Isn't the new 'official' Mac browser based on Konqueror? Seems like we're really in the same boat.
Anyway, I don't really see much conflict between Mac and Linux users. I use Linux partly because I like fiddling with things and building machines from scratch. But I'd most certainly consider getting an Apple if I wanted a laptop (ANYTHING to avoid having to deal with another Windows machine).
Funny, but one of the arguments against using anything-but-MS is that users would have to learn something that they're not used to.
The nice thing about Unix's "old technology" is that if you learned to use sh/csh/emacs/vi 20 years ago, you can still use them today, and be pretty confident that you'll still be able to use them in another 20 years.
Often, I feel that Microsoft comes up with new things just to keep developers too busy to even think about porting to other platforms. I remember trying to learn about DDE, which was hyped tremendously at the time.
Er, dogs have been purposefully bred for thousands of years to have certain traits, while humans have always intermixed. Do you think there are many African-Americans who are 100% African?
It also depends on what's valued at the time. If a musical genius like Mozart comes along today, does he write symphonies? If he did, you'd probably never hear of him. More likely, he'd do something that pays well like develop movie scores, or he might even start a rock band.
True, but you're assuming rational behaviour from the recipient of the "obsencely-paid" job, which would involve saving and investing the extra money for when it's needed. In actuality, most people in that position (or their spouses) will just end up buying more stuff.
For my first all-new PC in about a decade I wanted something that had good performance, all the various external ports (usb, 1394, audio, svideo) that I might ever want, and that was also semi-portable. A Shuttle sn41g2 fills the role nicely, with Nvidia video built in, a 2.5 Ghz Athlon, and a DVD writer. There's also an AGP slot if I ever want to get better video, and a PCI slot that I'll probably use for a TV-tuner card. It was a breeze to put together, actually easier than the larger cases I've dealt with in the past. And Linux (Gentoo) runs fine on it.
Just before buying, I had second thoughts, and checked out the price of a Dell system. They start at around $400, around $230 less than I spent. But... that's with only 256Mb memory, no floppy, and the CD wasn't even a writer (which I didn't think you could buy anymore). "Upgrading" all those thing brought the price considerably higher than what I paid, and then I'd end up with a system with unknown pieces that might not play well with my choice of OS.
Thanks for bring back some nice memories. I went to grad. school for a PhD in math, then ended up coding for the next 25 years. But I do remember it as a good time, with an easy TA job that only took a few hours a week, virtually no taxes to pay, and lots of interesting people to socialize with. And like you say, it's 'prestigious' enough that nobody cares that your're not making much money.
I once worked with a Lebanese fellow who said Saudia Arabia was like prison:
* You can't ask out women, or even look at them. * You can't drink. * There are officials walking the streets who hit you with sticks if you don't kneel down to pray at the prescribed times.
Last time I went camping (in a tent), most of the spots were filled with bus-sized RV's that probably are lucky to get 8 miles/gallon. I actually would welcome a doubling of gas prices.
...when soldiers from mostly modest backgrounds are sent out to die so the upper-middle-class can continue driving around in their $40K SUV's and $100K RV's.
Actually, it doesn't take that much skill to make dovetails by hand. Like many other older woodworking procedures, there's a not-so-obvious algorithm that makes it possible, and which you can still learn from older books or articles in Fine Woodworking.
What they should do is provide different models for hobbiests and professional users. The cheaper one might be made of alluminum, and might wear out after a few 1000 hours of use (which a hobbiest would be unlikely to do). The 'professional' model would be made if titanium, cost 5 times as much, and would be suitable for 10's of thousands of hours.
When you have a house, and you leave a bunch of CD players and MP3 players on the sidewalk in front of it, do you really think a kid who walks off with one should be thrown in jail for a decade?
That's why I no longer feel guilty about downloading Gentoo instead of buying commercial distributions. SuSE is my favorite, and I've bought a couple of their versions; but they go out of date really fast. When they change one of the base libraries (glibc?), you're forced to update almost everything, and that's a real pain when you only have a modem connection.
I sometimes think that the commercial linux vendors should offer free copies to open-source developers. But I also fear that that might be most of their market!
For the first time, I bought all the pieces for a new machine online, from Newegg. Shipping took three days.
It was a bit of decision for me, as I work less than.5 miles from Fryes. But aside from lower, prices, buying online had other advantages:
1. You can browse by Vendor. So for example, the DVD writer I bought is an NEC. The ones at Fryes are boxed under a variety of names, but you rarely can tell who manufactured them.
