible to argue that patents discourage actual innovation rather than encourage it.
Of course if this were a story about Government abuse of civil liberties in China, as applied to privacy, people would be decrying it as immaculate example of that failed, corruptible political system we call Communism. In America it just defers to "Well what have you got to hide, bad guy?"
Describing America in the context of Democracy becomes increasingly difficult.
The article is slashdotted, so I cannot comment with knowledge here. That said, I do hope the fact that OS\X is artificially tied to a particular hardware platform is considered when comparing. This artificial anchor makes OS\X a particularly risky OS to become dependent upon, married to the economic ambitions of a hardware business now dependent on near identical components as so-called 'PC's' (Asustek, Quanta make around 70% of the worlds portables, including Apple's). Similarly the need to go to websites to find, install and upgrade software is also a great disadvantage for Apple's platform: Fink/Macports have fairly measley offerings compared to most desktop Linux distributions and both still suffer from the kinds of dependency problems plaguing Linux users 10 years ago (at least that is my experience on Tiger). It's 2007: where's my one-click-system upgrade?
While I use OS\X fairly often, these two factors - along with the inflexible bolt-on windowing environment - rule out OS\X as a good general purpose operating system.
OS\X is super if you believe you're dependent on proprietary software, but for those that no longer are it offers very little over a modern Linux OS these days.
I should add that with:set mouse=a you have full mouse input in vim (including click-and-drag selection). This allows you to click on vim tabs in the terminal if you're a clicky kind of person.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always thought Thinkpads were a luxury laptop, however after reading many customer reviews, reading benchmarks, reading about build quality and looking at prices it turned out to be a very sane idea to buy one. I couldn't find a better spec'd, more performant and portable laptop with these features, let alone at the 14.1" footprint. I have around 6 hours battery life at normal use, a better graphics card than the most expensive MBP (the 17" has only the 8600 GT) and with twice the RAM (MBP is just 2G).. for $1000 less. Better still it has a keyboard to which no other laptop can remotely compare.
See for yourself:
The best spec'd MBP is $2799. A better spec'd T61p is $1728.. The T61p$1000 less expensive..
Thankfully those that design the Thinkpads understood the importance of input and gave it steering priority over the design. Having used a variety of laptops over the years it would be very hard for me to choose anything other than a Thinkpad: I haven't used a keyboard which is as kind to my hands - an actual pleasure to use - as that of my T61.
I recently spent time working on a MacBook and soon felt my joints and wrists complaining, sharing a similar experience to this MacBook owner.
It's easy to create consistent, flat, sharp-edged, un-ergonomic laptops: make them as symmetrical as possible while removing features that bear any relation to the shape of peoples bodies and voila, you have a fantastically good looking object that was never meant to be typed on for extensive periods without strain.
Before you start damning the EU for doing this quite so liberally, take note that America has been doing this to us EU citizens for quite a while now: on a recent trip to America I had both index fingers printed and my eyes photographed. It most certainly discourages me from returning.
Worse, the guy taking the photos was aggressive and treated me with suspicion - and to think I was going there to teach students at one of your most well reputed technical universities, complete with invitation in hand.
Oh well, best I stick to countries where I'm treated with basic respect.
This is a local exploit in that kernel version range, in other words instigated by someone at a keyboard connected to the host and with an existing user account on the machine.
Linux is doing just fine if you consider growth rate. These statistics - and those of several other sites I've encountered (including my own) indicate it's adoption rate is as fast as that of Apple's, in some cases moreso. However, adoption looks very poor if you look to 'market share', a figure based on sale count, and by far the most popular guage.
Recently, however, the wide success of the EeePC (and apparent solid sales of Dell's M1330 w/Ubuntu) shows that Linux can work very well in the hands of the uninterested or uninitiated if it comes preinstalled. At a conference I recently attended I met an art curator using an EeePC. She said she doesn't like computers but prefers the EeePC because "it's easier than my MacBook and has better internet". For the casual and highly mobile computer user I think Linux is very much claiming market share.
At the other end, the workstation market, Linux is also making very strong ground (3D animation, film compositing/editing, engineering).
All a Public BETA means is that it's publically accessible for trial. BETA software is very rarely targetted at the average user; it is evaluated by enthusiasts and those capable of squashing bugs. Aruably you wouldn't want to push a vast majority of people toward your BETA software. That's the Microsoft model - as if Vista isn't precisely a lesson in how not to do it.
