$6100 dollars for 8 4Gb sticks from the apple store (configuring a mac pro). That's about $400 at newegg.
You're either lying or misinformed. You need DDR3 PC3-8500 ECC RAM for a Mac Pro..
Yeah I have the choice of sticking to DDR2 which is just as good as DDR3 in pretty much EVERY case. And they used to charge $9600 for 16GB of DDR2 a year ago when someone tried talking me into getting Mac. At that time I could get 8gb of DDR2 for $40 bux after rebates on techbargains. No it's not ECC but I DON'T WANT OR NEED ECC. Regardless, I have to start at $2500 base price just to get a computer without the monitor attached (I have a beautiful 24" and 30") already.
Besides the punchline of my post was, I would pay Vista prices for OSX but they're too snobby to disable the BIOS lock. So saying that leopard costs $29 is an effing LIE. It would cost $2499 for me and not only get software that's obsolete in 3 years, but an enormous piece of aluminum to go with it.
Yeesh... apple is releasing snow leopard for $29 and microsoft is still pricing stuff like this? When will they learn that a lower price will likely increase the number of people willing to pay for it instead of pirating it.
Sure, you only have to pay twice as much for the non-upgradable hardware to run it.
$6100 dollars for 8 4Gb sticks from the apple store (configuring a mac pro). That's about $400 at newegg.
It's crap to compare the price of Mac OSX to Windows. I'd gladly pay Vista prices to run OSX on a PC.
As a PC fanboy for 20+ years, I have to say...when the games I play work natively on Mac, I'm switching.
Yes, I know I can buy a Mac now, buy Windows, and dual boot. But I don't want to do that, and I don't want to spend $100 on Windows when I just dropped $400 more than I'd pay for a Windows system to begin with.
I've priced it: comparable hardware with OS, the Macbook that meets my specifications is $400 more than the Dell equivalent.
Liar.. and here's why.
Which mac do you plan to get? I'm assuming as a gamer you want to have a nice pci-express slot for upgrading video card every 8-12 months. Guess what, you gotta get a mac pro. $2399 for the base model. Congrats!
Now consider you'll be paying double for RAM too because it stupidly uses ECC (which is also slower).
I hate apple for the pricing of their hardware. Go configure a Mac Pro today. They want to charge you $1500 for 8GB of RAM. $1500!! 8GB of DDR2 (non ECC) will cost you about $50 bux after rebate from newegg today (for corsair which is above average ram). just for laughs, 16GB of ram cost like $9,000. I could build 8-9 quad cores with 8gb, 2TB and 24" monitors for that much money.
Love the OS, hate the hardware. I will never buy a mac but would gladly pay for OSX (that is also a lie, but it proves my point).
The first Windows XP was something that was avoided by most for over a year. Win2k was stable, rock solid, why upgrade for the eye candy?
I have to say Amen. Win2k was the best OS they ever came out with. It took a few months for all the drivers to be there, but win2k was the first time I felt like upgrading windows was a true improvement in systems technology. The NT kernel was so much better than 9X. From Xp on, it's tacked on bloat.
Yeah, and thats what I don't really like about frameworks in general. They have all of these awesome cool fast easy to use things built in. But sometimes you discover that your needs are too complex for the framework, and someone instantly replies " you don't have to use feature X". Well sooner or later you aren't using many of the cool features of the framework anymore. So why are you using the framework?
Spring is the only framework flexible enough to get around the corners that things like rails back you into. If you find their JDBC classes not useful, you might still find their transaction management useful. However, their JDBC classes have helpers ranging from give me an object and I'll generate the SQL to having classes which allow your SQL to be ran with their improved exception handling. The really nailed the framework in the sense it provides some level of support no matter how complex your case may be.
If you take away threaded messaging, g-mail is just another e-mail program. I do like the way it handles contacts as well, automatically adding them once you send a message and the auto complete is very nice, but Yahoo Beta e-mail is actually a pretty slick drag-drop interface. I'm also a fan of the preview pane for desktop e-mail and yahoo has this nailed.
I still prefer g-mail, but I think it's strongest quality is still the threaded message view. Why has NOBODY else copied this (or am I seriously missing something?)
Maybe drivers are better now. 50% was an overstatement but even if I lose 10% I can't consider it an upgrade now can I? You won't find an article stating Vista has better or even equal performance than XP in games. And the game I play is counter strike soruce and I had a 30fps difference between 75 and 45.
