I'm not sure PS3 will outsell any console at $500 entry costs and Sony rather arrogently telling the gaming community (when Sony realized people felt strongly negitive about this price point) "Hey, frankly $500 is too cheap for this thing". Doesn't matter how cool sounding something is, people will only pay too much... And Sony is not a company to admit their mistakes (Beta Max, Memory Stick, Mini-Disk, Soon Blue-Ray).
In my college years I would have been seriously against the idea of not programming Native. I was a huge C/C++ fan and thought that programming languages such as java were evil. But in all honesty... These days... Programming in C/C++ is more of a pain than it is worth. They (and most nativly compiled languages that I know of) fall (far) behind languages such as C# and Java when it comes to ease of maintenance and OO prettyness (yeah C++ supports OO but ANSI C++ OO is fugly). I'd hate to say it but the only people who should be working with native are the folks and Microsoft, Apple and the OOS community. Developing operating systems and programming tools to allow the rest of the world to not deal with the uglyness of native code.
Personally I have a tendency not to trust the anti-netnutrality camp. My basic problem is the fact that this camp is made up of ISP's them selves who stand to profit greatly from a tiered internet model. The fact of the matter is while clearly Internet usage is on the rise, it remains wholly unclear as to whether the "backbone" of the internet can be broken. Personally I'm more prone to believe that there really aren't any serious bandwidth issues, probably won't be for quite some time, and that ISP's see this as a great way to double up on their profits.
Yeah, but then the problem is people start trying to base enterprise systems around PHP and MySql which neither was designed for (but are being painfully hacked to work in such environments). I agree that the problem isn't the tool as much as it is managment who hear buzz words and don't bother to research whether or not the tool is right for their given situation. You can't say a 16Oz claw hammer sucks because it can't do the job of a sledge hammer.
AVG has been awesome for me. I've used the free version for years, and recently upgraded to the pay version which gave me 3 years of service. On my parents 1.3GHz AMD Duron w/512MB memory there is no appriciable performance impact on the PC.
I agree that the authors conclusions aren't entirly accurate... I do think that Linux right now isn't in a winning position, but it's not because of a lack of educational software (though that would help with families). I think it has a lot to do with what people are comfertable running, right now the masses are extreamly comfertable with Windows.
Another innacuracy is with regard to windows being a poor platform of choice for developers. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Visual Studio.Net (for.Net and non-.Net applications development). If a developer wishes to use more open source oriented tools for whatever reason (greater *inx compatibility etc) they can always go ahead an install cygwin which offers a high degree of compatibility with *inx systems (linux in particular). An OOS developer my perfer linux because it is OOS its self, and does require fewer resources, but there is nothing to stop a developer from doing anything they may do on a *inx platform in a windows environment if they so choose.
He does make some good points. While Linux is far from being a bad OS to work on, and not exactly as difficult as the reader makes it out to be, it's still not quite there in the desktop world. At least from my perspective (a professional software developer), open source packages do work, and you can write good code, but many times I find the documentation skim, and many fustrating limitations with the technology (MySql in general for instance). To a large extent, the LAMP platform is over rated. Windows is fine, far from perfect, but it shouldn't be discounted.
Well, if this is the case then apparently he is not purchasing his upgrades through dell, or through a standard vendor of some sort. Other wise he would not mention "Geee... If you buy cheap parts they break"... Now, it may be Dell sucks for notebooks (I have not personally delt with them since 1996) this still just shows he is not doing the necessary research before making purchasing decisions. Based on what I'm getting out of the article, his particular arguments do not hold any water.
You know, not that I'm saying windows is the best platform in the world... But considering the issues he outlined in this artical, I'd say he is dealing with the wrong vendor for his computing solutions... With a good vendor (Dell, HPaq...) you will get the same level of hardware/software compatibility you will find on a Mac platform. The author also isn't doing a good job of choosing software. Basically, it seems to me his basic problem is going research finding good hardware/software solutions. I bet he'll have many of the same problems on the Mac platform.