Post #22159716 (above) makes this quite clear: Since when has packaged FLOSS software been harder to install than proprietary software? 1998? It would seem you are working hard to try to generalise the installation process of FLOSS based on the installation notes of a BETA release of KDE, an entire desktop environment. That's a bit ridiculous I'm afraid.
FLOSS doesn't have your 90% market share for a vast number of reasons other than the installation process of software. A decent package-manager even finds and downloads the stuff for you and ensures there aren't duplicate depending libraries flung all over the system. Don't look there for your witches..
You'd do well to slow down and allow yourself to think a little more broadly on this topic.
Kids these days, I don't know..
The primary problem surrounds the foolishness of mistaking a song for an artifact, of something of fixed value, to be bought and sold akin to furniture, houses and books.
Contrarily a song is not an artifact; it is not the sum of its spectral data, the print it makes on vinyl. A song is something experienced, it propagates by instigating changes in air-pressure as an orchestrated environmental effect felt by our ear-drums and our bones.
Music is something experienced in time, plays with interpretation and memory, and as such should be sold as a time-based service.
This is an old idea: 'The Wireless' (aka radio) did it. Last.fm still does it. Saunas do it, as do golf courses, the hotel and sex industries.
Don't make objects where they don't exist. A recording is a thing that includes the membrane it's recorded on. This innately makes it reproduce-able. Recordings don't 'contain' songs any more than a street contains the memories of those that walked on it.
Don't go the way of selling songs as objects. It was never going to work. It's silly.
IBM patents a Variable Rate Troll System?
Slashdot, time to get a lawyer, a real good one..
Not since the G3 (a beautiful laptop to use) has ergonomics been a priority in Apple portables. I know of several heavy typers claiming that the iBook or the G4 PB has wrecked their wrists. If you want pleasurable typing experience, and are prepared to (illegally?) run OS/X on that machine, you ought to choose something like a Thinkpad. IBM (and now Lenovo) always did take input seriously.
Having worked alot on an iMac recently - and having spent some time with a MacBook - my hands sigh with relief at my T-series Thinkpad. The keyboard is a pleasure to type on and doesn't run nearly as hot as a MacBook (I wonder how heat affects the joints also). Thinkpads may not be a Euclidean image of geometric beauty - but neither are people.
I guess you can only hope that Apple stops artificially tying down OS/X to their otherwise completely generic x86 hardware. The MacBooks wouldn't be nearly as popular if OS/X was de-shackled from so-called Apple hardware.
That said, in America, the cows bred are so pumped up on growth hormones and other meat-meddling stuff that they will no-doubt differ very greatly from their pre-Western civilisation ancestors above and beyond the immediate affects of traditional domestication: their bodies will be chemically very different from those your parents would've eaten (assuming they weren't vegetarian).
Thankfully the flesh of American cows and bulls is not allowed to be sold in Europe due to human health risk.
Hehe, that's a good one.
Sadly I wouldn't get too smug, Apple, HP, and Sony portables are made by the same company and have almost identical parts in most cases.
Apple doesn't 'make' hardware, Taiwan does.
This dual-booting project, of course, isn't about co-existance, it's about providing a future opportunity for Windows to be the sole OS on the OLPC, with Microsoft being a major investor. This is clear. All it takes now is a few visits to governments talking about education and being competitive in a "Windows world" and Governments will soon opt in for a Windows only install. The question being: "Dual boot or Windows with extra disk space?"
It's reasonably likely the OLPC will become a Windows-only machine in short time.
It will start with older children assuming Windows looks more 'serious' and grown up, like the computers people in images and movies they see online use. Governments will be taught to prefer Windows on the basis of it being more 'competitive' because Windows is "more like" what people in wealthier economies use.
The result of this is that more kids will learn to be bored by computers and computing, believing that they are opaque appliances with western graphic metaphors (what's a 'desktop' to someone that's never sat at a desk?) that seem to get slow over time. Just a small segment of the truly curious seeking alternative operating systems. Governments that bought the machines will wonder what went wrong when they see little or no innovation in the IT sector yet a massive outsourcing industry to faltering IT giants like the U.S.
Negroponte has always wanted to work with Microsoft on his terms. Windows will certainly enjoy a long and prosperous life.
Negroponte, you're being an idiot.
As a heavy terminal user I long since lost interest in running a desktop environment. This has become a problem when I travel internationally, something I do very often.
On two separate occassions I've been asked to boot my machine. On both occassions the security officials became quite disturbed when they saw a text only boot sequence. One asked me to turn the machine off immediately and after 30 minutes I was able to explain what was on my computer in a way they liked. The second incident was worse. Once my laptop had come out of suspend-to-RAM the security guy demanded "Log into your computer please". On seeing a single maximised xterm he became nervous. He held me until an official came down from upstairs, who promptly laughed warmly and said "It's unix. It's OK".