I'm still waiting for a pc that IS a reciever. Even the high end receivers suffer from lack of updatable software/firmware. Think about the horrendous lack of preferences... I don't want it to change modes when I change inputs. That's not the best example but it proves the point; it could be configurable. I want to get my OSD in Component output but they probably couldn't QA it in time... could have been in a future release.
My Yamaha RXV-4600 was $1200 last year and already obsolete because of no 1080p through. Why can't it pass a 1080p signal through? I assume because the software/firmware wasn't designed to as 1080p wasn't around 2 years ago.
Maybe it's hardware? Well it sure would be nice if that hardware was on a modular component bus like pci/pci-x where I could just swap out a $29 card. Even outboard FireWire/USB 2.0 would be just fine. Same goes for this new HDMI 1.3 crap... If I get my new TV, I can't run it through my receiver, and TV's never have HDMI output or through so a $100 splitter(not switcher) becomes necessary. Don't talk about what HDMI 1.3 is or isn't, bottom line is I should have to throw away a $1200 piece of equipment because of a cable update. Same thing goes for AV compression (or lack thereof).
My dream is a CPU pre-amp that only serves as a router and processing manager. It should have modular I/O. I don't need 12 analog ins/outs. Why do I pay for them? It should be able to take any input and route to any output, upscaling or down scaling as necessary. For specialized processing it should have modular components. Dolby's new codec shouldn't make my receiver obsolete when sub $100 sound cards are capable of decoding it. Modular components are defiantly the way to go, not to mention the general purpose CPU on this system could probably handle a lot of this without being a very fast chip.
It should be able to take those signals and do any blend you require. It should be able to merge video input providing the first ever useful picture in picture system. I can't go hdmi from cable and PS3 into any reciever and use PIP out meaning, I can't rack up exp points while watching something else. Sometimes I want to listen to music on my stereo while still playing the ball game with low volume. I'd love to assign the game to the rear surrounds only and using the fronts for music. How many of you have crappy receivers that won't even use the rears for music unless the signal is a certain format? You mean to tell me I require a DTS signal to play music on all 5 speakers... oh, you never though about that. Pity it's too late to change now.
With my high expectations, this article was a real disappointment.
I'll still get the RAM at NewEgg, I DO have SOME standards.
Why would you buy RAM at Newegg, but processors at a box store? They're almost certainly going to be more expensive at Frys than they are at Newegg.
Hold on, Fry's has some great deals sometimes. I love newegg and usually favor it because of no tax in IL, but Fry's is an unusually great brick and mortar to have nearby and has deals just a great or greater than the 'egg. Now if you said CC or BB I would agree completely, but Fry's kinda kicks ass.
All these things are great, especially db connectivity, but we are talking about minimalist perl for the use of Unix and Linux. What business does my OS have reading from or to a table? I would sooner have my database talk to the OS. For parsing or regex replacement awk and sed do me quite well, and Bash binds them all amongst the other 100's of shell utilities.
IMHO, I'll stick to the shell for system level. If I needed something more complex I would code it in another language, perhaps even perl, but the test sell it as a replacement to shell scripting. "The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed..." So what do these Perl versions to except require me to learn what could be argued as one of the sharpest scripting languages around.
As far as debugging, bash -x has served me well because I've never gone overboard and used it against it's intent. If it's more involved, I'll write it in something else; perhaps but not necessarily Perl.
Note to self: Don't click submit right away if you've only been awake for 2 minutes. Reading my original post, it's probably bad to post after being awake for 16 as well =/
The moment another, cheaper, OS can run games as fast, I'll stop stealing it. Until then I'll continue to run Linux on VMWare (paid for) to get all my real work done, but VMWare is a bit heavy to run in the background while gaming.
MS, please fix the Vista drivers so I may reinstall my pirate copy and continue to say that MS isn't totally evil.
Exactly my point. It's not a Lin vs. Win flame, it's a Business vs. Technical role and the salaries involved. Bottom line is technology doesn't make money by itself, it just helps businesses to operate. There are many more businesses ran by technology than business in technology. I bet the average finance report designer who just crystal to "program" a budget report makes more than the poor chap who sat up through late nights inventing OLAP.
Trailblazers will rarely be as successful financially than those walking the traveled path.
