It depends where you work - when my employer had separate days, people took off when they were sick, but now with PTO they come in and contaminate everyone else because they're selfish douchebags who don't want to lose a vacation day. It doesn't matter that they added them all together (i.e. if you had enough time in, you got 20 vacation days, 7 sick days, and 1 'floating holiday', but now you just get 28 days).
I just wrote this in another post, but it's applicable here - our company rolled sick/personal/vacation days into PTO; now people come in when they are sick because they don't want to 'blow' a vacation day. It pisses me off.
We sort of eliminated "sick" days by combining sick, personal, and vacation days all into Paid Time Off (PTO). Nobody had a problem taking a sick day when they were sick, nobody was going to get fired for it (although when there was crucial stuff going on you might be asked to provide a note from a doctor - but I've never heard of anybody actually being asked to). But now people treat all the days as vacation days - so they come in when they're sick because they don't want to blow a vacation day on it. Some of us have the luxury of working at home; if the illness is not that bad - i.e. the main reason I won't come in is because I don't want to make other people sick, then my supervisor has no problem with it.
If you go back up the line, the last point was that I wouldn't spend that much anyway (unless I could benefit from it - for what I do, I can't), but even if I did I wouldn't want to spend the extra $50 for several reasons: 1) it's still more money for something I could get for free (and have to replace anyway - I stopped using ubuntu, I don't like it anymore), 2) dual booting to windows is often helpful, 3) when I sell it the buyer will likely want a legit copy of windows.
True... I said "for what I need to do," and I don't travel a lot. I use it in my car more than anywhere else. When I'm at home or work I use a desktop.
On mine? Radeon HD with discrete memory. I am cheap - I admit it, I plan for this to last as long as my current laptop has lasted so far (over 7 years now). Quad-core, decent graphics, blu-ray - from Toshiba direct. My current laptop is Toshiba and lasted this long, and Toshiba gets better than average ratings for fewer problems.
Umm... no. I don't suppose you've installed anything lately. Besides, I have to install on a number of computers anyway, and I don't like Ubuntu, so I'd have to replace it anyway... so no, it makes no difference in what I wrote.
WTF? How do I have a "walled garden" having Debian on my laptop? A $1500 laptop gets you $1000 less in the bank than me, and no advantages given my usage.
I don't see the point in showing Dell there is a demand for Linux from the factory - not artificially like that, anyway. What do I get out of it? You really think Dell spent a lot of time on drivers when they largely build their laptops from components from other companies anyway? I wouldn't even use Ubuntu, and think I should pay extra for it just to prove a point that won't go anywhere anyway? Dell is doing this to satisfy a niche market - they know it, we know it. Make a Venn diagram of Linux users: who use laptops, who are willing to spend $1500 on a laptop, who want to buy from Dell instead of a more reliable brand, and who actually want to use Ubuntu.... then use a microscope to see how big the overlap is.
Spending extra money, in this case, solely to make an ideological point is just worthless.... Windows users and "average Joes" buying a new laptop are NOT going to get the Linux version because it's available, especially when it's more expensive, no matter how many people like us buy, so it's not like you're going to artificially sneak your way into giving Linux the same kind of advantage Windows has in the OEM market.
You can justify paying $1000 and more for laptops to yourself if it makes you feel better - there's NOTHING you can do on your laptops that I need to do as a developer that you an do on yours.... and mine cost less than $500. It's true my last one was $700, but that was a long time ago when laptops were more expensive (and I still have it, actually, and if I wanted to sell it I could - and I'd reinstall the XP Pro it came with - makes it a lot easier to sell second hand than with Linux).
But I AM a cheapskate. If I really wanted one of these, I'd buy the Windows version and then install Linux on it. Make it dual boot and get the best of both worlds.
Of course, $1,500 is more than I'm willing to spend on a laptop at all anyway.
So you miss the point entirely - nobody thinks "professionals" should be buying the cheap laptops. These are largely lower income people who have more time than money to wait on lines for days and want something their kids can write a paper with and that they can surf and do email on. It's a perfect fit for them.
He's right - to an extent - I had similar problems, where working things broke on new releases and you had a lot of WTF? moments, but I chalk it up to always wanting the latest and greatest without letting other people "beta" test it. Ubuntu has their six month release cycle, ready or not. I did switch to Debian and I'm a lot happier.