I know a couple of other people that have been in very similar situations.
These days I have a session manager such that I can boot into a clean GNOME desktop should such a situation arise, complete with soothing coastal background image.
The rationale for having me boot my computer apparently was that it may be a bomb, not that my contents might be suspicious. The logic of having me sit in front of them and power on a bomb just to find out if it is, in fact, a bomb still escapes me to this day. Nearly as bizarre as the giant liquids disposal vat at security check: "Please mix your bomb ingredients in this packed airport instead of on the plane. Thankyou."
In my experience both Fink and Macports are pretty poor alternatives to apt-get on a Debian based system. Fink however has more of the pre-2000 dependency woes Debian used to suffer. To be more specific, however, as someone that has developed and taught on both platforms, Fink and Macports are inferior for two simple reasons:
1/Fink and Macports have around 1/6th of the packages that Debian has (which is ~24000 packages)
2/ apt-get on a Debian system is fully integrated, and that's a beautiful thing, useful to upgrade the entire system with just a click in a GUI package manager or an apt-get upgrade.
To get up and running on a programming project on a bare Debian system takes me very little time compared to on Macs: downloading 960Mb of XCode and going to various websites to install software not available using Fink or Macports. From my experience, they cannot compare as development environments for portable programming projects. I far prefer a Debian machine.
Looking at some of the comments for this article it's clear that many aren't aware of just how easy it is to install and run a modern Linux desktop these days. Buy a laptop with Linux on it. You'll be very pleasantly surprised..
Finally, the primary statistical premise of the article is flawed: how can the market share of Linux on the desktop be used when Linux preinstalls are still so rare (with the exception of EEPC..)?
What's wrong with the Python interface to Intel's immensely popular OpenCV. Firewire devices, USB, multiple cameras.. all are a breeze on Linux or those-other-two-popular-OS's.
.. and prosper.
Using a Debian-based system as example:
apt-get install python-opencv
In a Python interpreter do:
from opencv import cv
then:
help(cv)
Headtracking for games has been around for a long time but this solution really takes the cake for using inexpensive, off the shelf technology..
The TrackIR solution linked above costs around as much as a Wii itself.
Clearly they are getting a headstart by treating all visitors to America as suspects: getting your eyes scanned and both index fingers printed is no kind of "welcome". A few years ago it was a completely different experience.
oops, should read: "To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product in the market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product."
The size of a patent portfolio cannot be a reasonable measure of innovation, especially in this case given that much of the Microsoft patent portfolio comprises bought patents: patents are bought and sold just like any other commodity.
Secondly, a patent doesn't guarantee the given innovation ever reaches the market. To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product from going to market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product. As a result it's possible to argue that patents discourage actual innovation rather than encourage it.
Of course if this were a story about Government abuse of civil liberties in China, as applied to privacy, people would be decrying it as immaculate example of that failed, corruptible political system we call Communism. In America it just defers to "Well what have you got to hide, bad guy?"
Describing America in the context of Democracy becomes increasingly difficult.
The article is slashdotted, so I cannot comment with knowledge here. That said, I do hope the fact that OS\X is artificially tied to a particular hardware platform is considered when comparing. This artificial anchor makes OS\X a particularly risky OS to become dependent upon, married to the economic ambitions of a hardware business now dependent on near identical components as so-called 'PC's' (Asustek, Quanta make around 70% of the worlds portables, including Apple's). Similarly the need to go to websites to find, install and upgrade software is also a great disadvantage for Apple's platform: Fink/Macports have fairly measley offerings compared to most desktop Linux distributions and both still suffer from the kinds of dependency problems plaguing Linux users 10 years ago (at least that is my experience on Tiger). It's 2007: where's my one-click-system upgrade?
While I use OS\X fairly often, these two factors - along with the inflexible bolt-on windowing environment - rule out OS\X as a good general purpose operating system. OS\X is super if you believe you're dependent on proprietary software, but for those that no longer are it offers very little over a modern Linux OS these days.
I should add that with :set mouse=a you have full mouse input in vim (including click-and-drag selection). This allows you to click on vim tabs in the terminal if you're a clicky kind of person.
Try also tabs in Vim7, I use them much more than :vsplit now.
:tabnew somefile.c and then use keys 'g-t' (Go to Tab) to move between them.
Open up a file as normal then