It's very, very simple. The "business'ish" programming roles are usually 50/50 development and analysis whereas the systems level programming jobs tend to keep you boxed in a more technical environment. People who blow smoke up ones ass make more money than the ones who actually do things. The world's best programmers couldn't sell a free system to a business, thus we have Linux. The worlds best marketers shoved windows 3.1 down everyones throat and built an empire. Where's the money?
Of course there are some very, very technical systems guys at MS but I wonder if their Engineers make as much as the DW guy who hands Ballimer his monthly report.
This entire ordeal is ludicrous. Mixtapes don't make album sales suffer. DJ's DO NOT harm the recording industry. I hope that DJ Drama wins a counter suit for the waste of time and efforts this will cost him. What a DJ does is their own creation. Most DJ's try to spin spanking new or unheard of (read unreleased) artists. The majority of mix-tapes (unless you are a really weak DJ) consist of a small portion of the song actually being on the tape, typically 1 verse or a hook. I've purchased more albums as the result of wanting to hear the full album version of a song after hearing a snippit or remixed version on a mix tape. They never use the full length of the song and the quality is usually degraded due to fact it's rerecorded, typically via an analog channel. Furthermore, they enhance the songs by mixing, scratching or doing voice overs to enhance the experience of the music. A mix tape is never a substitution for buying an album.
The recording companies would love to think the giant poster of the band is effective advertising, but it is not. New artists and new albums from existing artists are promoted exclusively by DJ's, be it mix tape or live mix. In Hip-Hop, House, Rave and other "underground" music mix tapes are the only valid form of advertisement. They don't make music video's anymore and if they do, please show me a channel that shows them in full length. Nobody listens to the radio, at least not for good hip-hop and other dance genre music. Plus radio typically censors music to the point it completely changes the song.
Now I concede that he may be violating copyrights to make money from copyrighted music. That's just a shame. If he purchased the albums he's mixing he isn't doing anything that should be wrong. The RIAA or RICO should be happy they landed an artist worthy of being on the mixtapes of established DJ's.
The hustle is over for the recording industry and this is another demonstration they are losing ability to continue pimping artists. They had a good 50-70 year run of chewing up artists and spitting them out... they should just give it up. Amnesty is the last option before they totally fold. Most artists are smart enough now to do self-promotion and start their own label. Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) and Sean Combs (Puff Daddy, P-Diddy) proved how much more money is available to artists when it is done through a self label. As a result most "True" hip-hop has gone the way of indie labels such as Definitive Jux (to name one).
Sorry if the post jumps around or is poorly worded but I am at werk and don't have the time to revise my rant. And yes... I spelled werk right.
The singularity is a point but the Schwarzchild radius around it is directly proportional to mass. One earth mass is equivalent to something like a few cm of Schwarzchild radius.
Inside the Schwarzchild radius everything falls into the hole regardless of velocity, no exceptions.
If work was switching to linux on the desktop I would say, "Eh, whatever". I used Gentoo at my last shop and let me just say that was NOT a very nice operating system to use daily. It was ok, but I always felt like I was walking on pins to not break something very simple. Truth is WinXP + Cygwin (properly configured for X and rxvt) can do anything I really need a Linux box to do and quite well.
Now at home, no way Jose.... Why? What can WinXP do that Linux can't? Games. The message, as I'm sure other will emphasize, it's all about what you need your computer to do.
It's hard to rationalize why companies spend 100-300 a license on Windows when Loretta can get her mail in Thunderbird, Leon can make charts in OOo with a slight learning curve from Excel, Tommy can draft the documents in OOo as well, and I can run Eclipse to code in any language I choose on a free OS. And it's not just Windows that costs. There's butt load of ancillary programs on my pc to set up NFS drives, anti-virus, novell for app deployment, exceed X-Server. All of this stuff could have been done by a clever Linux Admin and guess what, by a clever Windows admin as well.
However in the CYA world we live in it's companies spend the money as a scapegoat when shit goes wrong. Why do we use Weblogic instead of JBoss? Why do we use Oracle instead of a free or less expensive alternative? Why do we use Exceed instead of installing cygwin? Why do all the servers use Red Hat instead of Fedora or (insert distro here)? Because just like my aim on my home PC is to play games the managers of IT have aims to cover their asses. When it doesn't work they can say they used the "best" software and dump the blame on vendors.
Until Linux is willing to assume that risk, as Red Had did in the server world, desktops are out of the question.