I have one of those and am hit with the low memory problem all the time. I'll have to take a look into rooting it - there is so much crap you can't uninstall (and I don't know why you can't move a lot of apps, even 3rd party ones, to the SD card). I just don't want to screw it up.
The windows 7 desktops I got from Acer for my wife and daughter didn't even come with recovery discs, they highly recommended you make one yourself... I think I have like 4 or 5 DVDs for each box. Unbelievable.
So, I'm wondering if you can't do the same with Windows 8 - remove the crapware, clean the registry (if possible), then make recovery discs based on that configuration. Anybody know?
The poster quite clearly said "professional" help, i.e. at the Apple Store. If, for example, you're traveling and have problems with your internet on your Ubuntu laptop, where are you going to go to get help, professional or otherwise? And no, of course "help" is built into the price of the Apple computer, so I don't consider it "free" any more than Windows is "free."
Agree - and want to point out (as I did in an earlier reply) that many people simply over-buy for what they need; for the vast majority of people who aren't playing cutting edge 3D games or doing professional work like video editing, there's absolutely NO reason to spend more. I would rather make fun of someone who bought a $1000 laptop and doesn't play games or do processor intensive multi-media work... way to throw money down the toilet.
Yes... Apple has the market cornered for people with money to burn on gadgets, but I take exception to the belief that a $250 laptop that has a faster multi-core cpu, more memory, and more disk space than the $800 laptop I bought in 2006 (and still use) is not a "real" laptop. Yes, they were selling netbooks cheap, too - but you could get a "real" laptop for that price, too (which made getting a netbook pointless, IMO... in recent years, netbooks have gotten bigger and more expensive while low-end laptops became a much better deal).
I don't know what's wrong with Slashdotter's that they can't see the vast majority of these people just want an affordable working computer. They don't need to play the latest games or run their video editing software - they need to surf the net, get email, and have something their kids can do their homework on (cutting and pasting from wikipedia, from my observations). These cheap laptops are perfect for that, and I don't get why you belittle the often low-income families who couldn't afford something better. I live in a relatively nice area and there are still a lot of student's in my kid's schools who don't have computers at home. Yes, it's true that some idiots with more disposable income than brains waited on lines for days to save a couple hundred bucks on something they likely didn't need (but hey, it was a great price!), but a lot of those people wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise.
In fact, I think most people over-buy. If you factor out games and video editing, none of these cheap computers are any worse than the most expensive ones for what average users are actually using them for.
No Xcode with Linux... No free professional help in every major city in the world... so the op pays 300% more for those two things.
Don't get me wrong - Apple Laptops are great. Just not worth the price tag for me, and I really gave MacOS a valiant try (I have a mini at work... it's currenlty powered off and I'm using Linux on an ancient PC - although if they'd give me another network drop I'd leave it on and play with it occasionally).
Your reply is encouraging - I bought an inexpensive (but not sub $250) laptop online (so don't have it yet). I hope to make it dual boot, and am looking forward to trying out Windows 8. I am always willing to try something new - I gave Unity on Ubuntu and Mac OS X months long trials, very frustrating that I could work the way I wanted to. Yes, I tried to see if I conformed to the environment they forced on me that maybe I could work just as well (always hopefully faster), but it just wasn't happening. I use plain old debian now, and it's the least frustrating OS I've used recently. But I will give 8 a shot, and the HDD is big enough that I'd leave it there (my development work doesn't take all that much space). I hoping (but doubtful) to be pleasantly surprised.
Well... it sounds like you have the same problem I do - boot into Windows once every few months and get inundated with updates. At the same time, I have the same problem with Linux - up until recently I rarely used my laptop for work, and might grab it once every couple of months. That was frustrating because I would only use it when I was going to be waiting for a long time somewhere and only had wifi (often tethered to my 3G phone); at least it would ask me if I wanted to update before downloading, though - Windows was very frustrating that way because it would automatically start downloading things even though I was on a slow connection. Yes, in either case you could go out of your way to turn that off, but then you have to remember to do it manually when you had a good connection.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier in another post, I did get a BF laptop (ordered online, though). Not quite that cheap, but comes with windows 8 and I'm actually looking forward to checking it out although, at minimum, I will try to make it dual boot. I'm agnostic about OSes, but for the kind of development I do, I the least frustrated with Linux at the moment.
