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Well, I know feel I can reasonably recommend Linspire. Of the three distros of Linux I’ve tried since buying my USB WLAN adapter, Linspire is the only one that detected it and activated my internet connection. Not only that, I didn’t have to do anything to get the connection going. It also flawlessly detected my monitor type and graphics card, and defaulted to what it determined was the best resolution - 1024x768 - which happens to be exactly the one I use anyway 
I’m actually amazed, I’ve found a Linux distro that may actually be easier than Knoppix, which I never thought possible (as hard as I may be on Knoppix, it was and is still a great distro). I still haven’t tried installing any new software yet, but that’s up next…
Macs are great if you have a small business that relies on no more than Web based applications, e-mail and Microsoft Office … which is most small businesses. There are also plenty of accounting software packages and database support. There is this myth still that there is a “compatibility” issue in this realm. Used to be the case. Hasn’t been for many years.
The bottom line for me is “opportunity cost of my time”. I have a XP box that I use often. I’ve spent days and days of time trying to put humpty dumpty back together again while sitting on my floor with dozens of install disks and and screwdrivers and Microsoft Support Site on the screen of my PowerBook.
However, when I’m babying my XP box back to life, I’m not out making money. When I’m on Symatec’s site looking for solutions to a trojan horse, I’m not making money. When my “plug-in-play” devices randomly show up, I’m not making money.
This is not to say a Mac is overwhelming wonderful for all small business applications, it just easy on the pocket book overall when I could have used the days per month on my XP machine on growing my business.
If you consider what my time is worth, and how much any given computers costs, I’d buy a Mac at almost double its current price for me and my employees, because I know I’ll get a bigger bang in productivity by far.
In any case, I still keep my XP box around.
…
I like the new title. Whoever changed it did a good job.
Are you surprised? There’s at least one certain poster who I would never expect any less than zealous OS evangelism from, and they haven’t let me down in this thread either.
It appears that the radio system at LAX was shut down for three hours and 800 planes were left without any communications. The cause appears to be that a technician didn’t restart the system, which is required every 30 days. It seems the system is known to crash in 49.7 if it is not rebooted.
Article about LAX shut down
techworld.com/opsys/news/ind … ewsID=2275
Old Article about Windows 95/98 crashing after 49.7 days.
news.com.com/2100-1040-222391.html?legacy=cnet
I was an avid PC user, one day I switched to Mac. At first I got hooked with their design and I was a bit concerned about the compatibility. But I found out everything I had on my PC would work on my new Mac.
No crash, never had a virus, application software all work seemingly together and it looks great.
I do a lot of digital work, though not as a Pro. the difference is amazing.
I am glad I switched.
At the end of the day it’s a matter of taste and needs. No debate or “war” necessary.
Just get two or three hard disk drives and a version of all three major operating systems. (In Taiwan it’s cheap to do so.)
Like a few people on this thread, I, too, really like using Linux (minus dependency problems), but there is so much great open-source and freeware software for Windows, I keep it as my main work horse.
A great, clean freeware site:
(May I recommend PHP Designer 2005 and HTMLGate as two fine, fine pieces of freeware.)
Linux and Windows can happily coexist on the same hard drive. FreeBSD cannot - you really need a separate drive, or you run the risk of being bitten by the notorious “geometry bug”.
As for OSX, you’ve got to have a Mac. I’ve heard of a “Mac on Linux” project, but I think it still requires a PowerPC cpu (though not necessarily a Mac).
cheers,
Robert
XP is much more stable than earlier Windoze versions (which still lived on top of DOS) and shows that MS is getting better, but then, it is getting very much like the Mac OS now, isn’t it?
and wasn’t windoze an attempt (crude at first) to recover ground lost to Apple in the design of GUI? (Xerox not withsanding…nobody really lost much over Mac’s pickpocketing of the mouse and GUI idea).
ease of use, power for graphics and video, including bus architecture, screendraw language, etc make macs the choice both for professional for graphics and for hard core science…especially that it now gives a UNIX window as well, so all my SUN programs run superfast at home…and it doesn’t crash. and it lets go of memory after you close the program. and it multithreads properly. and it multiprocesses correctly, with fewer bottlenecks. and it is easier and more secure to set up networks (but admittedly less capable of running huge corporation networks less than 1% of users). and you don’t have to be a technoweeny to change things…and and and and…
and cost-wise, for a similarly specced machine, the mac is actually cheaper than a windoze box with FAR less hassle to maintain…stupid simplistic corporate accountants don’t know shit.
flame me, i don’t care, i have used all three main systems (though not linux) since 1982 and i am confident i know better than to go back to windoze now…
who wants to wrote a Mac emulator for Pentium chips and bus architecture anyway? it would run like a car with seven flat tires and only three out of eight cylinders in comparison. only drwa back is the lack f games written for it: most of the ports are shitty, which is why i have acces to an XP box for games if i need them
Bzzt. XP is not the first Windows to not run on a DOS base. IIRC WinME and 2K already had that in the bag. They, like XP, had an emulated DOS available, but didn’t run off a DOS foundation like previous iterations.
Yep. Billy boy knows a good idea when he steals it alright.
As for the much-vaunted “ease of use” of Macs, I actually find them awkward. I have to use Macs in the office, and they just run so counter to the way I’ve worked on computers since right back in the day that I just can’t use them effectively. I know that’s more of a user thing than an OS thing, but isn’t that the point? OS’s are designed for users. And the one-button mouse still pisses me off. Otherwise, if they weren’t so damned hard to upgrade, so heinously expensive, and let’s face it, bastards to ship without getting terrified something’s going to break, I would actually quite like a Mac.
