the 'new' mac

[paul cottingham]

Macs aren't "the best". Neither is Windows. Nor is Linux.

"neither is Linux."

I was with you till you started speakin' nonsense. Next thing I know you'll be saying that the sawstop isn't the best saw out there.....

[Bryan Morgan]

I configured my Amiga 3000 to boot from a virtual Ram disk. It was smokin fast, baby.

For a 33 mhz machine, that is.

Amigas! My cousin works in animation and he tells me those old Video Toaster machines are still sought after! Don't know why, not really my interest, but he seems to love them.

[Bryan Morgan]

"neither is Linux."

I was with you till you started speakin' nonsense. Next thing I know you'll be saying that the sawstop isn't the best saw out there.....

Hey, I LOVE Linux. All *nix really. Is it the best? Nope. Linux's problem is the lack of consistency. You find some nice code you want to compile and it has piles of other pieces of code you have to track down and compile first. Sometimes you run into a chicken or egg situation. Its not a huge deal for some of us because we just change the code to do what we want anyway (another plus for Linux) but for someone who can't/won't do that..... Also, there is a huge pool of awesome programmer talent in the open source community and tons of great projects... Instead of working on a few programs to make them awesome they find something and then go off and start a new one. How many CMS or Groupware software packages do we need?! No excuse, all the code is available to anyone. I'm not a programmer by any means but I can kludge through what I need to.

Of course the BSD snobs will chime in and say "just use BSD, it already has everything you need and never ever ever ever crashes" I love BSD too.

Now, that said, I have numerous examples of people who have walked up to an Ubuntu machine and just started using it. They had no idea about Windows or OSX or anything else. They just sat down and did what they needed to do. No confusion or anything.

Its also interesting how many things OSX and Windows 7 have ripped off from old Linux GUIs.

And I really want a sawstop. Especially because I am kind of clumsy and prone to accidents. Just WAY out of my price range.

[paul cottingham]

Hell they did babylon 5 on them for a fraction of the cost of a sgi machine. local tv station replaced $100,000 worth of buggy, hard to use hardware and software with a couple of amigas with video toasters in them. as far as I know, they are still using them. best computer ever made. period.

[Neal Clayton]

Hey, I LOVE Linux. All *nix really. Is it the best? Nope. Linux's problem is the lack of consistency. You find some nice code you want to compile and it has piles of other pieces of code you have to track down and compile first. Sometimes you run into a chicken or egg situation. Its not a huge deal for some of us because we just change the code to do what we want anyway (another plus for Linux) but for someone who can't/won't do that..... Also, there is a huge pool of awesome programmer talent in the open source community and tons of great projects... Instead of working on a few programs to make them awesome they find something and then go off and start a new one. How many CMS or Groupware software packages do we need?! No excuse, all the code is available to anyone. I'm not a programmer by any means but I can kludge through what I need to.

Of course the BSD snobs will chime in and say "just use BSD, it already has everything you need and never ever ever ever crashes" I love BSD too.

Now, that said, I have numerous examples of people who have walked up to an Ubuntu machine and just started using it. They had no idea about Windows or OSX or anything else. They just sat down and did what they needed to do. No confusion or anything.

Its also interesting how many things OSX and Windows 7 have ripped off from old Linux GUIs.

And I really want a sawstop. Especially because I am kind of clumsy and prone to accidents. Just WAY out of my price range.

did someone say BSD snobs?

i'm gradually migrating everything i'm responsible for away from linux. two small servers left, one small office backup/database machine and one webserver. FreeBSD has never hung me out to dry, linux has on many occasions. but its chances for doing so again are getting pretty limited.

the best part is i can make my people a profit doing it. i'm sold, ZFS is the future, and hardware raid cards look great on ebay. too bad sun doesn't get more credit for real work in eliminating one of the biggest contradictions in terms in the entire IT industry Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

hmm, which one doesn't compute?

the sad thing to me is how hardware chugs along while software often devolves. microsoft catches up to the times typically a year or two late. apple gives their faithful all of the marketing they so desire but not much else, linux gives us a broken project that forks into 3 more broken projects of which 80% is still broken code from abandoned IBM/SGI/ATT projects from the late 80s. is it any wonder that all of the money is being made in phones and small net appliances? at least the phones work as advertised (most of the time...unless it's an apple phone and you're left handed...).

Must be lots of stupid people out there then because Apple passed Microsoft earlier this year in having the largest market capitalization.

All the haters out there should realize you don't beat Microsoft or any other company in the USA by producing crappy products that don't work.

It's a 3 week wait to get an iphone right now. Ipad's sold 4 times as many as they anticipated, yet there are still those that say it's just a company based on image, not real working products. I guess you can't let the truth get in the way of a good story, because their products fly off the shelves, cute or not.