"25,000 lines of Javascript ? What could you possibly be doing which requires that level of Javascript interaction ?????"
document.write('25,000 bottles of beer on the wall, 25,000 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around - 24,999 bottles of beer on the wall');
document.write('24,999 bottles of beer on the wall, 24,999 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around - 24,998 bottles of beer on the wall');
document.write('24,998 bottles of beer on the wall, 24,998 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around - 24,997 bottles of beer on the wall');
etc...
My goodness!
for (var x = 1 ; x <= 25000 ; x++ )<br> {<br> document.write( x + ' bottles of beer on the wall, ' + x + ' bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around - ' + x + ' bottles of beer on the wall');<br> }
I agree with the referenced post, I just wish my employer would agree with firing up some CounterStrike every now and then =).
So I wonder with greater concern why businesses consider Windows the ideal business desktop environment for the casual employee who needs nothing more than simple spreadsheets or to log into the Java based SAP site to fill out their timesheet.
I've said numerous times on this site, give me DX10 for linux or give me windows. Windows does NOTHING that good old linux can't do until you want to fire up some CounterStrike.
And just don't even go there with the Cegeda, just stop before you start....
Slashdot Mirror
You're either lying or misinformed. You need DDR3 PC3-8500 ECC RAM for a Mac Pro. .
Yeah I have the choice of sticking to DDR2 which is just as good as DDR3 in pretty much EVERY case. And they used to charge $9600 for 16GB of DDR2 a year ago when someone tried talking me into getting Mac. At that time I could get 8gb of DDR2 for $40 bux after rebates on techbargains. No it's not ECC but I DON'T WANT OR NEED ECC. Regardless, I have to start at $2500 base price just to get a computer without the monitor attached (I have a beautiful 24" and 30") already.
Besides the punchline of my post was, I would pay Vista prices for OSX but they're too snobby to disable the BIOS lock. So saying that leopard costs $29 is an effing LIE. It would cost $2499 for me and not only get software that's obsolete in 3 years, but an enormous piece of aluminum to go with it.
Yeesh... apple is releasing snow leopard for $29 and microsoft is still pricing stuff like this? When will they learn that a lower price will likely increase the number of people willing to pay for it instead of pirating it.
Sure, you only have to pay twice as much for the non-upgradable hardware to run it.
$6100 dollars for 8 4Gb sticks from the apple store (configuring a mac pro). That's about $400 at newegg.
It's crap to compare the price of Mac OSX to Windows. I'd gladly pay Vista prices to run OSX on a PC.
As a PC fanboy for 20+ years, I have to say...when the games I play work natively on Mac, I'm switching.
Yes, I know I can buy a Mac now, buy Windows, and dual boot. But I don't want to do that, and I don't want to spend $100 on Windows when I just dropped $400 more than I'd pay for a Windows system to begin with.
I've priced it: comparable hardware with OS, the Macbook that meets my specifications is $400 more than the Dell equivalent.
Liar.. and here's why.
Which mac do you plan to get? I'm assuming as a gamer you want to have a nice pci-express slot for upgrading video card every 8-12 months. Guess what, you gotta get a mac pro. $2399 for the base model. Congrats!
Now consider you'll be paying double for RAM too because it stupidly uses ECC (which is also slower).
I hate apple for the pricing of their hardware. Go configure a Mac Pro today. They want to charge you $1500 for 8GB of RAM. $1500!! 8GB of DDR2 (non ECC) will cost you about $50 bux after rebate from newegg today (for corsair which is above average ram). just for laughs, 16GB of ram cost like $9,000. I could build 8-9 quad cores with 8gb, 2TB and 24" monitors for that much money.
Love the OS, hate the hardware. I will never buy a mac but would gladly pay for OSX (that is also a lie, but it proves my point).
If you take away threaded messaging, g-mail is just another e-mail program. I do like the way it handles contacts as well, automatically adding them once you send a message and the auto complete is very nice, but Yahoo Beta e-mail is actually a pretty slick drag-drop interface. I'm also a fan of the preview pane for desktop e-mail and yahoo has this nailed.
I still prefer g-mail, but I think it's strongest quality is still the threaded message view. Why has NOBODY else copied this (or am I seriously missing something?)
Maybe drivers are better now. 50% was an overstatement but even if I lose 10% I can't consider it an upgrade now can I? You won't find an article stating Vista has better or even equal performance than XP in games. And the game I play is counter strike soruce and I had a 30fps difference between 75 and 45.