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I'm not sure PS3 will outsell any console at $500 entry costs and Sony rather arrogently telling the gaming community (when Sony realized people felt strongly negitive about this price point) "Hey, frankly $500 is too cheap for this thing". Doesn't matter how cool sounding something is, people will only pay too much... And Sony is not a company to admit their mistakes (Beta Max, Memory Stick, Mini-Disk, Soon Blue-Ray).
iTunes, iPod and MacOSX are FOSS? Where do I download the source? I also missed HPUX being FOSS. I didn't like Opera was GLPed either...
In my college years I would have been seriously against the idea of not programming Native. I was a huge C/C++ fan and thought that programming languages such as java were evil. But in all honesty... These days... Programming in C/C++ is more of a pain than it is worth. They (and most nativly compiled languages that I know of) fall (far) behind languages such as C# and Java when it comes to ease of maintenance and OO prettyness (yeah C++ supports OO but ANSI C++ OO is fugly). I'd hate to say it but the only people who should be working with native are the folks and Microsoft, Apple and the OOS community. Developing operating systems and programming tools to allow the rest of the world to not deal with the uglyness of native code.
Personally I have a tendency not to trust the anti-netnutrality camp. My basic problem is the fact that this camp is made up of ISP's them selves who stand to profit greatly from a tiered internet model. The fact of the matter is while clearly Internet usage is on the rise, it remains wholly unclear as to whether the "backbone" of the internet can be broken. Personally I'm more prone to believe that there really aren't any serious bandwidth issues, probably won't be for quite some time, and that ISP's see this as a great way to double up on their profits.
Yeah, but then the problem is people start trying to base enterprise systems around PHP and MySql which neither was designed for (but are being painfully hacked to work in such environments). I agree that the problem isn't the tool as much as it is managment who hear buzz words and don't bother to research whether or not the tool is right for their given situation. You can't say a 16Oz claw hammer sucks because it can't do the job of a sledge hammer.
AVG has been awesome for me. I've used the free version for years, and recently upgraded to the pay version which gave me 3 years of service. On my parents 1.3GHz AMD Duron w/512MB memory there is no appriciable performance impact on the PC.
I agree that the authors conclusions aren't entirly accurate... I do think that Linux right now isn't in a winning position, but it's not because of a lack of educational software (though that would help with families). I think it has a lot to do with what people are comfertable running, right now the masses are extreamly comfertable with Windows. Another innacuracy is with regard to windows being a poor platform of choice for developers. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Visual Studio.Net (for .Net and non-.Net applications development). If a developer wishes to use more open source oriented tools for whatever reason (greater *inx compatibility etc) they can always go ahead an install cygwin which offers a high degree of compatibility with *inx systems (linux in particular). An OOS developer my perfer linux because it is OOS its self, and does require fewer resources, but there is nothing to stop a developer from doing anything they may do on a *inx platform in a windows environment if they so choose.
He does make some good points. While Linux is far from being a bad OS to work on, and not exactly as difficult as the reader makes it out to be, it's still not quite there in the desktop world. At least from my perspective (a professional software developer), open source packages do work, and you can write good code, but many times I find the documentation skim, and many fustrating limitations with the technology (MySql in general for instance). To a large extent, the LAMP platform is over rated. Windows is fine, far from perfect, but it shouldn't be discounted.
Well, if this is the case then apparently he is not purchasing his upgrades through dell, or through a standard vendor of some sort. Other wise he would not mention "Geee... If you buy cheap parts they break"... Now, it may be Dell sucks for notebooks (I have not personally delt with them since 1996) this still just shows he is not doing the necessary research before making purchasing decisions. Based on what I'm getting out of the article, his particular arguments do not hold any water.
You know, not that I'm saying windows is the best platform in the world... But considering the issues he outlined in this artical, I'd say he is dealing with the wrong vendor for his computing solutions... With a good vendor (Dell, HPaq...) you will get the same level of hardware/software compatibility you will find on a Mac platform. The author also isn't doing a good job of choosing software. Basically, it seems to me his basic problem is going research finding good hardware/software solutions. I bet he'll have many of the same problems on the Mac platform.