Only 1 company in the USA is worth more and that's Exxon/Mobil. I didn't realize you could become the second largest company in the USA by producing absolute crappy products that no one wants or likes, or that's don't work well.

it's not hard to make money selling a 400 dollar computer for 1500, all you have to do is convince people to buy it. they represent about 10% of the OS market, and it won't likely ever be much more than that. they didn't beat microsoft, they're not going to. as for inflating a stock price, that's mostly marketing too. ten years ago pets.com was a winner. what changed between that and the time it was delisted? nothing, except perception.

you can absolutely make money selling products that don't work well. look at black and decker. you can also lose money making widely used products that work flawlessly. look at motorola.

[Steve knight]

or right click-move to trash...or highlight it and hit apple-delete...

you really don't want to get into a "windows is simpler than OSX" do you? because of all the silly arguments windows users have...that one would be the weakest.

these don't work in snow leopard. my blind wife can't drag files to the trash and has no clue how to delete things.
I find handling files is easier in windows. lots of wacky quirks in osx that slow things down.

[paul cottingham]

did someone say BSD snobs?

FreeBSD has never hung me out to dry, linux has on many occasions. but its chances for doing so again are getting pretty limited.

Don't have to tell me twice we had an unpatched (I know, I know) FreeBSD web server running on the internet feeding out tons of web sites, mail and dns, it was attacked tons, but never breached in 6 years.

I just hate running X on it.

[Tim Morton]

these don't work in snow leopard. my blind wife can't drag files to the trash and has no clue how to delete things.
I find handling files is easier in windows. lots of wacky quirks in osx that slow things down.

yes they do. If the wife needs some mac lessons have her email me.

[Scott Shepherd]

it's not hard to make money selling a 400 dollar computer for 1500, all you have to do is convince people to buy it. they represent about 10% of the OS market, and it won't likely ever be much more than that. they didn't beat microsoft, they're not going to. as for inflating a stock price, that's mostly marketing too. ten years ago pets.com was a winner. what changed between that and the time it was delisted? nothing, except perception.

you can absolutely make money selling products that don't work well. look at black and decker. you can also lose money making widely used products that work flawlessly. look at motorola.

Neil, my point was that just as dug in as the "fanboys" are for apple, so are the apple bashers. It wouldn't matter to some if Apple produced the finest product ever made and sold it for $200. It just wouldn't matter to some, they would continue to say how horrible it is, no matter what.

I believe in giving credit where credit is due. I don't own a Mac. I do own an iphone. When the iphone came out, those apple haters said it was junk, crap, piece of garbage, and another horrible fad that would quickly drop off. Yet, they were completely wrong and you don't see any of them rushing to forums to admit they were wrong.

Then came the ipad. There were these same people saying it was a stupid idea and it had no use, no purpose and it was a fad that people wouldn't buy. Wrong again. With sales more than 4x what the estimated, and plants running at full capacity to produce them, someone was wrong again. Yet, I see no threads on people admitting they misjudged the company again.

So when you look at their side of things, they have been wrong just about 100% of them time, yet they speak with authority on the subject of how rotten apple is, despite the facts that contradict almost everything they say.

itunes was the same way. "Oh, it's horrible, it'll never last, it's a fad". Well, that fad has changed the music industry and made apple billions.

I don't recall Black and Decker being bigger than Microsoft and falling that far. I don't recall Black and Decker taking on Exxon/Mobil for the largest company in America.

If their products were so horrible people would not buy them. Period. There's an apple store here and every time I walk by it, there's no less than 50 people in the store looking at products, playing with products, and buying products. I walk by other stores and they are empty.

[Brian Ashton]

Just your imagination. Mac's are fool proof and never have problems. So I've heard.

As for advertising, it's the grease in the gears of commerce.

That's funny (and I mean that in the nicest way)... As I sit here typing this on my wifes windows machine because my mac's OS is being reinstalled because it shat itself. Nothing could be deleted in the trash and a few other problems were becoming a serious problem.

To be honest I find Windows to be more resistant to unexpected and uncontrollable problems such as a sudden shut down that cause data corruption. Don't believe me try it. The windows machine will often, without user initiation, self correct such problems. Whereas the mac wont and the problems will compound over time unless the user boots from the DVD and uses the disk utility to correct such minor problems (that will over time become a major problem).

I think the days of the macs perceived "invincibility" are coming to an end as it gains market share. Apple is now starting to experience what microsoft has been battling with for decades. The more popular the mac gets the more people will realize they're not all that much better than windows.

[Eric DeSilva]

Yeah, you're way farther ahead than me. The solid state drive and Win 7 rings a bell, I think someone was telling me about that not too long ago when I was moaning about not having an instant on machine.