Oh, and “easier to setup networks”? Can’t be any easier than setting up my home network on a cluster of XP machines was - plug them in, turn them on, click “Next” a few times, and we were away laughing. Although I know all too well that that’s a rare occurence.
Windows ME was still layered on DOS, they just hid the “reboot into DOS mode” option. That’s it. Otherwise it was really just Win98 with a fancier GUI on top. Ironically this made WinME less stable because the extra graphics meant you exhausted the fixed size system resources memory much more quickly.
Windows NT was the first native 32-bit Windows system, but it wasn’t too widely used until Win2k came out. While Win2k had a “workstation” version available, it was not priced or marketed as an end-user desktop system, but rather towards corporate power users.
XP was the first native 32-bit Windows system that was priced and targeted to the general user, and the first to come bundled with the majority of consumer level desktop/laptop system sold.
My bad. I wasn’t 100% on whether ME was, but I was pretty sure. My bad.
The following three stories are all related to a four-day outage of 60k+ computers at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions. It supposedly was all thanks to a botched M$ upgrade:
theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26 … rk_outage/
I’d concur with that. Ever since I switched to Mac OS X, I’ve been able to run thousands of open-source Linux and BSD applications supported by Fink, Darwinport and Gentoo. Installing those supported applications can’t be easier- just one or two mouse clicks and fink commander or port manager will get the source code from some server where it’s available somewhere in the world and then do the installation all by themselves.
Even the ones not supported by them, I can still get the source code from RedHat or Debian that I can build and run on OS X without ever reading or changing the code.
For example, I got applications like source navigator from RedHat and libraries like libpcap-ruby from Debian and just follow the instructions to build and now they run on my Macs.
Before I bought my first Mac 4 years ago, I had used DOS and windows for over a decade and Redhat and Debian distributions of Linux for over 5 years. I like Linux, but really hate the process I needed to go through to get the drivers that work on the dual SCSI, dual CPU, and triple ethernet cards on the HP machine I used. There were lots of driver conflicts and the machine kept crashing for months until I finally got hold of a new LAN driver that doesn’t conflict with SCSI driver. I had to compile Linux kernel in order to run NistNet, an internet traffic emulator.
I work for a company in California ( once had the largest market cap in the world 4 years ago) and these days I’m seeing colleagues who want to get rid of their IBM thinkpads and refresh with a Mac. For the ones who really get to know the power of OS X, none of them go back to be a sole windowz user. I still keep a couple of windowz laptops, as I still have some hardware dependent applications that only run on windows, but I’m using windows less and less, as I’m much happier with OS X.
[quote=“username”]>I’d have to say that Linux is in a better position than the Mac on this.
How so?
Mac is basically BSD and Linux drivers should be portable with small effort.
Also, since Macs don’t get assembled by 100 companies like IA32 clones do, it’s likely to be easier for Apple to write 4-5 drivers for a new model that’s gonna sell in millioins than it is for each PC manufacturer to get drivers for peripherals that constantly change.
P.S. WTF is wrong with the quote code in this forum?[/quote]
Interesting, I got it right the first time- know exactly why it crashed every
49.71 days when I saw the news just now. It uses a 32-bit counter that is increased by one every ms ( 1/1000 of a second)
a 32-bit counter can only count to 2^32 ms that is exactly 49.71 days:
the following calculation ran on octave on my powerMac G4
octave:1> (2^32)/1000/60/60/24
ans = 49.710
octave:2>
[quote=“beatnikmao”]It appears that the radio system at LAX was shut down for three hours and 800 planes were left without any communications. The cause appears to be that a technician didn’t restart the system, which is required every 30 days. It seems the system is known to crash in 49.7 if it is not rebooted.
Article about LAX shut down
techworld.com/opsys/news/ind … ewsID=2275
Old Article about Windows 95/98 crashing after 49.7 days.
news.com.com/2100-1040-222391.html?legacy=cnet[/quote]
Anybody checked out PearPC yet? The screenshots look promising. PearPC is a PowerPC emulator. As a host system you can use WinXP or Linux. That should give people an opportunity to try out MacOSX, if they have a install CD for OSX available.
There is also SoftPear PC, not quite an emulator, but rather a tool that translate between PowerPC and x86 instructions, so you can run some Mac software on Intel hardware. But it is also still pretty new, so not much will run at the moment.
I think all the OSses have their advantage and disadvantages, I use XP for gaming, video coding editing etc., Linux for programming, Mac for some DVD authoring, and portable computing (have a PowerBook), iTunes etc. So I basically see what free software I can get to do the job best, and I use the OS that this software runs on. This way I am flexible, and can always get the optimum. But I am a big Unix/Linux supporter, so I use M$ only because I have to, due to there monopoly. The majority of IT companies don’t think it is necessary to write software for Linux, because the market share is not as big as M$'s. I am sure if as much manpower would be used to develop software for Linux as it is used for M$, the OS would get past the major objections that people have.
I actually did try PearPC this weekend. I installed it under Linux, and then I used it to install Panther. Piece of cake. I would not say that it runs smoothly, but it is usable. I have to try and run some other programs, and need to get networking to work. That seems to be not well documented.