On a side note, about these people claiming Linux takes too much time, I was doing a peer session with another programmer using a Mac. At every step we found he was missing something we needed (his laptop - it was our first session on a new project using Django, a small project just to learn about it). Every library we needed was really annoying to get and install... he was getting mad at me because I just kept smirking and saying "apt-get install mysql-server," "apt-get install MySQLdb" while he was trying to find a download. Windows would have been worse. So I really don't get how any developer could possibly think they need to "waste" time on Linux when my experience has always been the opposite - but I suppose it depends what kind of work you do.
That's absurd... I hate wasting time configuring things, I want things to just work - and whether it was Ubuntu (which I abandoned to unity - and yes, I gave it a valiant effort and just didn't like it) or now Debian... download the ISO and install. As someone else mentioned, all my productivity tools are just an apt-get away - a lot easier and faster than hunting down, downloading, and installing all the various editors and scripting and programming languages I use. I had given up on Linux, too, up until about Ubuntu 6 - installed and it just worked. It's true that some releases broke stuff that was already working, but by and large I spent less time tweaking Linux than Windows at that point.
I still have windows, and I am one of the ones that got an inexpensive (but not sub $250) notebook... I'm a cheapskate, my current laptop is over 7 years old, and I want any new one I buy to last just as long, so I spent the extra to get blu-ray and USB 3.0, and also discrete graphics with it's own memory. It comes with Windows 8, and I will try to repartition and dual boot. If push comes to shove, I'll just use LInux, but I would love to try out Windows 8 - so I'm not some rabid anti-MS guy, either. I use what allows me to work the fastest and least aggravatingly. I have all the options - Mac, Linux, and Windows, and I even gave the Mac about a two month trial to see if I could get used to the UI. I still use LInux, currently debain, where I downloaded an ISO and installed it and it "just works." No "custom config," it just works.
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It depends where you work - when my employer had separate days, people took off when they were sick, but now with PTO they come in and contaminate everyone else because they're selfish douchebags who don't want to lose a vacation day. It doesn't matter that they added them all together (i.e. if you had enough time in, you got 20 vacation days, 7 sick days, and 1 'floating holiday', but now you just get 28 days).
I just wrote this in another post, but it's applicable here - our company rolled sick/personal/vacation days into PTO; now people come in when they are sick because they don't want to 'blow' a vacation day. It pisses me off.
We sort of eliminated "sick" days by combining sick, personal, and vacation days all into Paid Time Off (PTO). Nobody had a problem taking a sick day when they were sick, nobody was going to get fired for it (although when there was crucial stuff going on you might be asked to provide a note from a doctor - but I've never heard of anybody actually being asked to). But now people treat all the days as vacation days - so they come in when they're sick because they don't want to blow a vacation day on it. Some of us have the luxury of working at home; if the illness is not that bad - i.e. the main reason I won't come in is because I don't want to make other people sick, then my supervisor has no problem with it.
If you go back up the line, the last point was that I wouldn't spend that much anyway (unless I could benefit from it - for what I do, I can't), but even if I did I wouldn't want to spend the extra $50 for several reasons: 1) it's still more money for something I could get for free (and have to replace anyway - I stopped using ubuntu, I don't like it anymore), 2) dual booting to windows is often helpful, 3) when I sell it the buyer will likely want a legit copy of windows.
True... I said "for what I need to do," and I don't travel a lot. I use it in my car more than anywhere else. When I'm at home or work I use a desktop.
On mine? Radeon HD with discrete memory. I am cheap - I admit it, I plan for this to last as long as my current laptop has lasted so far (over 7 years now). Quad-core, decent graphics, blu-ray - from Toshiba direct. My current laptop is Toshiba and lasted this long, and Toshiba gets better than average ratings for fewer problems.
Umm... no. I don't suppose you've installed anything lately. Besides, I have to install on a number of computers anyway, and I don't like Ubuntu, so I'd have to replace it anyway... so no, it makes no difference in what I wrote.
WTF? How do I have a "walled garden" having Debian on my laptop? A $1500 laptop gets you $1000 less in the bank than me, and no advantages given my usage.