2. Most products have customer reviews, which can tell you quite a bit. For example, I avoided buying a (cheaper) KVM which had a few comments that mentioned degraded video quality. The one I bought was still only $39, and works flawlessly.
3. The web site entry has a lot more information than you can get at retailers. This is how I learned about the different grades of DDR RAM, and led me to get the PC2700. At Fryes, there's just a hard-to-read board with the prices.
4. And speaking of prices: You get decent prices online without having to deal with rebates.
I think I read the same thing about 20 years ago. It's also been long noted that almost every US president has been taller than average.
Anyway, that's life. I'm short, but make up for it by being a good coder. And I never have back problems, while I notice lots of taller people do.
I guess it would be ideal if I could be tall, smart, athletic, funny, and sensitive. Then I'd make loads of money and have hundreds of women after me. But then I might catch an STD and die a slow, painful death. So maybe I should just try to be happy with how I am.
I know almost every thread here has at least one comment like this. Yet everywhere I've worked (for over 25 years), most of the people I've worked with, however strange and geeky, were married.
Hell, even I got married, and I'm not only a lifelong nerd, but short and funny-looking.
Obviously, you've never experienced the terror inherent in a Windows reinstallation (where you can spend an hour watching it copy files and reboot 6 times, only to find that it's exactly in the same corrupted state at which you started).
Funny that you should mention "finding a niche". I've done all sorts of software over the years, but the one thing that's gotten me hired during the last decade is knowing how to hack out grammars with Yacc/Lex.
My old SuSE 6.2 version of linux was desperately out-of-date, and being unemployed, I didn't want to spend even a few dollars on a new distribution. But I did have lots of free time. And a dialup account has no limits on what you can download.
So... each night, my PC would download Gentoo packages, and would then spend the day compiling them. I actually ended up downloading over.5Gb through a 56K modem.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the new 'official' Mac browser based on Konqueror? Seems like we're really in the same boat.
Anyway, I don't really see much conflict between Mac and Linux users. I use Linux partly because I like fiddling with things and building machines from scratch. But I'd most certainly consider getting an Apple if I wanted a laptop (ANYTHING to avoid having to deal with another Windows machine).
Funny, but one of the arguments against using anything-but-MS is that users would have to learn something that they're not used to.
The nice thing about Unix's "old technology" is that if you learned to use sh/csh/emacs/vi 20 years ago, you can still use them today, and be pretty confident that you'll still be able to use them in another 20 years.
Often, I feel that Microsoft comes up with new things just to keep developers too busy to even think about porting to other platforms. I remember trying to learn about DDE, which was hyped tremendously at the time.
Don't you know: Portable music players haven't been invented until Microsoft comes up with one.
(I think it was Petreley who came up with this notion.)
Er, dogs have been purposefully bred for thousands of years to have certain traits, while humans have always intermixed. Do you think there are many African-Americans who are 100% African?
Yes.
It also depends on what's valued at the time. If a musical genius like Mozart comes along today, does he write symphonies? If he did, you'd probably never hear of him. More likely, he'd do something that pays well like develop movie scores, or he might even start a rock band.
I just put together some new hardware, and was going to install Linux on it. But this looks so cool that I'm going to wait for it...
True, but you're assuming rational behaviour from the recipient of the "obsencely-paid" job, which would involve saving and investing the extra money for when it's needed. In actuality, most people in that position (or their spouses) will just end up buying more stuff.
For my first all-new PC in about a decade I wanted something that had good performance, all the various external ports (usb, 1394, audio, svideo) that I might ever want, and that was also semi-portable. A Shuttle sn41g2 fills the role nicely, with Nvidia video built in, a 2.5 Ghz Athlon, and a DVD writer. There's also an AGP slot if I ever want to get better video, and a PCI slot that I'll probably use for a TV-tuner card. It was a breeze to put together, actually easier than the larger cases I've dealt with in the past. And Linux (Gentoo) runs fine on it.
Just before buying, I had second thoughts, and checked out the price of a Dell system. They start at around $400, around $230 less than I spent. But... that's with only 256Mb memory, no floppy, and the CD wasn't even a writer (which I didn't think you could buy anymore). "Upgrading" all those thing brought the price considerably higher than what I paid, and then I'd end up with a system with unknown pieces that might not play well with my choice of OS.