I would use Vista and DX10 if I didn't suffer a 50% performance hit in current games. Not much more to add to that.
I'm still waiting for a pc that IS a reciever. Even the high end receivers suffer from lack of updatable software/firmware. Think about the horrendous lack of preferences... I don't want it to change modes when I change inputs. That's not the best example but it proves the point; it could be configurable. I want to get my OSD in Component output but they probably couldn't QA it in time... could have been in a future release.
My Yamaha RXV-4600 was $1200 last year and already obsolete because of no 1080p through. Why can't it pass a 1080p signal through? I assume because the software/firmware wasn't designed to as 1080p wasn't around 2 years ago.
Maybe it's hardware? Well it sure would be nice if that hardware was on a modular component bus like pci/pci-x where I could just swap out a $29 card. Even outboard FireWire/USB 2.0 would be just fine. Same goes for this new HDMI 1.3 crap... If I get my new TV, I can't run it through my receiver, and TV's never have HDMI output or through so a $100 splitter(not switcher) becomes necessary. Don't talk about what HDMI 1.3 is or isn't, bottom line is I should have to throw away a $1200 piece of equipment because of a cable update. Same thing goes for AV compression (or lack thereof).
My dream is a CPU pre-amp that only serves as a router and processing manager. It should have modular I/O. I don't need 12 analog ins/outs. Why do I pay for them? It should be able to take any input and route to any output, upscaling or down scaling as necessary. For specialized processing it should have modular components. Dolby's new codec shouldn't make my receiver obsolete when sub $100 sound cards are capable of decoding it. Modular components are defiantly the way to go, not to mention the general purpose CPU on this system could probably handle a lot of this without being a very fast chip.
It should be able to take those signals and do any blend you require. It should be able to merge video input providing the first ever useful picture in picture system. I can't go hdmi from cable and PS3 into any reciever and use PIP out meaning, I can't rack up exp points while watching something else. Sometimes I want to listen to music on my stereo while still playing the ball game with low volume. I'd love to assign the game to the rear surrounds only and using the fronts for music. How many of you have crappy receivers that won't even use the rears for music unless the signal is a certain format? You mean to tell me I require a DTS signal to play music on all 5 speakers... oh, you never though about that. Pity it's too late to change now.
With my high expectations, this article was a real disappointment.
All these things are great, especially db connectivity, but we are talking about minimalist perl for the use of Unix and Linux. What business does my OS have reading from or to a table? I would sooner have my database talk to the OS. For parsing or regex replacement awk and sed do me quite well, and Bash binds them all amongst the other 100's of shell utilities.
IMHO, I'll stick to the shell for system level. If I needed something more complex I would code it in another language, perhaps even perl, but the test sell it as a replacement to shell scripting. "The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed..." So what do these Perl versions to except require me to learn what could be argued as one of the sharpest scripting languages around.
As far as debugging, bash -x has served me well because I've never gone overboard and used it against it's intent. If it's more involved, I'll write it in something else; perhaps but not necessarily Perl.
If I'm well skilled in BASH plus sed and awk, what does perl buy me?
yikes... s/where/wear/
Note to self:
Don't click submit right away if you've only been awake for 2 minutes. Reading my original post, it's probably bad to post after being awake for 16 as well =/
I embrace my hypocrisy and where the black robe with pride. It's slimming =)
The moment another, cheaper, OS can run games as fast, I'll stop stealing it. Until then I'll continue to run Linux on VMWare (paid for) to get all my real work done, but VMWare is a bit heavy to run in the background while gaming.
MS, please fix the Vista drivers so I may reinstall my pirate copy and continue to say that MS isn't totally evil.
Exactly my point. It's not a Lin vs. Win flame, it's a Business vs. Technical role and the salaries involved. Bottom line is technology doesn't make money by itself, it just helps businesses to operate. There are many more businesses ran by technology than business in technology. I bet the average finance report designer who just crystal to "program" a budget report makes more than the poor chap who sat up through late nights inventing OLAP.
Trailblazers will rarely be as successful financially than those walking the traveled path.
It's very, very simple. The "business'ish" programming roles are usually 50/50 development and analysis whereas the systems level programming jobs tend to keep you boxed in a more technical environment. People who blow smoke up ones ass make more money than the ones who actually do things. The world's best programmers couldn't sell a free system to a business, thus we have Linux. The worlds best marketers shoved windows 3.1 down everyones throat and built an empire. Where's the money?