I don't see the point in showing Dell there is a demand for Linux from the factory - not artificially like that, anyway. What do I get out of it? You really think Dell spent a lot of time on drivers when they largely build their laptops from components from other companies anyway? I wouldn't even use Ubuntu, and think I should pay extra for it just to prove a point that won't go anywhere anyway? Dell is doing this to satisfy a niche market - they know it, we know it. Make a Venn diagram of Linux users: who use laptops, who are willing to spend $1500 on a laptop, who want to buy from Dell instead of a more reliable brand, and who actually want to use Ubuntu.... then use a microscope to see how big the overlap is.
Spending extra money, in this case, solely to make an ideological point is just worthless.... Windows users and "average Joes" buying a new laptop are NOT going to get the Linux version because it's available, especially when it's more expensive, no matter how many people like us buy, so it's not like you're going to artificially sneak your way into giving Linux the same kind of advantage Windows has in the OEM market.
In fact, the reason I don't need to spend that much is BECAUSE I don't need a toy.
You can justify paying $1000 and more for laptops to yourself if it makes you feel better - there's NOTHING you can do on your laptops that I need to do as a developer that you an do on yours.... and mine cost less than $500. It's true my last one was $700, but that was a long time ago when laptops were more expensive (and I still have it, actually, and if I wanted to sell it I could - and I'd reinstall the XP Pro it came with - makes it a lot easier to sell second hand than with Linux).
Exactly... and why give up a "free" version of Windows? Even if you don't use it or dual boot or anything, you've got it if/when you want to sell it.
But I AM a cheapskate. If I really wanted one of these, I'd buy the Windows version and then install Linux on it. Make it dual boot and get the best of both worlds.
Of course, $1,500 is more than I'm willing to spend on a laptop at all anyway.
So you miss the point entirely - nobody thinks "professionals" should be buying the cheap laptops. These are largely lower income people who have more time than money to wait on lines for days and want something their kids can write a paper with and that they can surf and do email on. It's a perfect fit for them.
He's right - to an extent - I had similar problems, where working things broke on new releases and you had a lot of WTF? moments, but I chalk it up to always wanting the latest and greatest without letting other people "beta" test it. Ubuntu has their six month release cycle, ready or not. I did switch to Debian and I'm a lot happier.
I have one of those and am hit with the low memory problem all the time. I'll have to take a look into rooting it - there is so much crap you can't uninstall (and I don't know why you can't move a lot of apps, even 3rd party ones, to the SD card). I just don't want to screw it up.
The windows 7 desktops I got from Acer for my wife and daughter didn't even come with recovery discs, they highly recommended you make one yourself... I think I have like 4 or 5 DVDs for each box. Unbelievable.
So, I'm wondering if you can't do the same with Windows 8 - remove the crapware, clean the registry (if possible), then make recovery discs based on that configuration. Anybody know?
The poster quite clearly said "professional" help, i.e. at the Apple Store. If, for example, you're traveling and have problems with your internet on your Ubuntu laptop, where are you going to go to get help, professional or otherwise? And no, of course "help" is built into the price of the Apple computer, so I don't consider it "free" any more than Windows is "free."
Agree - and want to point out (as I did in an earlier reply) that many people simply over-buy for what they need; for the vast majority of people who aren't playing cutting edge 3D games or doing professional work like video editing, there's absolutely NO reason to spend more. I would rather make fun of someone who bought a $1000 laptop and doesn't play games or do processor intensive multi-media work... way to throw money down the toilet.
Yes... Apple has the market cornered for people with money to burn on gadgets, but I take exception to the belief that a $250 laptop that has a faster multi-core cpu, more memory, and more disk space than the $800 laptop I bought in 2006 (and still use) is not a "real" laptop. Yes, they were selling netbooks cheap, too - but you could get a "real" laptop for that price, too (which made getting a netbook pointless, IMO... in recent years, netbooks have gotten bigger and more expensive while low-end laptops became a much better deal).
I don't know what's wrong with Slashdotter's that they can't see the vast majority of these people just want an affordable working computer. They don't need to play the latest games or run their video editing software - they need to surf the net, get email, and have something their kids can do their homework on (cutting and pasting from wikipedia, from my observations). These cheap laptops are perfect for that, and I don't get why you belittle the often low-income families who couldn't afford something better. I live in a relatively nice area and there are still a lot of student's in my kid's schools who don't have computers at home. Yes, it's true that some idiots with more disposable income than brains waited on lines for days to save a couple hundred bucks on something they likely didn't need (but hey, it was a great price!), but a lot of those people wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise.