Thanks for bring back some nice memories. I went to grad. school for a PhD in math, then ended up coding for the next 25 years. But I do remember it as a good time, with an easy TA job that only took a few hours a week, virtually no taxes to pay, and lots of interesting people to socialize with. And like you say, it's 'prestigious' enough that nobody cares that your're not making much money.
I once worked with a Lebanese fellow who said Saudia Arabia was like prison:
* You can't ask out women, or even look at them.
* You can't drink.
* There are officials walking the streets who hit you with sticks if you don't kneel down to pray at the prescribed times.
Last time I went camping (in a tent), most of the spots were filled with bus-sized RV's that probably are lucky to get 8 miles/gallon. I actually would welcome a doubling of gas prices.
...when soldiers from mostly modest backgrounds are sent out to die so the upper-middle-class can continue driving around in their $40K SUV's and $100K RV's.
Actually, it doesn't take that much skill to make dovetails by hand. Like many other older woodworking procedures, there's a not-so-obvious algorithm that makes it possible, and which you can still learn from older books or articles in Fine Woodworking.
But it is slow and tedious (at least for me).
What they should do is provide different models for hobbiests and professional users. The cheaper one might be made of alluminum, and might wear out after a few 1000 hours of use (which a hobbiest would be unlikely to do). The 'professional' model would be made if titanium, cost 5 times as much, and would be suitable for 10's of thousands of hours.
When you have a house, and you leave a bunch of CD players and MP3 players on the sidewalk in front of it, do you really think a kid who walks off with one should be thrown in jail for a decade?
"Those who like sausage and laws and software should not see them being made."
(Okay, I added the part about software.)
That's why I no longer feel guilty about downloading Gentoo instead of buying commercial distributions. SuSE is my favorite, and I've bought a couple of their versions; but they go out of date really fast. When they change one of the base libraries (glibc?), you're forced to update almost everything, and that's a real pain when you only have a modem connection.
I sometimes think that the commercial linux vendors should offer free copies to open-source developers. But I also fear that that might be most of their market!
For the first time, I bought all the pieces for a new machine online, from Newegg. Shipping took three days.
.5 miles from Fryes. But aside from lower, prices, buying online had other advantages:
It was a bit of decision for me, as I work less than
1. You can browse by Vendor. So for example, the DVD writer I bought is an NEC. The ones at Fryes are boxed under a variety of names, but you rarely can tell who manufactured them.
2. Most products have customer reviews, which can tell you quite a bit. For example, I avoided buying a (cheaper) KVM which had a few comments that mentioned degraded video quality. The one I bought was still only $39, and works flawlessly.
3. The web site entry has a lot more information than you can get at retailers. This is how I learned about the different grades of DDR RAM, and led me to get the PC2700. At Fryes, there's just a hard-to-read board with the prices.
4. And speaking of prices: You get decent prices online without having to deal with rebates.
Fear of snow: Tux Racer
Fear of killer robots: Gnobots
Fear of cats: Wing Commander
I think I read the same thing about 20 years ago. It's also been long noted that almost every US president has been taller than average.
Anyway, that's life. I'm short, but make up for it by being a good coder. And I never have back problems, while I notice lots of taller people do.
I guess it would be ideal if I could be tall, smart, athletic, funny, and sensitive. Then I'd make loads of money and have hundreds of women after me. But then I might catch an STD and die a slow, painful death. So maybe I should just try to be happy with how I am.
I know almost every thread here has at least one comment like this. Yet everywhere I've worked (for over 25 years), most of the people I've worked with, however strange and geeky, were married.
Hell, even I got married, and I'm not only a lifelong nerd, but short and funny-looking.
"...as most developers have never talked to an actual customer..."
True. But usually, an open-source developer is his own customer.
Obviously, you've never experienced the terror inherent in a Windows reinstallation (where you can spend an hour watching it copy files and reboot 6 times, only to find that it's exactly in the same corrupted state at which you started).
Funny that you should mention "finding a niche". I've done all sorts of software over the years, but the one thing that's gotten me hired during the last decade is knowing how to hack out grammars with Yacc/Lex.
My old SuSE 6.2 version of linux was desperately out-of-date, and being unemployed, I didn't want to spend even a few dollars on a new distribution. But I did have lots of free time.
.5Gb through a 56K modem.
And a dialup account has no limits on what you can download.
So... each night, my PC would download Gentoo packages, and would then spend the day compiling them. I actually ended up downloading over