Of course there are some very, very technical systems guys at MS but I wonder if their Engineers make as much as the DW guy who hands Ballimer his monthly report.
This entire ordeal is ludicrous. Mixtapes don't make album sales suffer. DJ's DO NOT harm the recording industry. I hope that DJ Drama wins a counter suit for the waste of time and efforts this will cost him. What a DJ does is their own creation. Most DJ's try to spin spanking new or unheard of (read unreleased) artists. The majority of mix-tapes (unless you are a really weak DJ) consist of a small portion of the song actually being on the tape, typically 1 verse or a hook. I've purchased more albums as the result of wanting to hear the full album version of a song after hearing a snippit or remixed version on a mix tape. They never use the full length of the song and the quality is usually degraded due to fact it's rerecorded, typically via an analog channel. Furthermore, they enhance the songs by mixing, scratching or doing voice overs to enhance the experience of the music. A mix tape is never a substitution for buying an album.
The recording companies would love to think the giant poster of the band is effective advertising, but it is not. New artists and new albums from existing artists are promoted exclusively by DJ's, be it mix tape or live mix. In Hip-Hop, House, Rave and other "underground" music mix tapes are the only valid form of advertisement. They don't make music video's anymore and if they do, please show me a channel that shows them in full length. Nobody listens to the radio, at least not for good hip-hop and other dance genre music. Plus radio typically censors music to the point it completely changes the song.
Now I concede that he may be violating copyrights to make money from copyrighted music. That's just a shame. If he purchased the albums he's mixing he isn't doing anything that should be wrong. The RIAA or RICO should be happy they landed an artist worthy of being on the mixtapes of established DJ's.
The hustle is over for the recording industry and this is another demonstration they are losing ability to continue pimping artists. They had a good 50-70 year run of chewing up artists and spitting them out... they should just give it up. Amnesty is the last option before they totally fold. Most artists are smart enough now to do self-promotion and start their own label. Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) and Sean Combs (Puff Daddy, P-Diddy) proved how much more money is available to artists when it is done through a self label. As a result most "True" hip-hop has gone the way of indie labels such as Definitive Jux (to name one).
Sorry if the post jumps around or is poorly worded but I am at werk and don't have the time to revise my rant. And yes... I spelled werk right.
Yes, provided no ill side affects from the vapor.
aka, its event horizon
If work was switching to linux on the desktop I would say, "Eh, whatever". I used Gentoo at my last shop and let me just say that was NOT a very nice operating system to use daily. It was ok, but I always felt like I was walking on pins to not break something very simple. Truth is WinXP + Cygwin (properly configured for X and rxvt) can do anything I really need a Linux box to do and quite well.
Now at home, no way Jose.... Why? What can WinXP do that Linux can't? Games. The message, as I'm sure other will emphasize, it's all about what you need your computer to do.
It's hard to rationalize why companies spend 100-300 a license on Windows when Loretta can get her mail in Thunderbird, Leon can make charts in OOo with a slight learning curve from Excel, Tommy can draft the documents in OOo as well, and I can run Eclipse to code in any language I choose on a free OS. And it's not just Windows that costs. There's butt load of ancillary programs on my pc to set up NFS drives, anti-virus, novell for app deployment, exceed X-Server. All of this stuff could have been done by a clever Linux Admin and guess what, by a clever Windows admin as well.
However in the CYA world we live in it's companies spend the money as a scapegoat when shit goes wrong. Why do we use Weblogic instead of JBoss? Why do we use Oracle instead of a free or less expensive alternative? Why do we use Exceed instead of installing cygwin? Why do all the servers use Red Hat instead of Fedora or (insert distro here)? Because just like my aim on my home PC is to play games the managers of IT have aims to cover their asses. When it doesn't work they can say they used the "best" software and dump the blame on vendors.
Until Linux is willing to assume that risk, as Red Had did in the server world, desktops are out of the question.
Efficient, but perhaps less effective.
I agree with the referenced post, I just wish my employer would agree with firing up some CounterStrike every now and then =).
So I wonder with greater concern why businesses consider Windows the ideal business desktop environment for the casual employee who needs nothing more than simple spreadsheets or to log into the Java based SAP site to fill out their timesheet.
I've said numerous times on this site, give me DX10 for linux or give me windows. Windows does NOTHING that good old linux can't do until you want to fire up some CounterStrike. And just don't even go there with the Cegeda, just stop before you start....