In fact, I think most people over-buy. If you factor out games and video editing, none of these cheap computers are any worse than the most expensive ones for what average users are actually using them for.
No Xcode with Linux... No free professional help in every major city in the world... so the op pays 300% more for those two things.
Don't get me wrong - Apple Laptops are great. Just not worth the price tag for me, and I really gave MacOS a valiant try (I have a mini at work... it's currenlty powered off and I'm using Linux on an ancient PC - although if they'd give me another network drop I'd leave it on and play with it occasionally).
Your reply is encouraging - I bought an inexpensive (but not sub $250) laptop online (so don't have it yet). I hope to make it dual boot, and am looking forward to trying out Windows 8. I am always willing to try something new - I gave Unity on Ubuntu and Mac OS X months long trials, very frustrating that I could work the way I wanted to. Yes, I tried to see if I conformed to the environment they forced on me that maybe I could work just as well (always hopefully faster), but it just wasn't happening. I use plain old debian now, and it's the least frustrating OS I've used recently. But I will give 8 a shot, and the HDD is big enough that I'd leave it there (my development work doesn't take all that much space). I hoping (but doubtful) to be pleasantly surprised.
Well... it sounds like you have the same problem I do - boot into Windows once every few months and get inundated with updates. At the same time, I have the same problem with Linux - up until recently I rarely used my laptop for work, and might grab it once every couple of months. That was frustrating because I would only use it when I was going to be waiting for a long time somewhere and only had wifi (often tethered to my 3G phone); at least it would ask me if I wanted to update before downloading, though - Windows was very frustrating that way because it would automatically start downloading things even though I was on a slow connection. Yes, in either case you could go out of your way to turn that off, but then you have to remember to do it manually when you had a good connection.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier in another post, I did get a BF laptop (ordered online, though). Not quite that cheap, but comes with windows 8 and I'm actually looking forward to checking it out although, at minimum, I will try to make it dual boot. I'm agnostic about OSes, but for the kind of development I do, I the least frustrated with Linux at the moment.
On a side note, about these people claiming Linux takes too much time, I was doing a peer session with another programmer using a Mac. At every step we found he was missing something we needed (his laptop - it was our first session on a new project using Django, a small project just to learn about it). Every library we needed was really annoying to get and install... he was getting mad at me because I just kept smirking and saying "apt-get install mysql-server," "apt-get install MySQLdb" while he was trying to find a download. Windows would have been worse. So I really don't get how any developer could possibly think they need to "waste" time on Linux when my experience has always been the opposite - but I suppose it depends what kind of work you do.
That's absurd... I hate wasting time configuring things, I want things to just work - and whether it was Ubuntu (which I abandoned to unity - and yes, I gave it a valiant effort and just didn't like it) or now Debian... download the ISO and install. As someone else mentioned, all my productivity tools are just an apt-get away - a lot easier and faster than hunting down, downloading, and installing all the various editors and scripting and programming languages I use. I had given up on Linux, too, up until about Ubuntu 6 - installed and it just worked. It's true that some releases broke stuff that was already working, but by and large I spent less time tweaking Linux than Windows at that point.
I still have windows, and I am one of the ones that got an inexpensive (but not sub $250) notebook... I'm a cheapskate, my current laptop is over 7 years old, and I want any new one I buy to last just as long, so I spent the extra to get blu-ray and USB 3.0, and also discrete graphics with it's own memory. It comes with Windows 8, and I will try to repartition and dual boot. If push comes to shove, I'll just use LInux, but I would love to try out Windows 8 - so I'm not some rabid anti-MS guy, either. I use what allows me to work the fastest and least aggravatingly. I have all the options - Mac, Linux, and Windows, and I even gave the Mac about a two month trial to see if I could get used to the UI. I still use LInux, currently debain, where I downloaded an ISO and installed it and it "just works." No "custom config," it just works.
But unless it can at least be better than ROTJ, it's not worth doing.
Yeah... I doubt these new movies will be better than ROTJ.