I upgraded to Win 7 a month or so ago and slapped in a small SSD for the OS and some core programs--64 GB was big enough for Win 7, MS Office Suite, Adobe CS5 Master Collection. It boots fast, but it isn't instant on. Faster than my wife's macbook or my old XP system for sure, however.

If you really want instant on, you need to look at a couple SSDs configured in RAID 0. No fault tolerance, but fast...

[Neal Clayton]

Don't have to tell me twice we had an unpatched (I know, I know) FreeBSD web server running on the internet feeding out tons of web sites, mail and dns, it was attacked tons, but never breached in 6 years.

I just hate running X on it.

the thing that has driven me away, ironically, is a small home NAS that i've been using for about 5-6 years. it takes about that long (with all of the random power outages in that span of time) for an ext3 journal of that size to become completely corrupted and unrepairable. of course reiserfs and xfs are no better. the former doesn't even need power failure to corrupt itself, and the latter caches writes longer than ext3 does.

to which linux people will respond "always have a UPS and if your data is that important use hardware raid + hot spares". to which i would respond: you're cursing the cost of other server operating systems while telling me i need a couple extra thousand dollars worth of hardware to cover up flaws in your software. at which point they absolve themselves of all responsibility by declaring that free software has no warranty, and i should write something better if i need better. at which point i declare there's no need to write something better, other free OS projects have better already, i just need to stop using linux. at which point the faithful depart to go write another blog entry about how btrfs will almost be as good as ZFS...in a few years....except for all of the things it can't do. then they can switch over to their desktop and download all of the latest and greatest mpeg codecs/players from russian FTPs while whistling their favorite "everything is free" song.

maybe that was the design, ~39 hour fsck downtimes that fail at 97% are a great time for political OS arguments on slashdot.

[Bryan Morgan]

That's funny (and I mean that in the nicest way)... As I sit here typing this on my wifes windows machine because my mac's OS is being reinstalled because it shat itself. Nothing could be deleted in the trash and a few other problems were becoming a serious problem.

I'm sitting here next to a 2009 Mac Pro with snow leapord that refuses to recognize certain fonts pulled from a 10.5.8 2006 Mac Pro and also completely locked some PPDs that can't be moved or deleted. To the terminal console I go.... glad I chucked the crappy chiclet keyboard it came with...

[Bryan Morgan]

I think the days of the macs perceived "invincibility" are coming to an end as it gains market share. Apple is now starting to experience what microsoft has been battling with for decades. The more popular the mac gets the more people will realize they're not all that much better than windows.

I read an article recently that showed Apple having the highest number of vulnerabilities above all other systems. Admittedly it seemed a bit biased...

[Bryan Morgan]

the thing that has driven me away, ironically, is a small home NAS that i've been using for about 5-6 years. it takes about that long (with all of the random power outages in that span of time) for an ext3 journal of that size to become completely corrupted and unrepairable. of course reiserfs and xfs are no better. the former doesn't even need power failure to corrupt itself, and the latter caches writes longer than ext3 does.

to which linux people will respond "always have a UPS and if your data is that important use hardware raid + hot spares". to which i would respond: you're cursing the cost of other server operating systems while telling me i need a couple extra thousand dollars worth of hardware to cover up flaws in your software. at which point they absolve themselves of all responsibility by declaring that free software has no warranty, and i should write something better if i need better. at which point i declare there's no need to write something better, other free OS projects have better already, i just need to stop using linux. at which point the faithful depart to go write another blog entry about how btrfs will almost be as good as ZFS...in a few years....except for all of the things it can't do. then they can switch over to their desktop and download all of the latest and greatest mpeg codecs/players from russian FTPs while whistling their favorite "everything is free" song.

maybe that was the design, ~39 hour fsck downtimes that fail at 97% are a great time for political OS arguments on slashdot.

I had high hopes for BTRFS but honestly I don't think its going to pan out. They are using Apple type hype for it I am a big fan of XFS. Its done everything I've ever asked of it and it is very fast and mature, which is why we went with it in the first place. Of course, this is all on very expensive RAID systems with all kinds of hot spares and redundant iSCSI back ends I prefer hardware over software any day. Can't say I've ever had a problem or data loss with it in what, 10 years or so (knock on wood, then cut it up and build something nice). Plenty of drive failures though (which is another holy war unto itself ) 99.97% uptime according to Nagios, only downtime being scheduled moves, infrastructure changes, virtualization.

I haven't really given ZFS a shot yet. Maybe I will have to look more into it. All these filesystems make great claims but when we put them through testing they don't work as advertised and then you read all kinds of stuff from the apologists about "oh, you wanted THAT feature, yeah its still in development". Does ZFS live up to its claims?